A shock to the system

Work is (un)dead. Our predominant organizational system at work is broken. Knowledge work organizations are overworked and understaffed. The value flow is blocked while expectations are higher than ever. We are hustling non-stop but it’s never enough. Our work life is fibrillating: It is going way too fast without achieving much.

This state eventually created an undead system, not entirely dead but also not really alive. Inhabited by the inevitably resulting demotivated zombie workers, who do as little as possible and just as much as required, these systems are busy with navel-gazing. Burned-out middle managers frantically try to push work through the systems to keep things running. These systems are doomed to fail eventually.

A fibrillating human heart won’t recover by doing CPR but requires an electric shock to reset the heart. Improving the existing, broken system is not going to lead to any meaningful change. Instead, the system needs to be shocked. We must intervene together to overcome the current state and go to a new, improved version, based on shared principles and sound theory.

But before we go there you might wonder: how did we get here in the first place?

BEATING A DEAD HORSE

Back in 1911, Frederick Taylor introduced our current, predominant approach to organizing work called Scientific Management. In it, he separates thinking from doing and promotes the optimization of individual work steps to find the one best way. Since then, this basic concept has been amended, rebranded, and reintroduced countless times all over the world. Fancy names like Mission Command, Management by Objectives (MBO), or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are trying to distract from one difficult-to-accept truth:

We are beating a dead horse.

Based on the same outdated theory, these new incarnations cause countless symptoms of undead work in organizations big and small.

WORK IS UNDEAD

We live in a world where most professional organizations never realize their full value creation potential anymore. Furthermore, they usually barely scratch the surface of their collective human potential. Instead, haunted by the ghost of Frederick Taylor, companies introduce countless ineffective change initiatives that fizzle out miserably. As a result, company culture is deteriorating, long-term employees stop caring eventually and costs are increasing steadily.

Although not fully dead yet, work is definitely not really alive in most organizations either. It is in an undead state, driven further and further away from value creation and collaboration. Standardization, short-sighted quarterly goals, central steering, and cost management have become an end in themselves and ultimately created a dystopian zombie inhabited organization.

This predominant form of professional organization has many undesirable characteristics of which the four most fatal are captured here:

• Inefficient
  • Highly standardized but extremely slow & wasteful
• Unsustainable
  • Driven by basic desires and short term goals
• Inhumane
  • Lifeless, suppressed, artificially steered, isolated
• Expensive
  • High costs but insignificant results

REVIVING WORK

There is no future in social organizations for Command and Control or any other kind of scientific management-based approaches anymore. It’s time to dismount our dead horse and tackle one of humankind’s greatest challenges of the current century: Reviving our work organizations. We need to shock the system, foster organic, humane collaboration, and truly leverage its joint human potential.

A key element in this endeavor is to fully embrace the corresponding, underlying principles, and their accompanying theories. Examples include the Betacodex, Learning Circles, and Open Space Technology. They must serve as the foundation for every organization’s approach to value creation and lasting change.

Finally, the concept that will bring everything together is shared insight: arriving at a conclusion based on a group’s discourse and agreement.

THE DARK SIDE

In every dystopian zombie movie, there are good guys and bad guys, and figuring out who is who is crucial to survival. The same is true in the context of our critical goal to revive work: there are countless books, articles, videos, tools, templates, companies, etc. that may or may not have your best interest at heart. More often than not people will try to sell you old ideas in new packages that either won’t help you or, even worse, actively hurt your progress towards a vibrant work organization. I’m here to help you navigate this jungle of snake oil vendors so you make it to the other side safely.

THE BRIGHT SIDE

“Everything you do is an intervention.” Edgar H. Schein

So how do we accomplish this shift of belief in the world of work from obsolete scientific management theory to the contemporary state-of-the-art theory, principles, and shared insight? The answer is obvious: we need to shock the system with deliberate interventions.

Just as Edgar Schein postulated: everything we do is an intervention. We just need to be deliberate about it and make conscious choices. A widely accepted approach is Alan Deutschman’s “Change or Die” which is based on the following 3 steps:

• Relate
  • Find like-minded people to relate.
• Repeat
  • Make a change and practice repeatedly.
• Reframe
  • Reflect on your situation and how it has changed.

These 3 very basic principles are the foundation for creating incremental and lasting change. Of course, there is more nuance to the practical meaning of these principles that you will find in the book.