The Hidden Costs of Superficial Transformation
What’s the big deal, anyway? Borrowing ideas without a proper blueprint—who cares? Laugh it off, call it human stupidity, and move on with your life. But there’s a deeper problem lurking beneath it. When we fail, we don’t just abandon the approach. We replace it with a new one.
My shelves are overflowing with diet books. And don’t get me started on frameworks: they change faster than my son’s mood when he’s high on sugar. All this effort demands a massive investment. I’m not talking about the money that Dave-from-accounting pays to Weight Watchers, right before sneaking donuts into the Monday meeting. I mean energy. I’ve seen firsthand how long it takes—and how much it drains us—to admit we’ve been doing it all wrong.
Studies back this up. A well known example is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grief cycle in organizational change: we go through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before we even get to acceptance. And with every failure, the resistance to new change grows. Meanwhile, the problem doesn’t go away.
Now, we don’t need to fix everything. That would take forever. But we should dismantle the ones that drain resources or—worse—fuel resistance to fixing the real problems. So join me in the caffeine-fueled rebellion against Cargo Cults.
The Cult of Clueless Coaches
Let’s shake people out of their complacency. Make them see the mess they’re blindly maintaining. I’m calling out the absurdity, exposing the consequences, and making it impossible for people to keep pretending it’s fine. I mean to break the cycle, force uncomfortable truths into the open, and challenge both the believers and the so-called experts leading them.
It’s not gentle, and it’s not about playing nice. It’s about rattling the cage so hard that people have to do something about it.
Why? Because most people don’t connect the dots between these feel-good rituals and their real-world fallout. They slip under the radar. They don’t set off alarms. No sirens, no flashing lights. They just hum along in the background, quietly screwing things up, while under the surface it’s a slow-motion train wreck.
Grumpy employees drowning in nonsense, while leadership tries to “boost morale” with an employee happiness survey or—God help us—a ping-pong table. And the poor, frazzled dog owner getting yanked across the pavement at dawn by a furry tornado. Or the railway company, where a black hole of transparency leaves 300 developers wandering in the fog.
Challenging those trapped in their own idiocracy is just the beginning. I call out the teachers. The dog whisperer. The agile coach. The consultant. Someone who looks the part and says the right words. Because what if they haven’t got a clue what they’re doing? That they are just another cog in the machine? That’s when the consequences go nuclear.
Shadow Puppet Management for Professionals
Challenge your assumptions and question your own behaviors and beliefs.
When managers blindly copy frameworks like Prince II, Scrum, SAFe, or Lean—without understanding why those frameworks worked in the first place—they don’t solve anything. It looks like leadership, but it’s just projection. And it usually makes things worse—creating new processes to follow, endless meetings to attend, and mountains of paperwork to fill out.
When parents blindly copy best practices from trendy blogs or self-help books without understanding why those approaches work for these specific families, they tend to worsen the situation. They add fuel to the fire by piling on extra rules, drowning themselves in a flood of contradictory advice.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Not us! We’re too smart for that. You won’t find it here.” Well, think again.
SO start scanning for the ritual-circus and get to work fixing it.
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