Not in the catastrophic sense. The lights stay on, the customers get served, the quarterly numbers get hit often enough to keep everyone employed. But beneath that surface, an enormous amount of effort produces an embarrassing amount of output. Training programs that change nothing. Strategies that get announced and abandoned. Processes that everyone follows and nobody believes in. Meetings about meetings about the meeting we should have had instead.

If you work inside a real organization, you already know this. You’ve sat in the room. You’ve watched the slide deck. You’ve nodded along to the rollout. You’ve gone back to your desk and quietly figured out how to do your actual job around the official version of how it’s supposed to be done.

This publication is for you.

I came to this work the long way around. I spent years as a criminal investigator before I became a performance consultant, and the transition was less of a leap than it sounds. Investigators and consultants are doing the same job in different rooms. Something happened. Something is wrong. The obvious explanation is probably incomplete. The official story is definitely incomplete. The people closest to the problem know more than they’ve been asked. Your job is to find out what’s actually true.

The investigator’s mindset is the most underused tool in organizational work.

We hire consultants who arrive with answers.

We need people who arrive with questions.

We celebrate frameworks that promise certainty.

We need methods that tolerate the ambiguity of real situations.

We treat performance problems as moral failures—people aren’t trying hard enough, leaders aren’t visionary enough, culture isn’t strong enough—when they’re almost always structural.

This is the first thing I want you to take from this publication, and I’ll keep saying it until it sounds obvious:

The system is working exactly as designed—just not for you.

The dysfunction isn’t a bug. It isn’t a sign that someone forgot to fix things. It’s the predictable output of incentives, structures, and histories doing what they were built to do. The official story claims the organization is trying to produce one thing; the actual outputs reveal what it was actually built to produce. If you don’t like the output, investigate the system.

That’s the work. I take problems that get blamed on people and look at them as problems of design. Training that fails because the job didn’t need training in the first place. Processes that drift because nobody owns the gap between the documented version and the lived version. Transformations that stall because the org never actually agreed on what it was transforming into. Capability gaps that aren’t capability gaps at all—they’re authority gaps, or incentive gaps, or attention gaps, wearing a capability costume.

But seeing the system clearly is only the first move. The second is harder, and it’s where most organizational conversations fall apart:

Definitions matter.

If you and I can’t agree on what we’re looking at, we can’t possibly agree on what to do about it. Most meetings about dysfunction are actually multiple meetings happening in parallel, each participant solving for a slightly different problem under the same name. “We have a training problem” means six different things to the six people in the room, and nobody notices, because nobody asked. The work of definition isn’t bureaucratic throat-clearing. It’s the precondition for any shared action. Skip it and you’ll spend a year solving a problem that was never collectively defined.

Which brings me to the third thing, the line I’ll repeat most often, because it’s the one the entire industry violates:

Treatment without diagnosis is malpractice.

A doctor who prescribed without examining would lose their license. In organizational work, prescribing without examining is the entire business model. Frameworks arrive before facts. Solutions arrive before problems. Five-step plans arrive before anyone has asked what’s actually happening. This publication takes the opposite stance: the diagnosis is the work. If a post ends without a tidy action list, that’s not a failure—it’s the contract.

A few things I believe, stated plainly so you can decide whether to keep reading:

The gap between how things should work and how they actually do is the most important territory in any organization. It’s where the truth lives. Most management is an effort to pretend the gap doesn’t exist. Most good work is an effort to close it.

People are almost always smarter than the system they’re operating in. When work doesn’t work, the failure is usually upstream of the people doing it. Blame travels downward; causation travels upward. Investigate accordingly.

Frameworks are useful until they aren’t. The job isn’t to apply the framework. The job is to understand the situation. The framework is scaffolding, not the building.

Evidence beats opinion. Including mine. Especially mine. If I tell you something here and your experience contradicts it, trust your experience first and write to tell me what I’m missing.

You don’t need permission to start. Most of the people inside broken systems are waiting for someone with authority to fix the system. The people who actually improve things don’t wait. They investigate, they define, they document, they share what they learn. Authority follows clarity more often than clarity follows authority.

Here’s what you can expect:

Posts that take a specific problem and work it the way I’d work a case. Some will be short observations from the field. Some will be longer investigations. Some will be arguments staked plainly, with no hedge. All of them will try to tell you something true about how work actually works, rather than how we pretend it does.

I will be wrong sometimes. When I am, I’ll say so. I’d rather be useful than impressive.

I won’t write to fill a content calendar. I’ll write when I have something worth saying (at least once a week, but more likely two times). The trade-off for less frequency is that what arrives in your inbox should be worth opening.

I won’t sell you a course. I won’t sell you a certification. I won’t tell you that five steps will fix your culture. If I tell you something is hard, it’s because it’s hard. If I don’t tell you what to do about it, it’s because we haven’t finished diagnosing it yet.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably the reader. Subscribe, and let’s see what we find.

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Together, we can figure out what the fuck is happening. Let’s investigate.

—Ari

Attached is this year’s employee engagement survey, complete with assurances about confidentiality and promises that leadership is “committed to listening.” Across the organization, employees experience the same weary recognition—it’s that time again. Time to pretend that filling out a questionnaire will change anything. Time to participate in corporate theater where everyone knows their lines, plays their part, and absolutely nothing changes.

