Retail provides one of the clearest examples of this organisational behaviour. The moment a Regional Director or senior leader announces a visit, an entirely predictable ritual begins.

The phones start ringing. Managers call neighbouring stores asking where they are, what they are looking at and what questions they are asking. Displays are rebuilt. Shelves replenished and tidied. Stock gets moved and cleaning suddenly becomes a priority.

People who normally spend their day serving customers find themselves focused on preparing for an inspection. Not because they're trying to deceive leadership, but because they genuinely care and want to present the best version of their operation.

The strangest thing of all, everybody knows the game. The store manager knows. The visiting Director knows. The regional team knows. All the colleagues know. Yet the performance continues week after week and visit after visit.

For a few hours, serving customers becomes secondary to serving the visit. The operation shifts its attention from improving performance to improving the appearance of performance.

Whilst Retail provides one of the most visual examples of this phenomenon, versions of it exist almost everywhere. Presentations are polished for board meetings. Reports are adjusted for governance reviews. Teams prepare for inspections or senior leader visits. Sites prepare for audits. Organisations rehearse success for the people they believe matter most.

I have often thought about the old joke that the late Queen believed everywhere smelled of fresh paint because every building she visited had been repainted before she arrived. Businesses create similar conditions for their senior leaders. Over time, people stop showing reality and start showing the version of reality they believe leadership wants to see.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to present your best. Pride and standards matter enormously. The threat comes when the performance becomes the operating model, and reality no longer travels upward honestly.

Once organisations begin optimising primarily for visits, inspections or audits, they slowly lose sight of the customer, the colleague and the actual performance those activities were originally designed to serve or improve.

The result is a form of organisational theatre, underpinned by the appearance of control, standards and performance. When in fact, this theatre becomes ever decreasing. Leaders leave reassured because the evidence suggests everything is working. The greatest irony of all, is that the evidence exists precisely because everyone stopped showing what wasn't working.

The site team gets thanked for doing a great job, whilst behind the scenes productivity targets continue to rise. Site hours continue to fall, resources and budgets continue to shrink. All because the evidence suggests everything is working, allowing the organisation to believe it can operate even hotter.

The reality tends to be very different, because customers experience the gap in service, whilst the frontline teams feel the increased operational pressure. Managers become trapped between juggling optics and addressing root causes.

The truly scary thing is that the more successful the theatre becomes, the further senior leadership can stray from reality. Eventually decisions become based on the performative show rather than the operational truth. But reality always wins in the end, because this is ultimately an act of institutionalised self deception.

The strongest organisations strive to assess the real work, not the staged version, regardless of how tempting that may be in the short term. They reward problem solving over optics, truth over presentation and reality over reassurance. Whilst organisational theatre can create the appearance of performance, it will never replace performance itself.