Last week at Wyndham’s Theatre, Rosamund Pike finished her performance in Inter Alia, took her bow — and then came back.
“I am trying to tell you a story, and I’m feeling you, and I hope you’re feeling me too. Somebody was texting in this part.” She seemed genuinely upset. Not performing upset. Actually upset.
She didn’t stop the show. She waited until it was over, came back out, and named what had happened. The audience applauded. Because everyone knew what had been broken.
I love the theatre: it’s grown up “let’s pretend”. But does require everyone in the room agrees to the same compact: we will pretend this is real, and in pretending, make it so. Shakespeare’s Prospero says it plainly: “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.” His magic was our magic: in the agreement we make to believe and to sustain that belief.
I think about this a lot in corporate meetings.
Watch a senior leadership team prepare for a board presentation. They’re not sharpening the thinking. They’re choreographing the performance of sharp thinking. The right slides. Pause: the right hesitations. The right moment to say “that’s a great challenge” before answering a question they wrote themselves.
Walk into a marketing planning session. Someone has written “consumer insight” at the top of a slide and put something underneath it that isn’t an insight — it’s a demographic. There’s a Post-it phase. There’s a new technology opportunites piece. The most senior person says something vague and everyone writes it down. By the end there is a plan. It looks exactly like the last plan.
Erving Goffman saw this coming. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) he argued that social life is fundamentally theatrical — we are always performing for the audience in the room.
Goffman looked at a number of formal and informal organisations – an asylum, a hotel, a fishing community. Even though he was writing half a century ago, he spotted how thoroughly organisations tend institutionalise performance. How the scaffolding becomes the building. We even put the word in the job description: performance review, performance management, performance targets. Performance marketing fwiw.
The problem isn’t cynicism on behalf of those on stage. The problem is that the performance has become so collectively maintained it’s genuinely hard to tell it apart from the real thing. Including for the people in the central roles.
Until the phone goes off. Someone says something inconvenient. A number doesn’t add up. A junior person asks why we’re doing this again. And for a moment the actors are visible, blinking on the stage. The back of house is suddenly in plain sight — which is why we work so hard to keep it hidden.
In a good room, the inconvenient thing gets examined. In most rooms, someone says “great point, let’s take that offline” and the slides move forward. Inexorably.
Pike came back out and named it. That’s the thing organisations almost never do.
HERDSpotting tips
Watch for the preparation before the meeting. Are you doing the work or rehearsing the performance of doing the work. They are not the same activity.
Listen for the language that sounds like thinking but moves in circles: “Leaning in to the opportunity space,” “building on our core equity,” “aligning around the strategic intent.” Costume and drapery.
Reflect on the last time someone in a room said something true that was inconvenient. How did it feel? How was it received? That tells you everything about whether the organisation is doing the work — or performing it.