Employee surveys have become one of modern management’s most successful cons: a mechanism that allows companies to claim they value employee feedback without the messy commitment of actually acting on it. They’re the organizational equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”—a gesture that costs nothing, demands nothing, and accomplishes nothing beyond allowing leadership to check a box labeled “employee engagement.” The real purpose isn’t gathering honest feedback. It’s creating plausible deniability. When employees complain about problems, management can point to the survey and say, “We asked, and you didn’t tell us.” Except employees did tell them. They just weren’t listening.

The Confidentiality Myth

The foundation of every employee survey is a promise: your responses are confidential, anonymous, protected. This promise is a lie, and everyone knows it.

Employees understand how data works. They know that “anonymous” surveys still collect metadata—timestamps, IP addresses, device information. They know that when results are broken down by department, location, or tenure, the pool gets small enough to identify individuals. Work in a three-person satellite office? Your “anonymous” feedback might as well have your name on it. Gave the only negative score in your ten-person team? Congratulations, you’ve just identified yourself.

The confidentiality illusion crumbles further when employees watch how information flows through organizations. They notice when a critical comment in Monday’s survey becomes Tuesday’s closed-door meeting. They observe which employees get quietly managed out after particularly honest feedback cycles. They remember the manager who, during a team meeting, referenced specific survey language that was supposedly anonymous. The message becomes clear: confidentiality is a legal fiction, not a practical reality.

Even in larger organizations where true anonymity might be technically possible, employees have learned not to trust the system. They’ve seen too many “anonymous” feedback sessions where leadership somehow knew exactly who said what. They understand that HR systems log everything, that IT can trace anything, and that “we can’t see individual responses” often means “we can’t see them easily” rather than “we can’t see them at all.”

This knowledge poisons the entire exercise before it begins. Employees approach surveys not as opportunities for honest dialogue but as potential minefields where one wrong answer could mark them as “not a team player” or “resistant to change.” The survey becomes a test of political savvy rather than a genuine feedback mechanism.

Contaminated Data, Useless Results

When employees don’t believe they’re protected, they cannot give honest feedback. It’s that simple. The result is data so thoroughly contaminated by self-censorship and strategic dishonesty that it’s worthless for any meaningful purpose.

Watch employees fill out surveys and you’ll see the calculation happening in real time. They hover over the rating scale, considering not what they actually think but what’s safe to say. That question about management effectiveness? Better give it a 4 out of 5—not so high it looks like brown-nosing, not so low it looks like troublemaking. The open-ended question about workplace challenges? Write something vague about “communication” or “work-life balance,” nothing specific enough to be traced back, nothing honest enough to be useful.

The gap between survey responses and reality becomes obvious in any honest workplace conversation. At lunch, employees will tell you exactly what’s broken: the incompetent director everyone tiptoes around, the promotion system that rewards politics over performance, the “optional” weekend work that’s actually mandatory. But in the survey? Suddenly everything is “generally satisfactory” with “room for improvement.” The survey captures the corporate-approved version of employee sentiment—sanitized, safe, and completely divorced from truth.

This creates a perverse feedback loop. Leadership receives data showing that employees are reasonably satisfied, with only minor concerns about standard workplace issues. They conclude that no major changes are needed. Meanwhile, employees know they lied on the survey, see that nothing changed, and learn that honesty is neither expected nor rewarded. The next survey cycle produces even more filtered, even less useful data.

Where Survey Results Go to Die

Even if surveys somehow captured honest feedback—and they don’t—it wouldn’t matter. Because survey results don’t drive change. They drive PowerPoint presentations.

The journey is predictable. Results are compiled, analyzed, and transformed into a deck with lots of charts showing mostly positive trends. HR presents these findings to leadership in a meeting where everyone nods seriously and commits to “taking this feedback seriously.” Someone suggests forming a committee. Someone else proposes “further analysis.” The deck gets filed away, and everyone returns to business as usual.

Leadership engages with survey data selectively, treating it like a buffet where they take what they like and ignore the rest. Results that confirm existing priorities get cited repeatedly: “As the survey shows, employees value professional development,” says the executive who already planned to expand training programs. Results that challenge leadership decisions get dismissed: “The sample size for that question wasn’t statistically significant,” or “We need to understand the context better before acting on that feedback.”

Actionable criticism simply disappears. Employees report that their manager plays favorites? That’s a “personnel matter” that can’t be discussed. Multiple teams flag that the new software system is dysfunctional? “We’ve invested too much to change course now.” Widespread concern about unsustainable workloads? “We’re all doing more with less in this economy.”

The most damning evidence of leadership’s disinterest is what happens when employees ask about survey results. Months pass. Employees inquire. Eventually, they get a vague email about “positive trends” and “areas of focus” that could have been written without ever looking at the data. Specific problems raised in surveys are never mentioned. Concrete changes are never announced. The message is clear: we asked because we had to, not because we cared.

The Cycle of Cynicism

Each survey cycle that produces no meaningful change teaches employees a lesson: their feedback doesn’t matter. This lesson accumulates, deepening with each repetition until cynicism becomes the default workplace attitude.

Employees learn to game the system. They figure out the minimum acceptable scores to avoid triggering concern. They master the art of the meaningless comment: specific enough to look engaged, vague enough to be safe. They participate because participation is tracked and non-participation raises flags, but they participate without hope or honesty.

The tragedy is that this makes surveys even more useless, which gives leadership even more reason to ignore them, which makes employees even more cynical. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of meaninglessness, and everyone involved knows it. Yet companies keep running surveys, keep promising that “this time will be different,” keep insisting that employee voices matter.

