If You Go Away
I didn’t leave them, they left me.
The move had been discussed for some time and eventually a location was chosen. My division of BT was moving to Hemel Hempstead.
Only I didn’t. For reasons I can’t recall now, my little bit of the organisation remained in London (to the relief of me and my mates). And so I found myself having an unusual work pattern. I spent half the week in London, and the other half in Hemel Hempstead (the chosen site was on the hilariously named ‘Doolittle Meadows’ office park, all reference to which was swiftly removed by our mirthless CEO).
I already had a laptop and was a ‘road warrior’, meaning I would hook up to a telephone line and work from anywhere already, so it was pretty easy to base myself at our Head Office of a couple of days. In fact, it was better than that, because I could plug into the network there and have a high speed connection, so I could work effectively.
But that wasn’t what I did there. On a typical day I would have several meetings (I ran number of projects) but in between I would wander around and say hello to people. It was partly a way of seeing my friends who relocated there but it was also quick way to catch up on the status of projects. And most importantly, to find out the gossip.
What I found, quite unintentionally, was that it was a great way to build and deepen relationships in a way that I never did when we were all based in London. It was also welcome socialising as my days in London were mostly on focus work (and there weren’t that many people to talk to!).
Addiotionally, it meant I had my ‘ear to the ground’ and was very well informed about what was going on in the organisation.
As a Product Manager, I worked with all parts of the organisation and the awareness and relationships I was building in this way made me much more effective.
Counter-intuitively, being at a separate location made me more connected with my colleagues than when we were all based in the London office and, theoretically, it was easier to connect. (This is one reason why I am sceptical about the ‘proximity’ argument for a ‘return to the office’. That and the fact that the research dates from the 1960s)
When I was in the Hemel office, I felt I had the time and the licence to go and connect with people. To some, it would have looked like I was just killing time between my meetings but actually it was some of most valuable work I did.
Because building relationships IS the most valuable work you can do.
Relationships are what power organisations. They are the mycelium that hold the people together, the hidden pathways for trust, information and connection that enable things to happen.
Reach Out I’ll Be There
I think this change in my behaviour was due, in part, to being in a different environment than my usual office. Back in London, I felt the pressure to be ‘producing’, to be at my desk cranking stuff out. In the other office, although I COULD find a desk and hook into the network, no-one would notice if I did or not. I didn’t feel I had to look busy, or be in any particular place. No-one was looking for me, I could do what I wanted and go largely unnoticed.
So I chose to spend my time connecting with people and developing those relationships. I got closer to people I had known in London because I actually spend more quality time with them when I went to Hemel. I wasn’t going to see them about something to do with work, I was going to see THEM, as a person. So even though I saw them less frequently, our connection became stronger.
But what chance do people have to do this in today’s work environment? The pressure I felt back then to ‘look busy’ has only intensified since then. As Product Manager for BT’s email services, I had to wade through an unusually full inbox (back then) but that has become the norm for everyone today, along with multiple other message streams.
Everything is part of process which must be followed, measured and reported on. A large part of the everyday workload consists of meeting the needs of the bureaucracy, an endless treadmill of work to ‘feed the machine’. A machine which is running ever faster, served by a pool of people that is continually being cut back. Overwork is the norm for people in corporate life today, as the job eats up more and more of their lives.
People barely have time for their personal relationships, let alone those at work, which are reduced to the merely transactional. The cogs engage but only mechanically. Quite often they don’t even mesh properly, if at all.
And so the mycelium withers and dies and people become disconnected and isolated, whilst the organisation struggles to function. The absence of relationships that bind the people together makes the work harder to do and it takes more effort to achieve the outcomes. So overwork increases, there’s even less space and time for relationships, and the cycle of decline continues.
And without the mycellium, the people wither and die as well. Spiritually and literally.
(Hat-tip to Richard Merrick and his Outside The Walls substack, which I totally stole the mycelium analogy from)
Greased Lightening
I think there needs to be a radical rethink about how we structure work and organisations. Despite my scepticism about AI (it definitely will not live up to the current hype), it does offer the opportunity to remove a lot of the drudgery and low-value labour that people have to endure at work today. That could be used to free up time for people to invest in building relationships, connecting, bringing more humanity into their work. It could free up time for people to do more creative work, to really collaborate, experiment, innovate. To invest in learning and development, to work on realising their potential. That’s an amazing opportunity for us to rethink work. To decrapify it, even.
