Turning Down the Theater:

How Leaders Find Signal in a Noisy World

By Bryan J. Kaus

The thing about noise is this: it's everywhere, and it's killing us softly. Not the good kind of noise the hum of a busy restaurant or the clatter of a productive factory floor. I'm talking about performative theatrics that fill our days, the theater that masquerades as substance, the endless cascade of meetings about meetings about nothing at all.

Here's what I've learned watching smart people make spectacularly bad calls: volume isn't truth, and speed isn't direction. The loudest voice in the room is often the least informed. While everyone is shouting, the quiet signals that actually matter—the ones that tell you what's really happening and what's coming next—get drowned out completely.

When Smart People Miss Everything That Matters

Let me tell you some stories. Not fairy tales about visionary leaders who saw around corners, but true stories about how perfectly intelligent organizations missed signals so obvious that, in retrospect, it's shocking they went unnoticed.

Boeing stumbled on its own assembly line. In June 2025, lawyers summarized the National Transportation Safety Board's findings on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. The door plug that blew out at 16,000 feet had four missing bolts; Boeing had no record of who removed them or who should have reinstalled them. The FAA, meanwhile, was ineffective at addressing what it politely called "repetitive and systemic" non-conformances. The signals were everywhere—missing bolts, broken processes, under-trained workers. The noise was decades of success, stock buybacks, and the comfortable delusion that past performance guaranteed future safety.

Samsung missed the AI memory wave. For years, Samsung dominated memory chips. It spent billions on R&D and enjoyed market dominance. Then generative AI happened, and suddenly everyone needed high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Samsung had under-invested; SK Hynix had not. While Samsung counted its victories, SK Hynix became Nvidia's main supplier and captured roughly 62% of the HBM market. This wasn't a technology problem—Samsung possessed the technology. It was a listening problem: the weak signal was a fundamental shift in the type of memory the future would demand, drowned out by the noise of its own success story.

Meta built a world no one wanted. Mark Zuckerberg decided the future was virtual reality and spent tens of billions to build a metaverse. While Meta was busy creating cartoon avatars, TikTok was siphoning away users and Apple's privacy changes were undermining its ad model. Meta's costs skyrocketed and profits plunged; 11,000 employees lost their jobs. Only when investors demanded answers did the company pivot to efficiency. It was an expensive lesson in focus.

Google waited too long with AI. By late 2022, ChatGPT showed the public how generative AI could change search forever. Google had sophisticated language models that could have dominated, but fear of reputational damage kept them under wraps. Only after Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into Bing did Google declare a "code red" and scramble to catch up. Ironically, the company built on organizing the world's information missed the biggest information revolution since the internet.

Silicon Valley Bank forgot banking 101. The Federal Reserve's review called SVB's collapse "a textbook case of mismanagement." The bank's leaders failed to manage basic interest-rate and liquidity risk, the board didn't oversee senior leadership, and supervisors didn't act decisively. When risk management is treated as a secondary concern, a liquidity shock becomes a crisis.

FTX lacked governance from the start. Court filings show that FTX's management was essentially limited to Sam Bankman-Fried and two inexperienced colleagues. Many FTX entities never held board meetings. Executives commingled customer and corporate funds and moved the firm across jurisdictions to avoid scrutiny. Investors ignored red flags because they loved the founder's narrative. The signal—non-existent governance—was drowned out by hero worship and FOMO.

Southwest's holiday collapse was years in the making. For a decade, Southwest's unions warned that its crew-scheduling software was outdated. The airline cut its tech staff by 27%, and union leaders said it was "one IT router failure away from a complete meltdown." When a winter storm hit in December 2022, more than 15,000 flights were canceled and the airline lost over a billion dollars. Years of internal warnings were ignored in favor of growth targets and cost-cutting mandates.

