🧹 Fresh Brooms, Dirty Floors

I work for a corporation — a small cog in a big machine, if you will. About eighteen months ago, new leadership came in, and the ripple effects are finally hitting my level.

First, they stripped out all our plug-ins that weren’t on a very short approved list. Then they consolidated accounts and quietly cut access to convenience apps for many of us. Next came mandatory training in cybersecurity, AI, and “quality standards.” After that, new formats for annual reviews, job frameworks, and skill development. Most recently? They announced we all have to migrate to a shared version of Jira with the same tags and statuses, whether it made sense for our teams or not.

Now, to be fair, it’s the right — maybe even the responsibility — of new leadership to make changes. Fresh brooms sweep cleaner, as they say. Does anyone say that? But what worries me is that none of these changes are about speeding delivery. They’re not about improving the product. They’re definitely not about making our work experience or morale better.

So why are we doing all these things?

The details vary, but the answer is the same: they’re targeting the lowest common denominator.

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🔠 Welcome to Mediocrity 101

In case you’ve forgotten, the base definition of the lowest common denominator in math is the smallest number that is a multiple of all denominators in a set of fractions. You can google it if you want more detail on the math side of things.

I’m not a math person, so I’ll tell you how I mean it.

When talking about the lowest common denominator (LCD) in society, culture, politics, technology — whatever — I’m talking about taking whoever knows the least, cares the least, or tries the least and targeting everything based on that person.

For example, let’s say you have people working for you who will fall for any old phishing email, because they can’t be bothered to actually think before they click. Your solution? Target every single employee with mandatory training, despite the fact that it will be a waste of time (and a loss of productivity) for many of them.

Like I said... it’s not about improving morale.

And that’s just one simple example. LCD thinking shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

As mentioned above, in corporations, it’s about controlling damage based on the weakest performer. Policies and frameworks aren’t designed to empower your best people to excel — they’re designed to prevent the worst people from screwing things up for everyone. That means the best work with handcuffs on, not because they need them, but because someone else might.

In culture, it’s our movies, TV shows and video games being sanded smooth until nothing sharp is left. Edges are cut, risks avoided, nuance sacrificed, all in the name of “broadest appeal.” Heaven forbid someone be offended or confused by our content. We can’t possibly create something that won’t make a bajillion dollars. The result? Forgettable, formulaic content that satisfies everyone just enough to keep them watching — and excites no one.

In politics, it’s soundbites instead of solutions and legislation boiled down to slogans. Whole policies are framed by what won’t get the lowest polling numbers rather than what might actually make a difference. Leadership becomes less about leading and more about avoiding being disliked. Or not reelected.

Even technology — especially AI — gets trained this way. Models are tuned to avoid offense, to produce the safest possible answer, even if that answer is dull, vague, or meaningless. They programmed it to lie — just so long as the lie feels helpful.

The more people demand “safe outputs,” the more we drift toward sanitized nothingness.

Because at its core, that’s what lowest common denominator thinking is about — safety. And control. It’s about making sure nothing sticks out, nothing complicates the story, nothing requires too much trust in human judgment.

It’s about making sure the people in charge make as much money as possible while the rest of us do nothing to impede their progress. It’s about everything except excellence.

But there’s a cost we don’t talk about enough. And I think everyone’s finally starting to see it: when you build systems around the weakest link, you’re weakening the whole chain.

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♻️ Hollywood’s Recycle Bin

Let’s narrow our focus to culture, because anyone who works in a corporate environment already gets the business examples. And most of us have heard enough about AI and politics to last a lifetime at this point. Besides, other people are saying it better than I ever can.

Plus, I like culture, and this is my essay. 😏

We’ll start with TV shows and movies.

We’ve all heard (and probably participated) in conversations about how nothing new is being created in Hollywood anymore. We see spin-offs, reboots, remakes and every other kind of recycled idea they can come up with for movies and television.

