Innovation is the hottest word in business and an ideology that reaches ever further into our lives. Not only does innovation-hype fail to deliver, but our obsession with the new distracts us from the work that matters most. Andrew L. Russell calls out the delusion and outlines how we can escape innovation’s path of destruction.

An old air conditioner, poorly installed and maintained, threw out sparks on a warm night in early September 2018. The damage from the fire that ensued would not have been so devastating if the building had a sprinkler system, or fire doors, or fire hoses. But the building had not received its full annual maintenance budget since 2014 and had even closed temporarily in 2015 when it could not afford to pay its cleaning and security staff—people we would today refer to as “essential workers.”

The building that burned was Brazil’s National Museum, located in a modest section of Rio de Janeiro. The National Museum was home to treasures of human civilization, including the oldest human remains found in the Americas, the first recordings of indigenous music, pre-Columbian artwork and textiles, a world-famous collection of crickets and grasshoppers, and a scientific library of nearly 500,000 books, documents, and papers. When the fire engulfed it, on that terrible night in 2018, scientists around the world joined Brazilians in expressions of shock and sadness at the loss of Latin America’s largest collection of natural history and anthropological artifacts.