Peloton confused a fad for a forever trend. During COVID, Peloton couldn't make bikes fast enough. The company scaled up production, hired aggressively, and assumed everyone would exercise at home forever. When gyms reopened, demand plunged. Peloton ended up with warehouses full of bikes and had to borrow $750 million to keep running. Analysts called it a "gross overestimation of post-pandemic demand." The signal—gyms reopening, inventory piling up—was obvious; the noise was wishful thinking masquerading as strategy.

Why We Keep Missing What's Right in Front of Us

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we're not built for the world we've created. UC Irvine's Gloria Mark found that people remain focused on one screen for just about 47 seconds before switching. Recovering from an interruption can take nearly half an hour. A study of knowledge workers found that they toggle between applications and websites roughly 1,200 times per day, losing about four hours each week just getting back on track. That's five weeks of productivity lost every year to context switching.

Microsoft calls the result digital debt—the backlog of emails, meetings, and notifications that grows faster than we can process it. In its Work Trend Index, Microsoft reported that two-thirds of employees say they lack the time and energy for their actual job; these people are 3.5 times more likely to struggle with innovation. Workers spend 57% of their time communicating and 43% creating. We talk about work more than we actually work.

Information overload is only part of the problem. The other part is what Daniel Kahneman calls noise—unwanted variability in judgment. In performance reviews, only about one-quarter of rating differences reflect actual performance; the rest is noise. When decisions swing because someone didn't have coffee or the weather is bad, critical signals vanish in the static.

Building Systems That Actually Work

You can't eliminate noise—it's the price of doing business in a connected world. But you can build systems to cut through it.

Do a weekly noise audit. Each Friday, list the loudest, lowest-value inputs of the week—performative meetings, vanity metrics, hype cycles. Then delete them, delegate them, or sandbox them. Next, identify three quiet indicators that actually matter (customer churn, supplier lead times, early tech adoption) and assign an owner to each.

Practice decision hygiene. For every big bet, begin with independent briefs rather than a single anchoring memo. Add a one-paragraph premortem: "If this fails, what did we over- or under-weight?" Rotate a small red team to challenge assumptions with facts, not opinions.

Tame your calendar. Batch messages, set office hours for Slack, and eliminate redundant tools. Protect a 90-minute focus block every day; your team will mimic your behavior more than your words. Use two dashboards—one for running the business, one for placing strategic bets—and drop metrics that never change decisions.

Assign someone to watch the edges. Pay attention to early customer complaints, competitor hiring patterns, patent filings, and regulatory filings. Create a simple weekly report: What moved? Why might it matter? This is how you catch the next wave before it becomes a headline.

Create a customer truth loop. Call customers across won deals, lost deals, and churned accounts. Ask why decisions were made, not just what happened. Patterns show up in conversations before they show up in data.

Model the behavior you want. Write down two priorities each night and treat everything else as optional. Work in single-task blocks. Replace doomscrolling with primary sources—earnings calls, SEC filings, research. Attention is your scarcest resource; where you direct it, your organization follows.

Balance performance with authenticity. Stagecraft is necessary in a crowded market, but use your platform to amplify truth, not to manufacture it.

The Point Taken

Noise is what happens when we let other people set our agenda. When everyone performs, the quiet truths get lost. The companies above weren't run by fools. They were run by smart people who became distracted, complacent, or seduced by their own narratives. Boeing's quality lapses, Meta's metaverse obsession, SVB's risk blindness, FTX's governance theater, Southwest's technical debt, Peloton's straight-line projections—each shows how easy it is to miss signals that seem obvious in hindsight.

Our digital environment exacerbates the problem. Forty-seven-second attention spans, constant app switching, digital debt, and judgment noise dull even sharp minds. A Focus Operating System—auditing the noise, practicing decision hygiene, taming your calendar, watching the edges, looping customer truth, and modeling focus—is how you fight back. Treat attention as the strategic asset it is. Leaders who can separate signal from noise will see what others miss. In a world that rewards the loudest voice, the clearest vision wins.