They don’t. The surveys prove it every year. And employees have learned to stop believing otherwise.

The basic setup was simple. A small group of people—let’s call them lords, because that’s what they called themselves—owned essentially all the land. And I mean all of it. Every field, every forest, every patch of dirt you could possibly stand on belonged to somebody, and that somebody was definitely not you.

Everyone else—the peasants, which was like 90% of the population—worked that land. In exchange, they got to live on it and keep enough of what they produced to not starve. Mostly. It was a very “you scratch my back, I let you continue existing” kind of arrangement.

Now, the lords were very clear that this was not slavery. Slavery would have been barbaric. No, the peasants were free. Free to leave anytime they wanted! Of course, they’d be leaving to go to... other land that was also owned by other lords, who would offer them essentially the same deal, except now they’d have to start over from scratch. But technically, they had options. The lords felt this was an important distinction.

The Daily Grind (Literally)

Your average peasant’s day went something like this: Wake up before dawn in the small dwelling they rented from a lord they’d never actually met. (The lord owned dozens of these dwellings across multiple villages. He had people to manage that sort of thing.) Pay monthly tribute for the privilege of sleeping there—usually about half of what they earned.

Then travel to wherever their labor was required. Sometimes this was a short walk. Sometimes it was an hour-long trek. Depended on where you could afford to live versus where the work was. The lord’s overseer expected you there at a specific time and you stayed for a specific number of hours—eight, ten, sometimes twelve—doing whatever task had been assigned to you.

Farming, mostly. But also: maintaining the lord’s properties, keeping his records, transporting his goods, preparing his food. The variety was impressive. The pay was not.

Here’s the clever part: the wages were calibrated to be just enough. Enough to pay your rent-tribute, buy food, maybe own a second tunic. But not enough to, say, save up and buy your own land. That would’ve defeated the whole purpose. The system was self-regulating, like a thermostat, except instead of temperature it regulated how close to broke you stayed.

The Debt Situation

Most peasants also owed money to various creditors. Many had borrowed substantial sums to attend training schools where they learned skills the lords required—literacy, accounting, specialized crafts. These debts could take decades to repay. Some peasants would still be paying them off when their own children were old enough to attend the same schools and take on the same debts. (Generational planning!)

Others owed money for medical care. When you got sick or injured, healers would help you—for a price. A serious illness could financially destroy a family for years. Some peasants avoided seeking treatment until things got really bad, which often made treatment even more expensive, or impossible. But at least they’d avoided debt for a while, so there’s that.

The peasant also needed various goods to function in society: a cart or horse for transportation, proper clothing, tools for their trade. Moneylenders were happy to extend credit when wages fell short. The interest rates ensured the debt grew faster than you could pay it down, which was probably just an unfortunate mathematical coincidence and not at all by design.

The Dream of Advancement

The truly beautiful thing about feudalism—and I mean this—was the mythology that sustained it.

Peasants were taught from childhood that anyone could become a lord. All it took was hard work, virtue, and determination. Sure, it almost never actually happened. But theoretically? Totally possible.

When it didn’t happen—which was always—this was explained as a personal failing. You hadn’t worked hard enough. Hadn’t been smart enough. Hadn’t wanted it badly enough. The system was fine. You were the problem.

Meanwhile, the lords obviously deserved their position. They were smarter, more capable, better at managing resources. That’s why they had all the resources to manage. Circular logic is the most elegant kind of logic.

The peasants mostly believed this. They worked harder, hoping loyalty and effort would be rewarded. They told themselves that next year would be better. They celebrated the rare peasant who did manage to rise in station, holding them up as proof the system worked, while ignoring the thousands who didn’t.

And if anyone questioned the arrangement too loudly? Well, the lords had laws and enforcers to handle that. But mostly they didn’t need them. The peasants policed themselves, and each other.

That’s how you know you’ve built a really good system.

I am not describing medieval Europe.

I am describing America, circa 2026.

We rebuilt feudalism. We just gave it a website and called it a meritocracy.

The most successful rebranding campaign in human history, and we’re all too busy working to notice.

You know the ritual. It begins with a gate agent announcing that boarding will start with groups named after rare gemstones and precious metals, i.e., sapphire, diamond, gold, silver. This group strolls to the gate like members of they have been given ownership stake in the airline.

Then comes active military. Followed by “passengers needing extra time.” Then families with small children (who somehow weren’t “passengers needing extra time”).

When the gate agent finally announces “We’ll now begin boarding Group 1,” 47 people immediately stand up, clutching their boarding passes like golden tickets, even though they’re in Group 7. They form a scrum around the gate, blocking everyone who’s actually supposed to board (right now, it’s Group 1), creating a human traffic jam before anyone’s even on the plane. But this is only foreshadowing what’s about to come.

Then comes Group 2. Then Group 3. Then Group 4. Then people with the airline’s credit card. Then Group 5, which is somehow different from “main cabin.” Then steerage. At some point you realize there are more boarding groups than there are rows on the plane.

The beautiful part? None of it matters. Because while this elaborate kabuki theater unfolds, everyone’s playing a completely different game: the Overhead Bin Hunger Games.

The System That Makes No Sense

Here’s what actually happens when you board a plane front-to-back, which is how we currently do it:

Person 12A gets on, walks to row 12, stops, and spends 90 seconds trying to fit their “carry-on” (a steamer trunk) into the overhead bin. Behind them, 150 people stand in the aisle, motionless, like a human parking lot. Person 12A finally sits down. Person 13B now does the exact same thing. Repeat 30 times.

