LUC & THE MACHINE

Performers, Not Practitioners: The Rise of Strategic Incompetence

Luc and the Machine

How a culture of performance, ego, and algorithmic opacity is turning sustainability, and many other endeavours into theater.

✦ The Architecture of Acceptable Failure ✦

 

At every link in the chain — from carbon accounting to Net Zero, from science-based targets to voluntary nature-positive commitments — a quiet force ensures that the truth never fully arrives. That force is planned incompetency: the deliberate dilution of critical thinking, depth, and discernment across a sector that promises precision but relies on vagueness to function.

This isn’t about a few bad actors. It’s a system designed to keep everyone just competent enough to comply — and just incompetent enough to never question the foundations. It is a choir of half-knowledge, each voice echoing the next.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some professionals do resist the tide. Some teams operate with deep integrity. But they often do so in spite of the system — not because of it.

✦ The Illusion of Lofty Goals ✦

 

Companies are encouraged to set “ambitious” sustainability targets:

  • Net Zero by 2030
  • Forest-Positive Supply Chains
  • Nature-Positive Business Models
  • Ocean-Positive Commitments
  • Science-Based Targets
  • Regenerative Agriculture

 

But they do so while knowing — consciously or not — that some concepts lack a universally accepted definition, carbon accounting is flawed, some concepts cannot truly be measured or implemented,  the independent third-party verification is surface-level, and the reporting is optimized for optics, not accuracy. If competence were present at every level, the fraud would be obvious. So it isn’t.

When confronted with the structural failures of systems, many people retreat into a familiar defense: “It’s better to do something than nothing.”

But this mantra, repeated like a moral shield, too often serves as an excuse for avoiding the harder truth: that much of what we’re doing is not just imperfect — it is incoherent, ineffective, or actively counterproductive.

 

Striking water with a sword does not move the river.
Running in circles does not map the terrain.

 

Real change doesn’t come from frantic gestures. It comes from those willing to pause, to interrogate, and to rebuild from the roots. That kind of work doesn’t virtue signal. It threatens the very structures that protect mediocrity.

 

✦ The Chain of Distributed Ignorance ✦

 

Here’s how the incompetence distributes itself:

  • The CEO believes the target because it sounds visionary.
  • The Chief Sustainability Officer has never read the IPCC guidelines in full.
  • The Director of ESG doesn’t understand scope 3 emissions or what “additionality” means.
  • The consultants rely on spend-based emissions factors and unverifiable multipliers.
  • The verifiers check for formatting, not accuracy.
  • The regulators are underfunded, understaffed, or under pressure.

 

And the public? The public sees a glossy PDF with a leaf in the corner and a Net Zero claim by 2035. Job well done.

This isn’t a failure of one person. It’s systemic harmony — a collective performance that sustains the illusion of action. We call it “greenwashing” when the illusion leaks. But greenwashing is not the problem.

It is the symptom of a far deeper disease: planned incompetency as policy.

✦ Planned Incompetency Requires Broken People ✦

 

To sustain this grand illusion, you don’t just need weak systems — you need people who lack the discernment to see through it, the character to resist it, and the humility to question it.

And we live in the perfect era for this. The age of social media has trained an entire class of professionals to believe they are brilliant, unique, righteous, and deserving — often with very little substance behind it.

YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok — they manufacture entitlement at scale. People perform competence. They rehearse importance. And they believe their own hype. The system rewards this behavior with likes, inflated job titles, and speaking opportunities on ESG panels.

There are more sustainability conferences than trees planted — and most of those trees are in PowerPoint slides.

Self-awareness is not required. In fact, it's a liability. Humility doesn't trend. The culture has become a narcissism engine — and the sustainability world has not escaped it. It feeds off it.

Many who perpetrate the performance aren’t villains. They’re afraid, overworked, undertrained, or trying to survive. But systems that thrive on confusion don’t care about intention — only output.

Incompetency, crucially, can emerge in different ways. First, it can arise when someone is undertrained or ignorant of best practices. Second, and more subtly, it can appear when best practices themselves are poorly defined, open to interpretation, or entirely absent. In these cases, even a well-trained professional following established norms may still perpetuate ineffective or harmful outcomes. Competence becomes a moving target.

Overcoming this form of incompetency requires rare qualities: the ability to perceive the gap between surface compliance and deeper integrity, and the courage to act on that perception. This means questioning frameworks, creating new standards, and pushing against institutional inertia. It requires organizations willing to listen — and individuals willing to speak.

These conditions are rare, but they are not impossible.

✦ Fake It ‘Til You Break It ✦

 

“Fake it till you make it” has become the operating system of modern sustainability professionals. You don’t need to understand carbon markets or ecological thresholds — you just need to say things like:

“We’re embedding scope 3 decarbonization pathways into our cross-sectoral ESG-aligned impact strategy.”

That sentence means nothing. But it sounds like everything. And that’s all that matters.

What organizations want is not depth, but representation. They don’t need someone who understands carbon permanence — they need someone who can sit in the “Carbon Manager” chair.

A body in a blazer. A LinkedIn profile. A PowerPoint. That’s the job.

✦ The System Doesn’t Tolerate Narcissism — It Requires It ✦

 

The real trick of planned incompetency is that it feeds off people who believe they’re doing good. If you can convince someone they’re saving the planet while rubber-stamping lies, they become an evangelist for the lie.

Narcissists are perfect for this:

  • They are immune to feedback.
  • They weaponize self-righteousness.
  • They deflect criticism by framing it as “negativity.”
  • They genuinely believe they are the heroes of the story.

