In most early teams, pretend work does not arrive as obviously useless tasks. It appears as beautifully formatted decks, carefully updated dashboards, and detailed meeting notes that everyone praises and no one uses to make a real decision. Calendars fill up, channels stay lively, and work looks busy from the outside. Yet very little changes for the customer or the health of the company. When a founder pauses long enough to look closely, the uncomfortable truth emerges. This is not a story about lazy or manipulative employees. It is a story about a system that accidentally made performance theater feel safer than real progress.
People do not wake up in the morning hoping to fake value. They respond to what they believe the environment rewards. When roles are fuzzy, success criteria are vague, and leaders pay more attention to activity than to actual outcomes, rational people default to visible effort. They over prepare for meetings. They write documents to prove that they have thought hard about something, rather than to unlock a decision. They join calls just in case their absence will be noticed. In that atmosphere, pretend work is not a personal flaw. It is the safest available strategy.
The roots of pretend work are often found in how founders set things up in the first place. In young companies across Singapore, the Gulf, and North Asia, there is a recurring pattern. Founders insist that they want speed and ownership, but they continue to define success in language that belongs in a school report. They talk about “doing a good job” instead of describing the customer behavior that should change. They demand autonomy, then sit in every important meeting. They praise polished slides more often than they praise a team that quietly ships an experiment and reports back with clear results. The mismatch between what is said and what is rewarded teaches employees to prioritize image over impact.
Over time, this happens through small, almost harmless decisions. A daily standup ritual is copied from a bigger company, without the same clarity of roles or metrics. A new manager introduces corporate style status reports that are heavier than the problems they track. A remote team feels guilty about the lack of face time and compensates with more meetings instead of better agreements. Tools multiply because each new leader brings the system they are used to. Soon, the organization is covered with recurring meetings no one remembers choosing and dashboards no one uses to make trade offs. People start to spend more time explaining their week than designing a better one.
If you ask “why is my team doing pretend work” you will almost always end up blaming individuals. A more useful question is “what have we designed that makes pretend work feel rational”. This change in perspective moves you away from chasing symptoms and toward structural solutions. The long term fix is not to push people harder or to shame them into being more authentic. It is to remove the gap between what the company claims to value and what its systems actually reward. That shift means tightening the link between tasks and outcomes, redefining how visibility works, and clarifying who owns which decisions.
One of the most practical moves is to stop letting work float as disconnected tasks and to create a simple outcome grid instead. For every significant project, define three pieces of information in writing. First, describe the specific customer or user behavior that needs to change. Instead of saying “improve engagement,” say “increase weekly repeat logins from 25 percent to 40 percent in three months.” When the target behavior is clear in this way, pretend work becomes easier to see because anything that does not touch that behavior looks like a distraction. Second, identify the company level metric that links to that behavior. It might be net revenue retention, activated users, or average resolution time. The objective is not to find a perfect metric, but to make visible which projects are directly connected to the health of the business and which are supporting layers. Third, assign a named owner for the outcome, not just for the task list. This person is responsible for asking whether the current plan is still the most direct path to the outcome and for raising a flag when the work drifts into performance. With this outcome grid in place, people gain a clear lens for challenging their own ideas before they slide into activity that only looks productive.
The next important move is to redesign how visibility operates. In cultures shaped by pretend work, visibility usually means a running commentary of activity. People report how many calls they attended, how many slides they produced, or how many stakeholders they consulted. Leaders react to volume by default, because volume is easier to see than impact. To change this dynamic, shift the emphasis from activity to learning and impact. Replace dense, daily check ins with a lighter weekly narrative update. Ask every owner to report three simple things. What changed for the customer or for the metric they are accountable for. What experiment or action likely led to that change. What they are stopping because it did not work.