That’s not what business sees as the opportunity that AI offers, however.
They see it as a way to cut the number of people they need, to make the machine more ‘efficient’, to generate more profit for shareholders. To chase the same goals, hoping to outrun the the inevitable consequence of the diminishing returns by making the machine go faster.
Our ‘business leaders’ are like a bunch of testosterone-soaked young bucks sticking a turbo-charger and go-faster stripes on their clapped-out Toyota Yaris and tooling around like they are driving a Ferrari.
And then turning up the expensively-installed sound system (worth more than the car) to drown out that horrible knocking sound the says the engine is about the blow up.
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Better Together
I think AI will free up some resource, so what will happen to it? Some will be turned into profits but the most likely outcome is that it will be absorbed by bureaucracy. AI will itself require some bureaucracy to control it and manage its outcomes (especially the unintentional ones), whilst the rest of the bureaucracy will gorge upon the capacity that’s been released.
This has been the pattern of previous waves of ‘innovation’. Each one promises to reduce the bureaucratic burden but we seem to end up with even more work to do. The new technology enables new possibilities, which people cannot resist exploring and developing. This creates more complexity and complexity drives more bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is extremely effective at absorbing free resource and will thwart the efforts of even the most ruthless CEO to push the fruits of AI (if and when they ripen) into profits.
If organisations really wanted to be more efficient - and more importantly, more effective - they would ruthlessly set about reducing bureaucracy. That would be a far better investment, delivering much quicker returns, than AI. However, that would require a radical change to the way we think about work and organisations.
The approach I think offers most potential is to create a network of self-organising teams within an organisational eco-system that operates on a set of principles that enable self-balancing and self-correction. Removing the need for alignment and co-ordination across the organisation would massively reduce bureaucracy and inward-focus. It would also be a huge relief to employees who are currently sand-bagged by these needs.
Haier’s ‘RenDanHeyi’ philosophy and its platform-based networked enterprise model offer some pointers to possible solutions - although their focus on entrepreneurialism and ‘everyone can be a CEO’ is both limiting and may have some unwanted consequences, so should not be universally applied. It’s in the right ballpark, though. [See this article from Corporate Rebels on Haier’s evolution for more detail].
Each organisation will need to develop its own model, to make its own path, however. This will not be easy for many. They could do worse than to start by attacking the bureaucratic overhead and free people up to do some experiments, have some happy accidents and stumble across new realisations. Change allows the opportunity for new experiences and new learnings, if you allow and equip your people to approach it that way.
That is, in fact, leadership, according to Peter Senge’s definition of it as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. “Leaders” need to create the conditions for it to happen and then step back and let the community get on with it.
This seems to me to be the antihesis of what most “Leaders” see as their role. It’s the opposite of ‘command and control’. So I’m not expecting it to happen anytime soon as the norm and that’s why I think a lot of organisations are going to have a near-death experience before they change. Or be replaced by newer enterprises.
But there are always pockets of change, both at organisational and individual level. If you can shake loose of the shackles of micro-management and the oppression of ‘busyness’ and process, as I was lucky enough to do, you can run your own experiments.
What I accidentally discovered didn’t really change my organisation. It made me more effective, which had some benefits, but that wasn’t the main impact. What was most important was that it made my experience of work much more joyful, human and rewarding. Splitting my week across the two locations in this way was probably my most productive and enjoyable period in that division, despite it being a rather toxic and eventually damaging environment overall.
Relationships are the most important things in your work, for you personally and professionally. A little bit of humanity goes a long way, and we haven’t got nearly enough of it in today’s workplace.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or any other topic I have rambled on about. I’m interested to hear about your experience in Corporate Fantasyland and what your challenges are (especially if they are about making good trouble or getting the hell out!). Maybe I can help you figure out what to do next.
So get in touch, I’d love to hear from you
Book a call on my Calendly page
Email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com
Steal away - love the context you've used it in. Interesting to note "noises off" right now - Cory Doctorow (https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer) today. I think I'll perhaps note and curate....
what matters is what you write avout - conversation is at the heart of my own post today, and every post is part of a mycelium out of reach of head office :-)
Go well