 

These are not just personality quirks. These are traits cultivated by the system to ensure that no one digs too deep. No one runs the numbers. No one challenges the premise.

The competent are dangerous — because they see the rift between ambition and reality. So they are excluded, demoted, silenced, or replaced.

✦ The Collapse of Character as a Systemic Feature ✦

 

Planned incompetency is only possible in a society where character collapse has been normalized. The inability to say “I don’t know” has become a badge of leadership. The inability to admit fault has become a requirement for promotion. And performance has replaced substance at every level of professional life.

The result? A sustainability sector filled with:

  • Performers instead of practitioners
  • Posers instead of protectors
  • Executives who don’t understand the terms they promote
  • Verifiers who barely verify
  • Stakeholders who collude through shared ignorance

 

And once in a while, when the illusion fails and someone notices, it’s labeled “greenwashing” — as if that word could contain the full rot underneath.

✦ A Note on the Bigger Pattern ✦

 

While this essay focuses on sustainability, this is not just a sustainability problem. Planned incompetency is a civilizational design pattern — visible across every major sector where institutions rely more on performance than integrity.

We see it in:

  • Healthcare — where protocols are optimized for pharmaceutical sales over healing, and entire generations of doctors are trained to manage rather than cure.
  • Education — where learning is replaced with credentials, and critical thinking is suffocated by bureaucracy and branding.
  • Government — where policies are drafted by lobbyists, signed by politicians who haven’t read them, and executed by departments stripped of capacity.
  • Technology and AI — where products are launched without understanding their consequences, and algorithms rule decisions no one can explain.
  • Finance — where ESG funds greenwash investments, and risk models are black-boxed behind proprietary software.
  • Media — where stories are churned for engagement, not depth, and journalists become stenographers for PR machines.
  • Corporate HR — where culture decks replace culture, and “leadership” is a euphemism for role occupancy.
  • Academia — where research is shaped by funding outcomes, and publishing is a treadmill of quantity over truth.
  • Spirituality and Wellness — where healing is monetized, initiation is skipped, and everyone becomes a self-certified expert.
  • Law and Compliance — where rules exist for show, not enforcement, and ethics becomes a checkbox exercise.

 

We no longer reward wisdom — we reward presentation.
We no longer cultivate mastery — we simulate it.

Everywhere you look, brilliant people are buried, posers are elevated, and systems are staffed by those who cannot — and must not — see the whole picture.

The sustainability sector is simply the clearest mirror. But the reflection belongs to us all.

✦ The Future Is Not Inevitable — But It May Be Worse ✦

 

Some may read this as a cynical view — as if we’re condemning the whole field, the whole world, or the entire species. But that’s not the spirit behind these words. There is still a chance, however slim, that humanity could see clearly, course correct, and rebuild a sustainability profession rooted in truth, humility, and character.

But we must also name the darker possibility.

The system may not reform. It may deepen.
Planned incompetency may not be exposed. It may be perfected.

Why?

Because we are entering an era where transparency is being replaced by technology. Where the already-limited ability to examine a spreadsheet and reverse-engineer formulas is giving way to opaque, black-box systems — algorithms, proprietary software, machine learning models, and artificial intelligence tools that promise insight but deliver faith-based governance.

Once sustainability data pipelines, emission factors, and carbon accounting logic are encoded inside AI-assisted dashboards — systems no one fully understands — we will lose even the illusion of oversight.

Incompetency will no longer be a human trait. It will be baked into the code.

And no one will know.

  • A model will estimate your forest’s carbon sequestration.
  • A neural network will approve your offset eligibility.
  • An AI assistant will generate your annual ESG disclosure.

 

And if the foundation is flawed? If the model is trained on biased data? If the algorithm has been gamed to favor greenwashed results?

You’ll never see it.

We will be navigating a world of trust me systems — tools that demand faith in processes that are invisible, unchallengeable, and often unaccountable.

The age of digital sustainability is not inherently bad. But without deep integrity — without radical competence at the level of inputs, design, and ethical calibration — it risks becoming a cathedral of lies cloaked in code.

The question is not whether AI will run sustainability.
The question is: Whose values will it encode?
And who will be brave enough to challenge its outputs?

Because if we do not fight for clarity now, we may awaken one day in a world where planned incompetency is no longer just tolerated — it is automated.

✦ Not a Conspiracy — A Culture ✦

 

Some may wonder: is this all just a cynical overreach? Is it really possible that entire systems would be built on incompetence?

The answer is both simpler and more unsettling: this isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a pattern.

No secret meetings were needed. No grand orchestration. Just a slow accumulation of incentives — nudging decisions, one by one, toward convenience over clarity, performance over substance, self-image over truth.

Over time, those incentives become architecture.

When institutions reward optics instead of understanding, charisma instead of mastery, certainty instead of discernment — a certain type of person rises. A certain type of culture forms. A certain blindness spreads.

And that blindness becomes normal.

This isn’t about imperfection. All systems are imperfect.

This is about structural failure that persists because it’s profitable, comfortable, or branded as “best practice.”

It’s not that no one notices.
It’s that noticing comes with consequences, and so most people learn to look away.

✦ This Is Not a Call to Reform ✦

 

This is a call to remember that sustainability was once about reverence. About care. About responsibility to something greater than profit, performance, or personal brand.

If we are to restore meaning to this work, we must go further than reform.
We must rebuild the soul of the profession.

That begins with character.
That begins with humility.
That begins with you.

 

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