This seemingly small redesign has a powerful compound effect. It trains people to think in cause and effect terms, instead of seeing their week as a long list of disconnected duties. It normalizes the idea that stopping unproductive work is itself a valuable contribution. The sentence “we tried this, it did not move the needle, so we are dropping it” becomes a sign of maturity rather than failure. In many teams, especially in environments where face saving is important, this will feel uncomfortable at first. Some people will decorate their updates with unnecessary detail in order to prove effort. The leader’s responsibility is to gently redirect attention toward the few lines that actually describe impact and learning, and to quietly ignore the decorative parts. Over several cycles, people learn what truly earns attention.
A third pillar lies in ownership and decision design. Many founders assume that once they hire smart people, ownership will naturally emerge and decisions will flow. In reality, this assumption often produces overlapping responsibilities, slow decisions, and many rounds of performative input from people who are unsure about whether their voice is required. The solution is to design a simple decision ladder and use it consistently. For the recurring types of decisions in your business, decide which are fully owned by an individual, which follow a consult and proceed model, and which demand actual debate and consensus. Write these rules down and bring them into meetings. When everyone understands that a specific product change is tagged as “you decide, inform after” there is less reason to build layers of alignment theater. When a price change is tagged as “you propose, leadership decides by this date,” the energy goes into constructing a sharp proposal instead of chasing endless opinions.
Clear decision rights do not suffocate collaboration. They protect it. They ensure that collaboration is aimed at meaningful choices rather than at vague feelings of involvement. Over the long run, a clean decision architecture becomes one of the strongest protections against pretend work, because it removes the invisible friction that makes performance more attractive than ownership. "Even with good systems in place, people will always watch leaders more than they read documents. Leadership habits either feed or starve pretend work every week. If founders respond with praise to last minute heroics and perfectly polished decks, that is what the company will keep producing, no matter what the values slide says. If they consistently celebrate someone who retires a project that no longer makes sense or who simplifies a process for everyone else, they signal that real progress and simplification matter more than visible strain.
It helps to start with your own calendar. Look at how much of your time is spent in meetings where your presence is mostly symbolic. Question how often you ask for a deck when a one page narrative or a short call would have been enough. Notice the updates you receive and never act on. Each unnecessary request coming from you represents a potential hour of pretend work for someone else. Then, look at your reactions in real conversations. When a team member brings early, messy thinking, do you pounce on flaws or do you help sharpen the question and send them back with a smaller number of clear next steps. When someone admits that a key metric has not moved for three weeks, do you signal disappointment or do you engage with what they have learned and what they will stop doing from now on. Over time, these responses shape the emotional climate around real work and experimentation.
To reduce pretend work in a durable way, the shift cannot rely entirely on one charismatic founder. It must be institutionalized so that it survives leadership changes and growth. That means weaving outcome grids, learning focused visibility, and decision ladders into onboarding, performance reviews, and promotion criteria. New hires should learn from their first week that looking busy is not a currency in this company. They should hear stories about projects that were shut down when they stopped adding value and about people who were recognized for removing complexity, not only for adding new initiatives. Managers should be trained and evaluated on their ability to coach toward outcomes, protect time for deep work, and say no to reporting that does not increase clarity.
As the company expands into new regions, these principles need thoughtful adaptation. In some cultures, challenging a process, even a dysfunctional one, feels socially risky. In others, people may offer opinions freely but feel little responsibility for the outcome. The core remains the same. Protect time for deep, focused work. Tie visibility to customer change and business impact, not to motion. Make ownership and decision rights transparent and stable. When these elements are in place, pretend work loses most of its appeal because it no longer secures status or safety.
A simple test reveals how far you have come. Imagine disappearing from the company for two weeks. Would your team spend more energy updating each other, producing status artifacts, and trying to anticipate what you would want, or would they spend most of their energy moving the few outcomes you have defined together. If the answer is still the first, it is not a sign that you hired the wrong people. It is a sign that the system still makes performance more rewarding than progress. The work ahead is to keep redesigning that system until real work becomes the easiest and safest choice your people can make.
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