Most organisations that say they are innovating are, at best, rehearsing. The difference matters — one produces new capability, the other produces new slides.
Innovation theatre is not cynical. Most of the people staging it believe they are doing the work. The problem is that the artefacts of innovation — the lab, the offsite, the pitch day, the hoodie — have become so recognisable that they can be produced without ever producing a decision anyone has to live with.
The tells
**The lab has no shutdown authority.** New bets are announced but never killed. Every idea that enters the pipeline stays there, quietly consuming attention, until it is quietly forgotten.
**The pitch day is the point.** The organisation invests in preparing for the demo more than in operating what the demo describes. Six months later, no one can tell you which of last year's pitches shipped.
**The metric is activity.** Number of experiments run. Number of teams onboarded. Number of workshops held. None of these is an outcome; all of them are theatre disguised as governance.
The most expensive form of innovation is the one that produces the feeling of innovation without any of its consequences.
The operating changes that end it
**Fund the portfolio, not the projects.** Stage the capital. Every new bet gets a small first tranche, a shutdown criterion written before the money is released, and a decision date on the calendar. The portfolio's job is learning rate, not roadmap completion.
**Name the shutdown owner.** Someone in the room has authority to end a bet. That authority is used at least once a quarter, in public, so the organisation learns that ending is a normal part of the work.
**Report on decisions made, not experiments run.** The board update is: what did we decide this quarter, based on what evidence, and what changed as a result. Everything else is theatre.
Where to start
Pick one active bet. Ask three people in the room what evidence would cause the organisation to stop it. If you get three different answers, the bet is theatre. Writing the shutdown criterion for that bet, together, in one afternoon, is the beginning of the practice.