The adhesive is failing. I am pressing a lime-green square against a whiteboard surface that is already weeping under the weight of 125 other neon fragments. The air in the room has that specific, recycled quality of a space where 15 people have been breathing the same anxiety for 5 hours. At the front of the room, Marcus-a man who definitely owns at least 15 pairs of identical, ethically sourced minimalist sneakers-is clicking a $45 pen and telling us to ‘lean into the discomfort of the unknown.’ He’s using a font on his slides that suggests he knows a secret about the future that the rest of us are too traditional to understand. We are ‘ideating.’ We are ‘blue-sky thinking.’ We are, in reality, watching the slow-motion death of original thought.

This is corporate theater at its most expensive and least effective. We’ve spent $575 on artisanal catering boxes just to arrive at a solution for a logistics problem that the warehouse team actually solved 45 days ago, only to be told by the executive suite that the solution wasn’t ‘scalable’ enough. So here we are, performing the ritual. It’s a secular prayer to the gods of disruption, led by people who have never actually disrupted anything more significant than a Sunday brunch reservation. I look over at Sage G., the court sketch artist the company hired to ‘capture the visual journey’ of our brainstorming session. Sage has spent 25 years in high-stakes courtrooms, sketching the faces of those facing life sentences or corporate collapse. Today, he looks more exhausted than I’ve ever seen him. His charcoal stick hovers over a sheet of vellum as he captures the slumped shoulders of the middle manager in the corner, a man who has clearly realized that his 15 years of institutional knowledge are being discarded in favor of a ‘gamified’ problem-solving framework.

The Courtroom vs. The Boardroom

He shows me his pad. Instead of ‘synergy,’ he’s drawn a series of 35 hollow boxes stacked on top of each other, teetering over a void. It is the most accurate representation of our company culture I have ever seen. It reminds me of my own recent failure, a weekend spent attempting a DIY shelving unit I found on Pinterest. I spent 45 minutes looking at a perfectly filtered image of a reclaimed wood floating shelf and 5 hours screaming at a piece of drywall that refused to cooperate with my lack of structural understanding. I wanted the ‘aesthetic’ of craftsmanship without the actual burden of engineering. That is exactly what this workshop is: the Pinterest of corporate strategy. We want the photo of the wall covered in colorful notes, but we don’t want the dust and splinters of real change.

The Containment Strategy

Innovation workshops are not designed to generate innovation; they are designed to safely contain it. They are a pressure relief valve. If you give the ‘renegades’ in the office a room, some Sharpies, and 125 minutes to shout about change, they feel heard. They feel like they’ve contributed. Then, you take those notes, transcribe them into a PDF that will be buried in a digital folder 15 levels deep, and go back to doing exactly what you were doing before. The organization doesn’t want your disruptive idea. It wants the feeling of being the kind of place that *would* have disruptive ideas. It’s a containment strategy. If an idea is truly dangerous to the status quo, it won’t survive the ‘vetting’ process where 5 senior VPs-who haven’t used the actual product in 15 months-decide which ideas are ‘aligned with our core values.’

I remember one specific workshop 5 years ago. We came up with a radical transparency model for client billing. It was brilliant, honest, and would have saved us 45 hours of administrative headache every month. The facilitator loved it. The team was electric. But when the ‘outputs’ reached the executive floor, the idea was stripped of its teeth. By the time it was implemented, it was just a slightly different font on the same confusing invoices. The ritual had been completed, the energy had been harvested, and the status quo remained untouched. It’s the difference between someone who talks about building a home and someone who actually understands the load-bearing capacity of a steel beam. When we look at the physical world, we don’t accept this kind of performative nonsense. You can’t ‘ideate’ a bridge into existence; it either holds weight or it doesn’t. This is why I find myself gravitating toward organizations that prioritize the tangible over the theatrical. For instance, the way Sola Spaces approaches design isn’t about sitting in a circle and talking about how a room ‘feels’ in a vacuum; it’s about the hard, technical reality of light, glass, and structural integrity. They build things that actually exist in three dimensions, whereas most corporate innovation exists only in the two dimensions of a slide deck.

The Nihilistic Vote

Sage G. finishes another sketch. This one is of the facilitator, Marcus, looking at his watch. It’s 3:45 PM. The energy in the room is cratering. We have reached the ‘prioritization matrix’ phase of the day, where we take our 255 ideas and narrow them down to 5 ‘quick wins.’ A ‘quick win’ is corporate speak for an idea that requires zero effort and changes absolutely nothing. It is the low-hanging fruit that has already rotted on the ground. We vote with little red stickers. I put my 5 stickers on the most absurd, harmless ideas I can find, out of a sense of nihilistic spite. One of them is ‘improving the coffee selection in the breakroom.’ It wins by a landslide. We all applaud. We have ‘innovated.’

I wonder if anyone else feels the weight of the wasted time. There are 15 people in this room. If you calculate the hourly rate of everyone present, this 5-hour session has cost the company roughly $7,525 in lost productivity. For that price, we could have actually hired a consultant to fix the broken database or bought the warehouse team the new scanners they’ve been begging for for 15 months. Instead, we have a wall full of paper and a collective sense of mounting dread for the emails that have been piling up while we were ‘disrupting’ the coffee supply chain. I think back to my Pinterest shelf. It’s still leaning at a 15-degree angle in my hallway. Every time I walk past it, I’m reminded that you can’t shortcut the process of learning how things actually work. You can’t substitute a ‘vision’ for a level and a stud finder.

The True Nature of Change

The tragedy of the modern workshop is that it devalues the very thing it claims to celebrate. By making innovation a scheduled event, we imply that it shouldn’t happen the rest of the time. We suggest that creativity is a faucet you turn on at 9:05 AM and off at 4:55 PM. But real innovation is usually ugly. It’s usually an argument. It’s someone pointing out that the current system is failing and being met with 15 reasons why it can’t be changed. It’s Sage G. sketching the truth of a moment that no one wants to admit. Real innovation is a threat to the person who spent 15 years building the system that is now obsolete. You can’t solve that with a ‘yes and’ improv exercise.

As the workshop winds down, Marcus asks us for ‘one word’ to describe how we feel. I want to say ‘exhausted.’ I want to say ‘expensive.’ I want to say ‘irrelevant.’ Instead, I wait for the person next to me to say ‘inspired’ so I can just nod and move toward the door. We leave the sticky notes on the wall. They’ll be there until 7:45 PM when the cleaning crew, who actually understand the value of a job well done, will scrape them into a gray bin and dispose of our ‘breakthroughs’ along with the empty $5 water bottles. Sage G. packs his charcoals. He catches my eye and gives a small, knowing shrug. He knows he’s just documented another crime scene where the victim was common sense.