I like a good story. When I think of nights out at a theater, whether cinema or live performance, I think of hours spent together with friends or family and hopefully getting immersed in the magic of great storytelling and atmosphere.
That is not the kind of theater that I am considering in this post. Though there is still a type of stage, a performance and an audience, the connotation is usually less than favorable.
Let’s begin with a few examples to illustrate what is going on here.
There can be tremendous benefit in a strong compliance posture, in that it enables business and can protect the organization from harm. On the other hand, it is compliance theater, if the focus has shifted towards just simply checking off boxes, to adherence to words and specific phrasing, regardless of understanding.
Well-chosen metrics can be extremely useful, providing context for measurement and guiding goals for optimization. But blind adherence to and optimization for specific metrics can turn into a form of metrics theater, pushing the metrics into foreground and divorcing them from purpose they were intended to be used for.
Somewhat related, productivity theater is a lot about the perception of people working really hard, getting after it, getting things done. People might signal getting up at 4am, lean into hustle culture, perhaps with pride advertise their intense schedule. Looking busy, being busy – neither of course necessarily means actually producing value.
Of course corporate life does not have a monopoly on the phenomenon at all.
Do you know of a couple (married or not) in your circle of friends, who just seem so good together? Special occasions well-celebrated and vacations or weekend getaways just perfectly executed? Everything seems to go just so right for them, and their well-curated social media feeds easily attest to all of that? It may just be a form of relationship theater. Who knows how well it actually reflects reality.
These types of theater are not advertised as a performance, they are usually intended as portraying real truths about something, though that portrayal may not actually fit that reality.
Or, in other words, the map no longer matches its territory. This theater is performative rather than truth seeking. The label is the smudge on the lens trying to remind you to compare, to check the map against reality.