Meanwhile, Person 34F has been standing in the aisle for 15 minutes, watching this happen, knowing their turn is coming, unable to do anything about it. It’s like waiting in line at the DMV, except you’re standing up and you paid $400 for the privilege.

The current system—boarding front-to-back by arbitrary “groups”—is mathematically optimized to create the maximum number of aisle-blocking events. It’s like designing a highway where every car has to stop and parallel park before the next car can pass. You couldn’t create a worse system if you tried.

Actually, that’s not true. You could create a worse system: you could have people board randomly while calling out numbers that don’t correspond to their seats and then act surprised when they don’t listen. Which is exactly what we do.

Here’s What Would Actually Work

The solution is so obvious it’s painful. Board rear-to-front. Window seats first, then middle, then aisle. Or just strict rear-to-front by row.

Think about it: If you board row 30 before row 10, Person 30A can take as long as they want with their overhead bin because no one is behind them. Person 29A boards next, same deal. By the time you get to the front of the plane, everyone’s seated and you’re done.

This isn’t theoretical. Astrophysicist Jason Steffen literally ran computer simulations and found that back-to-front, window-middle-aisle boarding is twice as fast as the current system. Twice as fast. We’ve known this for over a decade.

Or here’s an even simpler solution: Make first class board last. Right now, first class boards first, which means they sit there sipping champagne while 200 people shuffle past them giving them death stares. Cool for them, I guess, but it also means they’re taking up the aisle space while everyone else is trying to get to their seats. Board them last and they can walk directly to their seats with no one in their way. Everyone wins.

Want to get really radical? Ban carry-ons. Or actually enforce the size limits. The overhead bin arms race exists because airlines started charging for checked bags, so everyone brings everything on board. You know what doesn’t have a boarding problem? Trains. Stadiums. Movie theaters. Buses. Literally any other system where people need to sit down in assigned seats.

The fix is absurdly simple. We’re not trying to solve cold fusion here. We’re trying to get people to sit down in numbered chairs.

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Why Nothing Will Change

So why don’t airlines do any of this?

Because they don’t give a shit about you.

I don’t mean that as hyperbole. I mean it as a literal description of their incentive structure. Inefficient boarding doesn’t cost airlines money. It costs you time. And your time is worth nothing to them.

Think about what airlines actually care about: fuel costs, labor costs, gate fees, turnaround time between flights. You know what doesn’t affect turnaround time? Whether boarding takes 20 minutes or 35 minutes, because the plane isn’t leaving until it’s scheduled to leave anyway. The pilots need their pre-flight checks. The fuel needs to be loaded. The catering needs to happen. Boarding is rarely — if ever— the bottleneck.

But here’s what inefficient boarding does create: anxiety. Stress. A desperate scramble for overhead bin space. And you know what anxious, stressed people do? They pay $40 for “early boarding” so they can get on the plane first and guarantee their bin space.

The chaos isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s a revenue stream.

Airlines figured out decades ago that customer experience doesn’t matter. You’re going to fly anyway because you need to get somewhere and they’ve consolidated into an oligopoly. There are four major carriers. They don’t compete on service because they don’t have to. They compete on routes and prices, and even then, barely.

The system is broken on purpose. It’s broken because fixing it would cost money (retraining gate agents, redesigning boarding procedures, enforcing carry-on limits) and generate zero additional revenue. Meanwhile, keeping it broken generates upgrade fees, credit card sign-ups for priority boarding, and gate-checked bag fees when the bins inevitably fill up.

You think I’m being cynical? Airlines haven’t cared about customer experience since deregulation in 1978. They’ve spent 40 years figuring out how to extract maximum revenue from minimum service. They’ve removed legroom, added fees for everything, turned their planes into flying buses, and made the entire experience as miserable as legally possible.

And boarding? Boarding is just another opportunity to make you pay to avoid suffering they created.

So no, they’re not going to fix it. They’re never going to fix it. Because the system isn’t broken for them.

It’s only broken for you.

It’s designed to meet compliance regulations.

The L&D system exists so that when the auditor asks, “Do you provide anti-harassment training?” the answer is yes. When the board asks, “Do we have leadership development?” the answer is yes. When the lawsuit asks, “Did you train people on data privacy?” the answer is yes.

The entire infrastructure—the LMS, the course catalog, the completion tracking, the certificates—is engineered for one purpose: documentation that training occurred. Not that learning happened. Not that behavior changed. Not that capability increased. Just that the training event took place and someone clicked “Complete.”

You know this is true because you’ve taken these courses. You’ve clicked through the sexual harassment training with its stilted scenarios where “Brad” makes obviously inappropriate comments to “Jennifer” in the break room, and you answer multiple-choice questions that insult your intelligence. (”Is it appropriate to comment on a colleague’s body? A) Yes B) No C) Only on Fridays.”) You’ve sat through the cybersecurity module that teaches you passwords should be “strong” without explaining what that actually means, then makes you watch a 4-minute video about phishing emails narrated by someone who sounds like they’re reading a hostage statement.

This is why L&D courses feel like they were designed by aliens who heard about human learning third-hand. This is why they’re filled with stock photos of diverse people pointing at whiteboards and “knowledge checks” that test whether you were awake, not whether you learned anything. This is why nobody remembers anything from them twenty minutes after clicking “Complete.”

