Focus Factor and Productivity Theater

In the time it took to read this sentence, AI just helped someone generate a 15-page requirements document, three user story templates, and a perfectly formatted project plan. None of it will help them build the right thing. Welcome to the new era of performative productivity - where looking busy just got exponentially easier.

The Focus Factor Foundation

To avoid this trap organizations need to double down on fostering Focus Factor - the recognition that innovation and problem-solving depend on deep thinking, downtime, and happy brains. This mindset emphasizes limiting work in progress, protecting cognitive resources, and creating space for meaningful work.

But there's a nefarious anti-pattern that directly undermines Focus Factor: the belief that activity is a sign of productivity.

When teams equate busyness with progress, they fill every moment with meetings, tasks, and visible work - exactly the opposite of what enables deep thinking and creative problem-solving. This creates a vicious cycle where teams become too busy to think strategically about what they should actually be working on.

The Performative Productivity Trap: Teams caught in this pattern often exhibit classic Focus Factor violations - high work-in-progress, constant context switching, and the inability to take time to understand impact before diving into new work. They're so busy doing things that they never have space to determine if they're doing the right things.

The Psychology Behind the Performance

Understanding why teams fall into performative productivity helps address it more effectively:

Uncertainty Avoidance: When teams aren't clear on what outcomes matter, they default to activities that feel "safe" and measurable.

Visibility Bias: Work that's easy to see (meetings, documents, process) gets more attention than invisible work (thinking, learning, iterating).

Comfort in Familiarity: Process-heavy work feels more controllable than the uncertainty of discovery and experimentation.

Fear of Judgment: "Looking busy" feels safer than risking failure on ambitious outcomes.

Two Types of Productivity: Performance vs. Progress

Most organizations have accidentally built elaborate systems for appearing productive rather than being productive. Teams fill calendars with status meetings, craft perfect user stories that sit unfinished, and celebrate velocity increases while customer satisfaction stagnates. To understand the difference, we need to recognize that productivity has two distinct flavors:

Performance Productivity (Theater)

• Focus: Looking busy, hitting activity metrics, perfect process adherence

• Measures: Story points completed, meetings attended, documentation created

• Questions asked: "How much did we do?" "Are we following the process?"

• Feels like: Exhausting busyness with little satisfaction

Progress Productivity (Value)

• Focus: Learning, shipping, solving real problems

• Measures: User outcomes achieved, problems solved, hypotheses validated

• Questions asked: "What did we learn?" "How did we move the needle?"

• Feels like: Energizing focus with clear momentum

And Here’s the kicker, performance productivity often looks more organized and measurable, especially to leadership who are removed from day-to-day work. And so folks gravitate towards its false sense of security.

The Performative Productivity Patterns

Pattern 1: Meeting Theater

• Daily standups become lengthy status reports

• Retrospectives generate action items that are never revisited

• "Alignment meetings" where everyone already agrees in person but the backchannels are blowing up with dissent

• Reality check: If you removed half your meetings, what takes a hit?

Pattern 2: Documentation Theater

• Perfectly crafted requirements that no one references during building

• Detailed project plans that become obsolete within a week

• Process documentation that exists to show you "have process"

• Reality check: Is your documentation helping decisions?

Pattern 3: Velocity Theater

• Celebrating increased throughput without measuring customer impact

• Gaming estimation to hit targets

• Focusing on sprint completion rates instead of value delivery

• Reality check: Could you increase velocity 50% while delivering zero customer value?

Pattern 4: Planning Theater

• Quarterly roadmaps planned to the day that everyone knows will change

• Extensive risk mitigation for hypothetical problems

• Feature specification before validating the underlying problem

• Reality check: How much of your last quarterly plan actually shipped as planned?

The Coming AI Amplification Effect

Here's what makes performative productivity even more dangerous today: AI is about to put it on steroids. As AI tools make things faster and easier across all aspects of the product delivery lifecycle, the temptation to focus on outputs over outcomes will intensify. 

The Risk: When you can create the appearance of thorough work in a fraction of the time, it becomes even easier to mistake activity for progress. Teams might find themselves generating more documentation, more detailed specifications, and more comprehensive plans - all while moving further away from actual user value.

The Opportunity: The same AI capabilities that could amplify performative productivity also create unprecedented opportunities for progress productivity. When routine tasks take minutes instead of hours, teams have more cognitive space for the work that actually matters: understanding users, validating assumptions, and solving real problems.

The question isn't whether AI will change how we work - it's whether we'll use it to become more genuinely productive or just more efficiently performative.

Practical Interventions

Model Outcome-Focused Questions

• Instead of "How many features shipped?" ask "What user problems did we solve?"

• Instead of "Are we on schedule?" ask "What have we learned about our assumptions?"

• Quarterly reset: What would we stop doing if we had to cut our work in half?

Create Psychological Safety for Progress

• Celebrate intelligent failures and course corrections

• Reward teams for stopping unproductive work

• Make it safe to say "This isn't working" early

Design Systems for Progress

• Funding models that reward value over velocity

• Review processes that focus on outcomes over outputs

• Communication rhythms that share learning, not just status

• Make sure you measure more than speed.

The Progress Productivity Payoff

Bottom Line: True productivity isn't about how busy you look - it's about how much value you create. When teams optimize for progress over performance, they don't just deliver better outcomes - they build more sustainable, satisfying ways of working that recognizes that innovation requires space to think, not just space to do.