There is a status deck somewhere in your company that nobody reads. It gets updated every few weeks, shown in a meeting, and forgotten. Your manager knows this too. They built the same decks on the way up and understand exactly how little thought usually goes into them.
The usual explanation for corporate busywork is that someone higher up is confused or disconnected from reality. That's comforting, but mostly wrong. These artifacts survive because they're doing a job, just not the one they claim to do. The status deck isn't primarily an information product; it's an evidence product. Its purpose is to exist on schedule with your team's name attached so that, when someone asks what the team is doing, there's something to point to. The content matters far less than the fact that it exists.
Once you see work as evidence rather than output, a lot of seemingly irrational behavior starts to make sense. Meetings that produce no decisions demonstrate that coordination is happening. Documents nobody implements prove that a problem was considered carefully. These activities are often excellent at producing organizational proof and terrible at producing the outcomes they supposedly serve.
Managers participate for the same reason everyone else does. They're measured on whether their teams appear aligned, organized, and under control. A manager who eliminates a status report because nobody reads it also eliminates the artifact they'll be asked for later. The honest manager becomes the exposed manager. Keeping the deck is often the safer choice.
To be fair, some of this "theater" is genuinely useful. Audit trails matter. Visibility prevents bad decisions. But organizations rarely reward the right amount of coordination. They reward more visible evidence than the team next door. With no incentive to reduce reporting and constant pressure to increase it, useful work and bureaucracy grow together.
That's why "just stop doing busywork" isn't a real solution. Most people agree the deck is unnecessary, yet each individual has a rational reason to keep producing it. The system persists not because people are foolish, but because they're responding sensibly to the incentives around them. The busywork isn't an accident. It's the visible byproduct of an organization rewarding proof of work almost as much as the work itself. So don't judge that much and, maybe, be happy that you have a job at all. Because it's probably made up.