They’re not supposed to teach you. They’re supposed to generate a timestamp in a database that proves you were “taught.”

The system is working exactly as designed. It’s just not designed to do what it claims to do.

THE COURSERA CHARADE

Now let’s talk about “development budgets.”

Most companies will tell you they invest in employee development. They’ll point to their generous learning stipends, their platform subscriptions, their tuition reimbursement programs. They’ll show you the line item in the budget. They’ll mention it in the job posting and again during onboarding.

What they’re actually giving you is Coursera (or LinkedIn Learning) access.

This isn’t development. This is a participation trophy. This is the corporate equivalent of giving someone a gym membership and calling it a fitness program.

Real development costs money—actual money, not the $400 per employee per year that platform access costs. It requires dedicated time during work hours, which means someone’s not doing their “real job” for a while. It needs mentorship, which means a senior person spending hours coaching instead of producing. It demands feedback, which requires managers who know how to give it. It needs practice, which means letting people try things and fail without punishment. It requires designing roles that stretch people into new capabilities, not just extract their existing ones. It means creating career paths that make sense and are actually available, not just theoretical ladders that lead nowhere.

Real development is messy and expensive and time-consuming and requires sustained attention over months and years.

Guess which one companies choose?

The beautiful thing about platform access is that it’s something to point at. “We offer professional development! Look, here’s the login!” It’s proof you “did something” without having to do anything. It shifts the burden entirely to the employee—if you’re not growing, that’s on you, buddy. We gave you the tools. Never mind that you’re working 50-hour weeks and have no time to watch videos about agile methodology. Never mind that even if you did, there’s no one to help you apply it and no project where you could practice it. Never mind that your manager has never asked about your development goals and wouldn’t know what to do if you told them.

You have access. You get the participation certificate to post on LinkedIn. What more do you want?

WHAT REAL DEVELOPMENT WOULD REQUIRE

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you’ve watched the gap between what your company says it values and what it actually funds.

Real employee development would require sustained commitment, not quarterly training initiatives that disappear when budgets tighten. It would require actual spending—real money (and time), not access codes. It would require managers to spend time developing people instead of just managing output. It would require designing jobs that build capability, not just extract it. It would require honesty about what people need to learn and courage to let them learn it on company time.

It would require giving a shit.

The looking is uncomfortable. The noticing is painful. But you already know all of this. You’ve sat through the trainings. You’ve clicked through the modules. You’ve used the Coursera access exactly once.

That’s the thing about broken systems—they only work as long as everyone agrees to pretend they’re not broken. The moment someone points out that the emperor has no clothes, that the L&D infrastructure is designed for documentation not development, that the whole thing is compliance theater masquerading as learning—the illusion cracks.

The next time someone shows you the L&D budget line item, ask what it’s actually buying. The honest answer will tell you everything you need to know about what the company thinks of you.

The noticing is uncomfortable. The looking is the work. You can’t fix what you won’t see.

You know it’s bullshit. Your manager knows it’s bullshit. HR definitely knows it’s bullshit. And yet here we all are, gathered around the glowing altar of the performance appraisal system, pretending this exercise measures something real. It’s like we’ve all agreed to participate in an elaborate play where everyone has memorized their lines but nobody believes the plot.

The performance review is corporate theater at its finest—a Kabuki dance of self-assessment, goal-setting, and feedback that exists in a parallel universe where words like “synergy” and “impact” actually mean something.

It’s a system that measures nothing, develops nobody, and exists purely because... well, because it exists. And that’s apparently reason enough.

The Great Copy-Paste Renaissance

Let me walk you through how this actually works, because the gap between what companies think happens and what actually happens is wider than the Grand Canyon.

Step one: You open last year’s performance review document. This is crucial. Why reinvent the wheel when you literally did the same job you did last year?

Step two: You copy your task list. All of it. “Managed stakeholder relationships.” “Delivered quarterly reports.” “Participated in cross-functional initiatives.” It’s all still true! You’re still doing these things! In fact, you’ll probably be doing them next year too, which is great because you can copy-paste this document again in twelve months.

Step three—and this is where the real artistry comes in—you add the magic words. You didn’t just “send emails,” you “facilitated strategic communications across multiple business units.” You didn’t “attend meetings,” you “drove alignment on key organizational priorities.” You didn’t “do your job,” you “delivered measurable impact on critical business outcomes.”

What impact? Doesn’t matter. The system doesn’t actually measure impact. It measures your ability to claim impact using the right vocabulary. It’s like Mad Libs for corporate drones: “I [action verb] the [buzzword] which resulted in [vague positive outcome] for the [business unit].”

The beautiful thing about this system is that it rewards creativity in exactly one area: your ability to make mundane work sound like you personally saved the company from bankruptcy. You answered customer service emails? No, you “enhanced customer experience through responsive, solutions-oriented engagement.” You fixed a bug in the code? Wrong. You “improved system reliability and user satisfaction through proactive technical intervention.”

Everyone knows this is what’s happening. Your manager knows you’re inflating routine tasks into strategic achievements. You know your manager did the same thing on their review. It’s bullshit all the way up and all the way down. But we’ve all agreed to pretend that this document—this carefully crafted work of fiction—represents an accurate assessment of your performance.

Personal Development: The Goals You’ll Never Achieve (And Nobody Cares)

But wait, there’s more!

You can’t just document what you did. You also have to set personal development goals for the coming year.

This is my favorite part of the whole charade, because it’s where the system’s dishonesty becomes most naked.