It’s been true for centuries that there are no new ideas. That’s a pretty commonly accepted reality among content creators. Every plotline can be boiled down to a few basic arcs. It’s the specifics that make a story unique.

But Hollywood is rarely bothering with unique specifics these days, because no one is willing to risk their money on something that isn’t a “sure thing” at the box office. So they pick up yesterday’s hits and either mangle them into something unrecognizable (and often total crap) or they lift them whole and just set them down with new faces.

This is even more true with adaptations from novels, where the showrunners “tweak” stories for the broadest audience by adding material (even when that means cutting some of the original), changing characters in ways that feel like box-checking rather than storytelling, cutting anything that might be deemed risky, and sanding down the sharp edges that gave the story power in the first place. Not every cut or change is bad, but if the end result bears little resemblance to the original work, then why do an adaptation at all?

In the end, the result is rarely anything worth watching.

We’re seeing the same problem with video games now. Creativity isn’t what the game or movie studios are looking for — they want moneymakers that can reuse/reduce/recycle existing ideas and programming with familiar names that already have a fanbase to be exploited.

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🐐 From GOATs to Goofs 👎

I have two video game case studies we can use to make this point.

First, let’s look at Bioware. Bioware was a small studio that created some of the greatest RPGs of all time (in my educated and picky opinion) in the early 2000s — Dragon Age: Origins, and the Mass Effect trilogy. They created story arcs with NPCs that grew over time. Decision trees that had a real impact on the game’s outcome – and on future games in the series. They created worlds that are rich in lore and detail.

Then they were bought by Electronic Arts. Cue the funeral dirge. Their last three major releases were, at least by comparison to their predecessors, complete disasters.

There was Anthem — the MMORPG that couldn’t, and barely tried. It collapsed into Mass Effect: Andromeda, which tried to cash in on the Mass Effect fanbase without details like a strong protagonist, character arcs, or the worldbuilding fans loved from the trilogy. Both flopped financially, critically, and culturally.

More recently, Dragon Age: Veilguard. I could rant about DA:V for an hour, but I’ll spare you… Let me summarize by saying that they focused more on broadening appeal than on developing a detailed storyline or characters.

In all of these cases, the failure seems to have been caused by mandates passed down from the corporate overlords rather than the creators themselves.

But the end result is the same. Games we don’t love.

My second example goes the other direction. Let’s talk about Baldur’s Gate 3. BG1 and BG2 were released in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Fans adored both of them and clamored for more. But BG3 wasn’t released until 2023, because the studio (a small independent called Larian) wanted to be sure they got it right. Spoiler: they did. The game has sold over 15 million copies to date, won more than 14 major awards, been “liked” by over 90% of Google users, and has a rabid fanbase.

Larian didn’t dumb BG3 down. They were inclusive without negatively impacting the character development or plot. They were creating original storylines within an existing world (it’s based on Dungeons & Dragons). In short, BG3 is solid proof that you don’t have to aim for the lowest common denominator to succeed.

We are working our way toward the cultural equivalent of a Darwin Award.

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🕺 No One Wins in This Limbo Game

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, we built for the best — the way Larian did with Baldur’s Gate 3. We created systems and content that assumed people could grow into them, not shrink to fit inside them. Our schools expected rigor. Our jobs expected judgment. Our stories expected attention and imagination.

Our world expected us to rise to meet it.

When you build for the best, you give people something to aspire to. You raise the bar, and even if not everyone clears it, the striving changes them. They grow.

Now? We build for the least. For the weakest clicker, the laziest viewer, the most fragile ego. We flatten, simplify, dumb down — not to help people rise, but to make sure no one ever feels left out or left behind.

And in the process, we make sure nothing rises at all.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being lumped in with the lowest common denominator. So what do we do about it?

I say we stop settling. Stop rewarding the safe choice. Demand better. From studios. From leaders. From companies.

From ourselves.