Decrapify Work or Die (the one where Jason gets it all wrong)
Stuck at Basecamp
There’s been some furore around a memo that Basecamp Founder Jason Fried sent out, outlining some changes that he and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson are mandating. I think this is because many people, like me, enjoy their books and writings and their unique perspective on work but feel that they have got this wrong and let themselves down.
Some of the things they have decided on seem sensible, stripping out bureaucracy that has crept in over the years. Their whole philosophy is a sort of corporate minimalism, so that makes sense. So they are disbanding the few committees that have slipped in, and they are ditching 360 appraisals.
The ones that seem to grate, however, are
No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account
No more paternalistic benefits, just salary
With both of these they seem to want to remove the company from the context that it operates in. They don’t want conversations about whether the company should be taking a stance on societal, political or economic issues. They don’t just want to be neutral, they just don’t want to have those conversations at all.
And they just want to pay cash because they have no business getting involved in their employees personal lives.
I think they are deeply wrong on both counts. They are trying to stick their heads in the sand.
I believe organisations have a responsibility to be engaged in their surrounding and the lives of their employees and should not only be aware of the context that they operate in but seek to positively influence it. I want to see companies MORE engaged with the socio-political context they operate in, not less.
Fried begins the memo by saying that they treat their company as a product, and this is just another iteration, albeit one that amounts to a ‘full release’.
But companies aren’t products. They are collections of humanity, networks of human beings, they are complex adaptive systems.
They are treating Basecamp like a lego set when it’s more like a chemistry set. And I think they’ll realised that when it blows up in their face.
Even the experts agree
I was struck by this statement by Amy Edmundson and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in their Fast Company article “5 ways organizations can encourage employees to fight back against toxic leadership”
“When individuals give up on institutions, we’re all at enormous risk of falling into a vicious cycle of cynicism and instrumentalism that boils down to taking care of oneself – and letting others do likewise. To care about a larger cause, a purpose, a community, is to be an easy mark. Why take that risk?
Because societies collapse when too many people think this way.”
Hear, hear. That’s why it's not just about decrapifying work. But it's a good place to start.
Self-organising self-organising
At our Reinventing Work Pirate Crew meetup this week, we looked at some the options for self-organising and some of the less successful attempts to implement them. Now, I believe self-organising is an important part of the solution to Decrapify Work, but I think there are a few problems in the approaches we have at the moment.
We’re still looking for ‘Paint-by-Numbers’ solutions and stuck in the belief that we need some management consultants to come and implement a ‘system’ that worked somewhere else for someone else. So we end up with a shopping list of options, like Holocracy, Sociocracy, Teal and the rest of them. All off-the-peg when what we really need is bespoke.
There is an evident contradiction in asking someone to tell you how to self-organise, too.
Straight off the bat, let me say I am not a fan of Holocracy. In fact, I think it’s pretty unworkable and you end up with a different but equally wasteful bureaucracy and a subtler but equally dysfunctional hierarchy. So I don’t think it really counts as a self-organising approach.
Then we have the problem of hero leadership. Many of the examples of self-organising are instigated by a charismatic and visionary (and, paradoxically, humble) leader, and whilst this may have been necessary initially, it’s a constraint on wider adoption.
It seems evident to me that each organisation will have to create its own model of self-organising and, whilst they can obviously learn lessons from others, only they can build something appropriate for the context they operate in.
And it also seems evident to me that self-organising has to arise from within the organisation, not be led from the top. The people in the organisation have to figure it out and continue to adapt and evolve it.
That’s why I think the Pirate approach of breaking some rules and starting with small, bold steps is absolutely the way forward.
I mean, mutiny was one of the earliest forms of self-organising, after all.
It wasn't meant to be like this
This newsletter, I mean (not that it IS a newsletter, of course). It was supposed to be a podcast. And then I thought I’d just share my thoughts every week in a brief email as a way of developing ideas for the podcast. And then it wasn’t really ‘brief’ because I found I had more to say than I thought.
I’m still experimenting with this, working out loud and seeing what emerges. And who knows, I might even get around to doing the podcast (although does the world really need another podcast by an old, middle-class white dude?).
I often advocate experimentation and play yet it has taken me some time to get around to doing it myself. And now I know why - it makes you feel extremely vulnerable. But I’m over that (although I still expect to get corrected by some of my more erudite readers) and it’s fun. I am finding out a lot about what I think and, who knows, some it might even be useful?
So now I’m wondering what else I could experiment with. Perhaps I could go on Tik-Tok! Now, that would really embarrass my family …