I recently read an article on the concept of looking productive, and it stuck with me — because it describes perfectly an organisational disease I see more and more often in companies, especially now that AI is in the mix.
I see it, and people tell me about it constantly: more and more people spend their days performing productivity instead of creating value.
The Symptom
Packed calendars. Meetings on top of meetings. Fires breaking out every five minutes. And yet: slow decision-making, murky priorities, projects that barely move.
What’s going on?
Simply put, many teams aren’t working to produce outcomes — they’re working to produce visibility.
The Cause
It’s easy to fall into this trap, and it doesn’t come from laziness. It comes from a management culture built on control — one that uses the wrong productivity KPIs, completely disconnected from what productivity actually means.
Think about it: if a company measures presence, response time, number of sales calls, constant availability — people will optimise for those signals.
The problem is that real cognitive work operates in exactly the opposite way.
Who Actually Creates Value
The most impactful people I’ve worked with have a few things in common: they attend fewer meetings, but better ones. They look less “busy”. They carve out space — for decisions, for thinking, for themselves. And in the end, they make better calls.
This happens because value cannot emerge from cognitive fragmentation. It requires focus, autonomy, and clarity — especially now, when on top of managing projects and people, we’re also managing LLM agents that can produce output at speed. Output that looks perfectly acceptable at first glance, but under closer scrutiny requires domain knowledge and real judgment to actually be up to standard.
Output vs Outcome
So, as managers, we need to stop confusing output with outcome.
Outputs are: slides, tasks, reports, emails.
Outcomes are: problems solved, margins improved, satisfied customers, simplified processes.
These are two entirely different worlds.
The Consequence
And when an organisation loses sight of outcomes and gets absorbed in the theatre of productivity, the best people start to disengage — because they can see that looking busy matters more than being effective.
My Approach
As far as I’m concerned, management’s job is not to control people. I’d rather design systems where useful work can emerge without the constant pressure of performative anxiety.
Not everyone agrees with me — I want to be clear about that. I sometimes get sharp criticism from people who are used to measuring the wrong signals and are convinced they have something to teach. I suspect the same happens to you.
Don’t Get Played
Quality still beats quantity — and in an AI-driven world, that may be truer than ever.