Your company wants you to identify areas for growth. They want you to set ambitious learning objectives. They want you to demonstrate commitment to continuous improvement. What they don’t want to do is give you time to actually develop those skills, or money to take courses, or any meaningful support whatsoever.

So you write something like “Develop advanced data analysis skills” or “Improve public speaking abilities” or “Learn Python.” And then... nothing happens. Because you have a full-time job doing the things you already know how to do. Because the training budget was cut. Because your manager has no idea how to help you learn Python and frankly doesn’t care if you do.

But next year, when you’re filling out this form again, you’ll need to address these goals. So you’ll write something vague about “making progress” or “seeking opportunities to apply these skills” or—if you’re feeling honest—you’ll just delete them and write new goals you also won’t achieve.

The company doesn’t actually want to develop you. If they did, they’d have a development program. They’d have mentorship. They’d have training. They’d have managers who give a shit. What they want is for you to perform the ritual of self-improvement, to demonstrate that you’re the kind of person who thinks about growth, even though the system provides zero support for actual growth.

It’s personal development as performance art. You’re not supposed to actually grow. You’re supposed to write down that you want to grow, in the correct format, using the approved language. The goal isn’t development. The goal is documentation that you thought about development.

The System Exists Because the System Exists

Here’s the thing that really gets me: nobody thinks this works.

I’ve never met anyone—not one single person—who believes the annual performance review system effectively measures performance, drives development, or improves outcomes. Not employees. Not managers. Not HR professionals. Not executives.

Everyone knows it’s broken.

So why does it persist?

Because the machinery exists. Because there’s a form. Because there’s a process. Because there’s a database somewhere that stores all these reviews. Because changing it would require admitting it never worked in the first place, and that’s a level of institutional honesty most companies simply cannot handle.

It’s easier to keep running the broken machine than to turn it off and ask hard questions like “What are we actually trying to accomplish?” or “Is there a better way to do this?” or “Why are we doing this at all?”

The system perpetuates itself through sheer inertia. It’s a corporate zombie—dead but still walking, consuming resources and time, serving no purpose except its own continuation.

We feed it our hours and our bullshit because that’s what the system requires, and the system requires it because... well, because it always has.

This is how broken systems survive in organizations. Not because they work. Not because anyone wants them. But because dismantling them would require someone to stand up and say “This is stupid and we should stop,” and that kind of honesty is career suicide.

So we keep the system. We keep filling out the forms. We keep having the meetings. We keep pretending it means something. And the system keeps existing, justified by nothing except its own existence.

What We’re Not Measuring (Everything That Matters)

Let’s talk about what the annual performance review actually measures.

Does it measure competency? No. Your manager sees you work every day. They already know if you’re competent. The review doesn’t reveal anything new about your abilities.

Does it measure growth? Absolutely not. Growth happens continuously, in small increments, through daily work and challenges. A once-a-year snapshot captures none of that. It’s like trying to understand a movie by looking at a single frame.

Does it measure your actual impact on the company? Not even close. Real impact is complex, often collaborative, and hard to attribute to individuals. But the review form needs you to claim individual impact, so you do, even though you know it’s a simplification bordering on fiction.

Does it measure whether you’re getting better at your job? No. It measures whether you can remember what you did and describe it in favorable terms.

What the system actually measures is:

• Your ability to document your work in the approved format

• Your skill at corporate language and buzzword deployment

• Your willingness to participate in organizational theater

• Your compliance with bureaucratic processes

In other words, it measures bullshit. It measures your ability to bullshit convincingly, in writing, once a year.

The things that actually matter—Are you solving real problems? Are you helping your team succeed? Are you learning and adapting? Are you making good decisions under pressure?—none of that shows up in the performance review. It can’t. The system isn’t designed to capture actual performance. It’s designed to generate documentation that the company performed performance management.

The Feedback That Never Comes

Here’s the cruelest irony of all: the performance review system is supposedly about feedback and development.

The whole point—the stated purpose, the justification for this entire apparatus—is to help employees understand how they’re doing and how they can improve. It’s meant to be a tool for growth.

But here’s what actually happens: You work for twelve months. During those twelve months, if you’re lucky, you get occasional vague comments from your manager. “Good job on that project.” “Thanks for handling that.” Maybe, if something goes really wrong, you get a tense conversation.

But real feedback? Honest, specific, actionable feedback about what you’re doing well and what you could do better? That doesn’t happen. Not regularly. Not continuously. Not in the moment when it would actually be useful.

Then, once a year, you sit down for your review. And if there’s critical feedback—if there’s something you should have been doing differently—you’re hearing it for the first time, twelve months too late to do anything about it.

Or worse: there’s no critical feedback at all. Everything is fine. You “meet expectations.” You get your 3 out of 5 or your “satisfactory” rating. And you leave the meeting with absolutely no idea what you should do differently, what you should keep doing, or what actually matters to your manager.

The system that’s supposed to provide feedback provides no meaningful feedback. The process designed to support development supports no actual development. It’s a feedback system with no feedback, a development process with no development.

If you wanted to design a system that actively prevented good feedback, you couldn’t do much better than the annual performance review. It’s too infrequent to be relevant. It’s too formal to be honest. It’s too tied to compensation to be developmental. It’s too focused on documentation to be conversational.

It’s everything feedback shouldn’t be, packaged as a feedback system.

