In the right light, motion looks a lot like progress. The standups are tight. The tickets are moving. The demos land on time. But zoom out and suddenly the map doesn’t match the journey.
You’re moving fast, but where to?
This is the essence of Productivity Theatre: the illusion of forward motion sustained by rituals, metrics, and muscle memory. It’s not malice. It’s comfort.
When ambiguity strikes we default to delivery, because building things feels safer than interrogating direction. But unchecked, this reflex builds velocity without vision. And that’s how output becomes a liability.
The Tactical Addiction
In uncertain times, doing becomes a form of coping.
- Scrum ceremonies give shape to chaos.
- Story points promise certainty.
- A well-groomed backlog creates the illusion of control.
But too often, these systems are used to soothe anxiety — not sharpen strategy. Teams find themselves looping inside two-week cycles, chasing dopamine hits from shipped features that quietly reinforce drift.
This isn’t incompetence. It’s self-protection. Tactical work provides a clear sense of closure. Strategy, by contrast, lives in ambiguity — it asks uncomfortable questions about trade-offs, priorities, and what not to do. And without deliberate mechanisms to surface those questions, most teams will avoid them.
The Disappearing Why
Rituals don’t guarantee alignment. In fact, they often disguise the absence of it.
A standup can become theatre — a place where everyone performs busyness without revealing doubt. Retrospectives become procedural. OKRs get backfilled. And before long, the team has internalised the choreography of productivity without checking the coordinates.
What’s missing? Friction. The right kind of friction: Strategic Tension. The kind that forces you to pause, ask “why this?”, and reassert direction. But modern workflows are optimised for smoothness. We equate friction with failure. Resistance with blockers. So we eliminate the very signals that might have saved us from drift.
Rewiring for Strategic Tension
Productive teams aren’t frictionless — they’re well-calibrated.
You don’t need to burn your rituals. You need to repurpose them. That daily standup? Let it surface tension, not just status. That retro? Make space for purpose audits, not just process tweaks. Even a quarterly planning cycle can become a strategic checkpoint — not to deliver more, but to sense whether what you’re delivering still matters.
The goal is tension, not turbulence. And you don’t need more meetings to get there. You need sharper prompts. Smarter facilitation. A shared willingness to surface misalignment early — before it metastasises into wasted sprints, phantom progress, and team burnout.
Conclusion
True productivity isn’t about output. It’s about orientation.
You can ship on schedule and still veer off course. You can hit velocity targets and still lose strategic altitude. The difference lies not in how much you’re doing — but in whether what you’re doing still maps to why you started.
Productivity theatre is seductive because it’s legible. But real strategy isn’t always visible from the burndown chart. It lives in the questions you ask, the tensions you honour, and the rituals you refuse to let go stale.
Direction before delivery. Otherwise, you’re just acting busy.
