Flavio Masson

Founder/Chief Innovation officer at Masson.nyc (est 2003). We create interfaces & the stories they carry.

Countering innovation theater demands ascending levels of critique and possibility.

Countering innovation theater demands ascending levels of critique and possibility.

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The first level recognizes how innovation frameworks become instruments of preservation—linear processes, stage gates, and metrics that perform change while ensuring nothing fundamental shifts. Re-arranging chairs on the upper deck of the Titanic.

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A deeper intervention emerges in confronting Pyrrhic victories: those moments when institutional success consumes the very resources—social, material, psychological—needed for genuine change. This recognition reveals how organizations absorb and redirect transformative efforts to maintain their existing structures, yet also points toward real possibilities for change.

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The most profound shift occurs when we dare to imagine precisely what these structures render "impossible"—consider how even four-year presidential terms are not facts of nature but invented constraints we can reimagine.

Think of chess, not as a metaphor of conflict, but as a map of ascending levels of awareness:

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At first, pieces move according to fixed rules on a predetermined board.

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Then pieces hover suspended, freed from their prescribed paths, revealing their constraints as constructed rather than natural.

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Finally, we reach the realm of art and utopian imagination: who ordained these rules, this board, this arrangement of power? What forms of play become possible when we refuse the given game entirely?