Out Of Time
It’s not been a good week for my blood pressure.
I try to keep across the conversations about hybrid/remote and new ways of working. We’re clearly in a transition period from the office-centric world pre-COVID to something new and probably a much more varied and divergent landscape than we are used to. I have my own views about where we are headed (in case you hadn’t noticed) but I like to hear what the ‘experts’ think.
Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of thinking going on. In fact, the conversation is limited, hackneyed and, well, infuriating.
It started with a webinar from a well-known US business school (I’m not naming names, here, I’m not trying to pick fights. These are just illustrative of a wider trend.) It was a panel discussion about how to create the right culture for hybrid work. The panel consisted of a four guys, 50+ middle-class Americans, three white and one POC but similar academic backgrounds. So, you know, balanced and representative as usual. Two were academics, one from tech and the host was a journalist.
It began OK, they had a survey and shared some of the results. Then they started pontificating on how to adapt to hybrid working and out came the same assumptions, inherent biases, assertions presented as facts and lame suggestions that we hear time and time again from these ‘experts’.
I got so infuriated I posted about it on LinkedIn. But then they carried on and so I started ‘live-tweeting’ it (a surprisingly effective form of anger management, I found out!). You can see my thread here
Look, these are all clever guys, they write articles and books on business and management, they do research and lecture on it. Some of them have even held executive positions, with considerable success. But they haven’t got a clue about the realities of work for most people, the 70% or more who are NOT actively engaged, for whom work is somewhere between ‘Meh!’ and terrible.
Have they sat in a bland office on a bland office park on the outskirts of a bland town doing some bland and tedious ‘work’ day after day? Have they been a step in a workflow, on a bureaucratic production line, without any sight of what is being achieved? Have they been told their opinions and ideas are of no interest to anyone and they should keep their mouth shut and their heads down?
Ok, I’m exaggerating to make my point but it’s the daily mundanity of many people’s working lives that is the problem here and you need to be able to put yourself in the place of the majority to have any real insights. Simply repeating the false narratives of senior management and parroting the implicit assumptions that underpin them is not helping anyone, other than sustaining the delusions of those at the top.
Look, I’m not saying I’m a paragon of virtue here, I’m also guilty of this to some degree. My experiences are from decades ago. I don’t have nearly enough conversations with people in the lower levels of organisations (if you are one of those and you’d like to help me change that, get in touch for a chat). However, I’m not presenting myself as an expert, I’m just a bloke who asks questions and challenges assumptions and tries to find out where the theory actually connects with reality.
This lot wouldn’t know reality if it punched them in the face.
Listen To The Man
So for some light relief, I decided to listen to a podcast on the way back from Write Club.
You know those people on the tube who sit there angrily shouting at no-one in particular? You probably think they’re drunk or a bit mad but they just MIGHT be listening to a really annoying podcast.
Here was another expert, an ‘influencer and thought leader’ who has just written a book. White, middle-class, middle-aged, male … you get the picture.
Again, I’m not going to name names, I’m not picking a fight, I’m illustrating a point.
He had some opinions about the future of work that I didn’t agree with. That’s OK, we can have dialogue, we can create knowledge and wisdom from that. What really annoyed me was his assumptions, which were largely unstated.
Assumptions about how innovation works. About what makes collaboration happen. About what attendance at the office signifies.
But what really annoyed me was that he thought the lessons he drew from his experience could be generalised. That his ‘sample of one’ applies to everyone, represents some kind of universal truth.
What is it with these guys? They invariably come from an industry which is distinctly atypical in the way it operates. Like Investment Banking, Newspapers or Advertising agencies (I’m referring to specific people who have made these sorts of public pronouncements here). Their experience is from 20, 30, 40 years ago. Their peer group those who had similar experience to them, is a vanishingly small percentage of the ‘white collar’ workforce and will contain almost no-one under the age of 30 and yet they think their experience is relevant to EVERYONE, FOREVER!!!
It’s not just their opinion, it’s an irrefutable truth, a law of nature, the way the world is ordered, right?
Only it’s not.
It’s just the braying of another over-confident man who can’t see beyond the end of his own nose.
Enough already. It’s time for them to shut up and listen, and give my blood pressure a break.
(If you think I have just described myself then you are welcome to tell me - I promise to listen!)
Careless Whisper
It’s possible that some of this is these ‘experts’ telling their audience what they want to hear. The C-suites and senior managers who want to hear that life is going to back to something like how it was before, who want to be re-assured that they can control the future again and that their positions are secure.
We know there is a massive disconnect between the guys at the top and the rest of the employees. The bosses mostly want everyone back in the office, the workers mostly want to carry on working remotely for some of the time. Hybrid is something of an uneasy truce between these two positions.
Bosses fear that a remote-first organisation will undermine their role and threaten their position. They fear they won’t be able to adapt, that they will be made functionally redundant (followed by the real thing). They are facing an existential crisis, especially if they over-identify with their role and status. They are terrified.
So maybe this stuff is just a comfort blanket being offered in the hope of getting nice consultancy contracts. These guys are just mopping the fevered brows of their clients, whispering soothing words in their ears and telling them it’s all going to be alright in the morning. Just sign this contract and I’ll make the monsters go away.
That is basically the MO of the big consultancies, after all. The problem is it’s not true. It’s another business fairy story. Reality cannot be denied for ever, and if you don’t acknowledge it and face up to it, when it makes its presence felt it will be extremely painful, possibly fatal.
Accidents Will Happen
One of the assertions that is frequently made is that we need to be in-person for innovation to happen, we need the serendipitous collisions in the corridor, we need the ‘water-cooler moments’. This is a big justification for getting people back in the office.
I say it’s an assertion because I haven’t heard any organisation who has evidenced it. I wonder how many of them can actually describe how innovation works in their organisation, or point to innovations that have come about in this way, or who even track these things.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen that way but I am questioning how important it is. It’s an approach that is based on chance, on happy accidents, and I question whether that is an effective approach. It’s certainly not efficient or predictable, which seem to have been the driving forces behind most organisational development over the past few decades.
Steve Jobs put great store by these ‘happy accidents’ and designsed the Pixar building to maximise serendipitous meetings but most organisations are not engaged in the highly-creative and challenging exercise of making animated movies. And that was 20 years ago and the world has turned…
If organisations are so interested in innovation then I question why they don’t address the many things they do that inhibit creativity and innovation. Like fear-driven cultures, micro-management and surveillance, top-down decision making, excessive workloads, lack of trust and praise, unnecessary bureaucracy and heavy pressure to conform to arbitrary norms.
In fact, a lot of innovation happens by accident, in unlikely and unpromising circumstances. Post-It notes are the result of an attempt to create a super-strong glue. Viagra was a failed angina drug. Britain’s RADAR system, critical to winning the Battle of Britain, was invented in a couple sheds on an isolated part of coast with the most rudimentary facilities. Text messaging was created as a channel for engineering messages.
A friend of mine runs a programme to teach innovation to students. It’s a structured, repeatable approach (how many organisations have one of those?). When COVID hit, they had to move the course from in-person classroom-based to completely online. Not only did it work well, they attracted a much more diverse cohort and the quality of the innovations was the highest ever.
I suggest the assumption that having people meeting in offices is necessary for innovation to happen is unproven. In fact, I could put together a strong argument that going to an office every day inhibits it.
That’s just one assumption. We have internalised this and many others but we need to identify them, question them, challenge their validity and relevance. I don’t blame people for holding them, I do criticise them for not examining them.
And if you think I’m doing the same, call me out. I’d love to have a conversation about it. That’s how we all learn
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