The Dishonesty We Won’t Name

So here we are. A system that measures nothing. Develops nobody. Provides no useful feedback. Exists purely for its own sake. And costs thousands of hours of collective time across every company that uses it.

Why do we keep doing this?

Because naming what’s broken requires honesty that most organizations simply don’t have. It requires someone to say out loud what everyone already knows: this doesn’t work, it never worked, and we’re all just going through the motions.

It requires admitting that we’ve built elaborate systems that serve no purpose except to create the appearance of management. That we’ve institutionalized bullshit and called it performance management. That we’re asking people to waste their time on theater because we’re too cowardly to admit the theater is pointless.

But everyone knows. You know. Your manager knows. HR knows. The executives know. We’re all in on the secret: this is bullshit.

The question is: how much longer are we going to pretend it isn’t?

As someone who is focused on capability and enablement, I think it comes down to three primary failure points.

First, interview questions don’t link to actual competencies. Someone applying for a software engineering role gets asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” as if their ability to generate corporate-speak about career trajectories has anything to do with whether they can debug code. A marketing candidate gets the classic “What’s your greatest weakness?” question, which measures exactly one thing: their ability to recite the same humble-brag everyone learned from the same internet article.

Second—and this is where it gets truly baffling—even when companies stumble upon profoundly competent or overqualified candidates, they don’t hire them. I’ve watched hiring managers reject someone with a decade of relevant experience because they “seemed overqualified” or “might get bored.” Imagine any other scenario where you’re offered something better than you expected and you say, “No thanks, this is too good.” You’d sound insane. But in hiring? Standard practice.

Third, there’s no system at all. It’s broken at every level. The job description was written by someone who doesn’t do the job. The recruiter screens for keywords they don’t understand. The hiring manager asks questions they Googled the night before. The team interview is just vibes. The final decision often comes down to whether someone “felt like a culture fit,” which is code for “reminded us of ourselves.” This isn’t a process. It’s improv theater where everyone’s pretending they have a script.

The outcomes from this are absurd and reach performance art levels when you look closely. Companies will reject 200 qualified candidates, then complain they “can’t find talent.” They’ll require five rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, as if they’re hiring the Secretary of Defense. They’ll ask candidates to complete unpaid “sample projects” that coincidentally look exactly like actual work the company needs done. They’ll make someone interview with twelve different people who all ask the same three questions, then take eight weeks to decide, then offer below-market salary because “we’re a family here.”

It don’t make no damn sense.

So why does it continue? Because fixing it would require admitting the system is broken. It would mean the VP of Talent Acquisition would have to say, “We’ve been doing this wrong for years.” It would mean HR would need to rebuild processes from scratch instead of copying what everyone else does. It’s easier to keep running the broken system and blame “the talent pool” when it doesn’t work.

Hiring will stay broken until someone with power is willing to say what everyone in the process already knows: this isn’t measuring what we think it measures. We’re not finding talent. We’re filtering for people who interview well.

The looking is the work. Someone has to be willing to do it.

The leadership at Red Robin had figured out something that apparently eludes most of the corporate world: they couldn’t possibly present every scenario a waiter would encounter, but they could prepare a waiter to handle any situation.

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A customer wants anchovies on their burger? A kid is having a birthday celebration and wants a yellow balloon (and we have none in stock)? Someone needs their fries arranged in order of length?

So instead of doing what most companies do—which is hand you a binder the length of War and Peace, chock full of scenarios that you’ll likely never encounter, a mission statement so vague it could apply to either a restaurant or a cult, and expect you to memorize it—Red Robin taught a very simple guiding principle:

“We have an all-out unbridled desire to create happy guests.”

Now, if they’d stopped there, this would be just another eye-rolling corporate slogan, the kind of thing you’d see on a poster next to a stock photo of people high-fiving. But Red Robin didn’t stop there, because they understood something crucial: words don’t mean anything until you define them, illustrate them, and demonstrate them.

They broke “unbridled” down. They illustrated it. They made us explain it. They made us demonstrate it. I knew it so well, I can still recite it 30 years later.

What does unbridled look like? If a customer said, “I want anchovies on my hamburger,” and we didn’t have anchovies, unbridled meant we sent somebody to the store to get them.

Because unbridled means having no boundaries to what we’ll do for a customer.

Here’s where most training fails: it teaches understanding instead of capability. Companies think if employees can define “customer-focused” or nod along to a mission statement, they’ve succeeded. But understanding doesn’t tell you whether to go buy anchovies. Red Robin didn’t care if we could recite their slogan. They cared if we could think our way through situations nobody had scripted for us.

As a trainer now, I see this everywhere. Companies build training around what’s easy to measure — knowledge checks, completion rates, certification pass rates — because those numbers are clean and reportable. But the question that matters is whether people can think their way through a situation nobody anticipated.

Information transfer is not the same as capability development. Red Robin understood that. Most companies don’t, and they wonder why the training didn’t stick.

Red Robin understood the power of building people with an unbridled capability; people who would go above and beyond to take care of customers. Everything else is just expensive theater.

I was on a work trip a few weeks ago and it was dinner time. So my teammates and I needed to find a place that was good and close. In 2026 this means we immediately pulled out our phones and started scrolling through Google and Yelp reviews like archaeologists examining ancient tablets for clues about whether the pasta would be al dente or a crime against Italy.

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This is what passes for decision-making in modern life.

And here’s where it gets interesting: we have collectively agreed, as a society, on a very specific rating that restaurants must achieve to be considered legitimate. Not five stars. Oh no, that’s clearly fake. Nobody’s that good. A perfect rating screams “the owner’s cousin wrote all these reviews from different email accounts.” And certainly not one star, because we’re not masochists.

