For 25 years, I have taught design in a culture that too often rewarded the performance of intelligence over its development. Students learned quickly that a project’s success depended not only on the quality of the thinking, but on how convincingly that thinking could be staged. Time that should have gone toward interpretation, synthesis, and conceptual risk was consumed by formatting, polishing, and aesthetic calibration. They made rational tradeoffs about where to spend their cognition, optimizing for what would read as smart in the room. What often appeared to be rigor was actually the performance of rigor. That pattern did not end in school. It followed many of them into consulting and strategy, where pitch decks and trend decks frequently privileged fluency, style, and visual confidence over the originality of what was actually being said.
