Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.

These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.

Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.

They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.

Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern standards. Buildings seem to grow rather than conform. Homes, shops, and temples express individual identities, sometimes clashing, often improvised, yet always alive. Materials vary. Colors assert themselves. Nothing feels standardized or pre-approved.

And yet, the city works. Yogyakarta stays with me because it reveals something easy to forget: Efficiency and creativity are not opposites. Function does not require uniformity. Reliability does not demand sameness. Creativity is another way of organizing competence.

Decades ago, architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas warned of the rise of what he called the “generic city,” places shaped less by memory or meaning than by efficiency, capital flows, and global standards. These cities are designed to work everywhere and belong nowhere. They are frictionless, interchangeable, and easy to forget.

What Koolhaas observed in urban form has quietly taken hold inside organizations.

Modern management has become extraordinarily good at optimization. Best practices spread. Benchmarks align behavior. Systems scale. Performance improves. Over time, imagination erodes, not because leaders stop valuing creativity but because the systems they build no longer require it.

Every organization must do two things at once. It must maintain itself, ensuring reliability and consistency. It must also grow by experimenting and evolving. Maintenance depends on optimization. Growth depends on deviance. The tension is unavoidable.

Over the past several decades, management has overwhelmingly favored maintenance. Best practices promised defensibility and control. They reduced variance and enabled scale across markets and geographies. They delivered enormous value and reshaped managerial judgment, defining what feels professional, credible, and safe to imagine.

As American cities began to resemble one another, so did organizations. Corporate campuses blurred into one another. Strategy decks echoed the same language. Leadership models converged. Innovation programs replicated familiar forms. The result was not mediocrity, but high competence without distinction.

When best practices became taste

Best practices were meant to be scaffolding, temporary supports to help organizations learn from success and avoid obvious mistakes. Over time, they hardened into something more powerful: taste.

Taste operates beneath awareness. It shapes decisions before analysis begins, defining what feels professional and responsible. In modern organizations, best practices now function less as guidance and more as aesthetic norms, unspoken expectations about how serious organizations are supposed to look, sound, and behave.

You can see this in the world’s most admired firms. Large technology companies may differ in mission and market position, yet their internal grammars converge. Objectives are managed through OKRs. Work is organized into agile squads. Physical environments signal creativity, whether or not creativity is actually occurring.

This convergence is not a crude imitation. It is working as intended. Best practices spread because they perform. As they scale, they flatten differences. Organizational character yields to organizational competence.

Strategy offers another example. Across industries, strategy decks increasingly follow the same choreography: market landscapes, capability maps, transformation roadmaps. Two competitors may enter a boardroom with different logos and nearly identical logic. When problems are framed the same way, solutions converge before anyone recognizes that a choice was made.

This is how the Architects of Banality operate, not through neglect but through fidelity to benchmarks and peer comparison. Collectively, they erase distinction.

Innovation without imagination

Innovation was meant to protect organizations from drift toward sameness. Instead, it has absorbed the logic it was designed to counter.

Across large organizations, innovation is now formalized. Labs, accelerators, hackathons, and venture funds operate through established playbooks. These systems reduce uncertainty and generate incremental progress. They also preserve the assumptions on which the organization already depends.

The result is structured novelty. Ideas move quickly, but within boundaries that feel measurable and defensible. Innovation becomes a managed activity rather than a disruptive force.

Artificial intelligence intensifies this narrowing. Models trained on historical success reward familiar patterns and extend what has already worked. They increase variation without altering the frame. Novelty becomes a refinement of precedent.

This is why convergence persists even among firms that celebrate originality. Organizations may experiment constantly, yet their architectures of experimentation increasingly resemble one another. Innovation has been optimized for predictability.

What disappears is not effort. It is the deviation that cannot be benchmarked. What contracts is not creativity. It is tolerance for ideas that temporarily reduce efficiency in order to discover new assumptions.

Resisting this drift does not require abandoning discipline. It requires deliberately separating exploration from optimization. Leaders must decide where metrics apply and where they do not. They must protect spaces in which performance temporarily declines so imagination can reorganize the system.

Cities endure when they preserve edges. Organizations endure when leaders choose not to smooth them away.

Optimization will always win the meeting. Imagination survives only when someone in authority decides it should.