No, the magic number is 4.3 to 4.6. That’s the sweet spot where a restaurant is good enough to trust but flawed enough to be believable. We also require at least 300 reviews, because we are nothing if not rigorous about our pseudoscience.

Think about that for a second. We’ve built an entire system where perfection is suspicious and mediocrity is unacceptable, so we’ve all silently agreed to trust only the narrow band of ratings that suggests “pretty good but with some haters.” This is the logic we’re using to decide where to spend forty dollars on moo shu pork.

But let’s talk about when people actually write reviews, because this is where the whole house of cards starts to wobble. In my experience, I write a review under exactly three circumstances: (1) I’m so angry I could spit, (2) I’m so delighted I want to marry the chef, or (3) the server asked me to review them and I’ve got some spare time.

Notice what’s missing from that list? “I had a perfectly fine meal that met my reasonable expectations.”

Nobody writes that review. Nobody fires up Yelp after an adequate steak to report: “The food was fine. The service was acceptable. I have no strong feelings either way.” That review doesn’t exist. So what we’re left with is a dataset composed entirely of people at emotional extremes, plus a handful of people who had some spare time and were cajoled into writing a review because the server flashed a pretty smile.

This is the foundation we’re building our dinner plans on.

Restaurants are living organisms—staff turns over, quality fluctuates, menus evolve—the only constant is the restaurant you go to today will most certainly not be the one you go to tomorrow.

Why would a review from last month be more trustworthy than one from last year? Because it’s recent? What if something changed yesterday? What if the good chef is on vacation and they’ve got the backup guy working tonight? What if—and here’s a thought—the person who wrote that glowing review just has terrible taste?

Here’s the really absurd part: we’ll dismiss a five-star review as potentially fraudulent, but we’ll absolutely believe a one-star review is the gospel truth.

Why?

What makes us think angry people are more honest than happy people? Have you met angry people? They’re not known for measured, objective assessments of reality.

Does this system actually help us pick the best restaurant? Of course not. We’re scrolling through reviews written by strangers having the worst or best nights of their lives, trying to predict our own future based on someone else’s past, and hoping the 4.4-star rating means something more than “enough people were sufficiently motivated by emotion or boredom to type some words into their phones.”

And then we’re going to dinner anyway.

Because what else are we supposed to do?

Every time I board an airplane, I participate in a ritual so magnificently stupid that it could only have been designed by a committee of people who have never actually been on an airplane.

The process works like this: First, they invite the people sitting in the front of the plane—the ones with the wide seats and complimentary mixed nuts—to board first. These passengers stroll down the jetway like they’re entering a spa, while the rest of us, crammed into the gate area like sardines auditioning for a smaller can, watch them with the kind of silent, murderous rage usually reserved for people who bring acoustic guitars to parties.

Then, and this is the beautiful part, everyone else has to walk past these seated first-class passengers to get to their seats in the back. It’s a parade of resentment. A gauntlet of class warfare. The first-class people are already sipping their pre-flight champagne, and we’re shuffling past them with our oversized backpacks, making eye contact that says, “I see you, and I hope your noise-canceling headphones malfunction.”

Here’s the thing: there is an obviously better way to do this. It’s so obvious that a reasonably intelligent golden retriever could figure it out. You board from the back of the plane forward. Row 35 gets on first, sits down, stows their stuff. Then Row 34. Then Row 33. Like a reverse avalanche of human beings, filling the plane efficiently from tail to nose. No one blocking the aisle. No one waiting while someone in Row 12 tries to fit a suitcase the size of a dishwasher into an overhead bin designed for a loaf of bread. It would be faster, smoother, and would prevent roughly 73%, give or take a tantrum, of the homicidal thoughts currently generated by commercial air travel.

But airlines don’t do this. They do the exact opposite. Why? The official explanation involves something about “premium customer experience” and “loyalty program benefits.” Which is corporate-speak for “we want rich people to feel special.” And sure, I get it. First-class passengers paid more, so they get to board first, recline their seats into actual beds, and enjoy the schadenfreude of watching economy passengers realize their “seat” is actually just a medieval torture device with a tray table.

But I think the real reason is darker and more primal: the overhead bins.

See, airlines have systematically reduced the number of bags you can check for free, which means everyone now carries on luggage that would have been considered a steamer trunk in 1952. We’re all terrified that if we don’t board early enough, there won’t be any overhead bin space left, and we’ll have to gate-check our bag, which feels like a personal failure on par with forgetting your own birthday. So first-class boards first to claim the bins. Then “premium” passengers. Then people with credit cards. Then people who made eye contact with the gate agent. The whole system is built around scarcity and anxiety, not logic.

And here’s what gets me: we all know this is insane. Every single person in that gate area understands that the process is backwards and inefficient. But we accept it. We participate in it. We don’t even really complain about it anymore, except in the form of jokes we make while standing in line.

This is how broken systems work. They’re not broken because no one notices. They’re broken because noticing doesn’t feel like enough. The looking is supposed to be the work, but we’ve convinced ourselves that the looking is pointless unless it comes with a solution, and solutions require power we don’t have. So we board the plane backwards, every single time, complicit in our own frustration, glaring at first class while they sip their champagne and we fight over bins.

The plane takes off. We all get to the same destination. And tomorrow, we’ll do it again.