The Long and Winding Road

Some time ago I came up with the concept of a ‘fluid’ career. It’s the idea that during the course of your working life, you move back and forth between different states of employment - the corporate gig with a salary, working as a contractor, being a consultant, freelancing, being in a start-up, running your own business, being in education (there are probably more options but these are the main ones). The point of the fluidity is that you move between these states continuously, particularly in and out of permanent employment. (Generally, once you’ve left permanent employment for a period, it’s hard to get back in without a considerable drop in position or having to start again. Just ask any Mum returning to the workplace.)

I’m not claiming it’s a particularly original idea, and some people already have careers like this. However, they are the exception and my point is that we need to make this the norm. The few who are able to be fluid in this way right now have a number of advantages (some earned, some not) but for the rest for most of us it’s a path that is fraught with difficulties.

These fall into three areas. How society is set up, the biases of employers and our own mental models.

Our societies and economies are set up on with the assumption of the traditional career paths. People have jobs that provide a regular income, or they run their own businesses (this binary is baked into tax and other government functions). If we look at people in managerial and professional roles, it is assumed they work continuously from entering the workplace (probably in their early twenties) until retirement and that they have steady or rising income over most of that period. Taxes, pensions and benefits are designed around this profile, as is the economy in terms of macro-economic policies. It is not designed to deal with discontinuities, fluctuations in income, periods of return to study and so on.

That’s not to say that there are no allowances to deal with these but that they have been bolted on and are meant to deal with exceptions, with the minority. However, as we have seen increasingly over the past few decades, these are becoming more common experiences for everyone. The limitations of these allowances are becoming apparent and are why more people feel the system is failing them, and that the system itself is heading for collapse (looming pensions crisis, anyone? No apparently not, it’s much easier to kick that can down the road. Along with the ageing population, rising health and care demands, declining working population and tax take, skills and training deficit, NEETS and so on.)

Secondly, employers still hire on the basis of compliance with the old career model. They now do a forensic analysis of CVs to detect any breaks in employment, which they will interrogate you about and probably view unfavourably. They look dimly on sideways movements, assuming they reflect a lack of focus, ambition or ability on your part. Career breaks, periods of study (unless these are adding to your credentials for your current career path) and changes in career direction are all likely to raise doubts in their mind. None of this is official policy but these biases may mean you are screened out in the evaluation process (probably by an AI trained on previous hiring practice), be negatively influencing the hiring manager and other interviewers, or rule you out of internal development programmes.

And lastly, the traditional model of the career path is imprinted on all of us, an unconscious norm that we feel we have to comply with. It has the advantage of being simple and seemingly predictable. We choose a career, get the necessary qualifications, start working in that field and progress over time until we retire with a comfortable pension. Our parents have modelled this for us, we see many others have trodden this path and we are told it’s why we need to study and work hard. We still believe in this even though the evidence of our own eyes tells us it’s a mirage, or at best an opportunity that is rapidly disappearing.

A ‘fluid’ career, on the other hand, is a leap into the unknown. By definition, we don’t know where it will lead, or what it will contain. We can tell ourselves it will allow us to be ourselves, follow our passion and find our true purpose (these may be valid or turnout to be illusions, I couldn’t comment. Well, not in less than 2000 words…) but they will not deliver us the stability that we have traditionally sought to build our lives upon. Living your purpose may be great but it won’t help you get a mortgage, provide the environment to raise a family, or help you save for a pension. As my dear old Dad used to say, “If they don’t accept it at Barclays, it’s not much use”.

Those of us who went into corporate careers accepted that there was something of a trade-off between the freedom to do what we truly wanted and the stability of a regular income and benefits that a corporate gig offered. We knew we’d have to accept restrictions on ourselves, do things we didn’t enjoy or want to do and fit into the corporate machine. However, that was a trade-off that we made because it was a good one and because the other party, our employer, acknowledged it too and made sure it was a fair one. At least, this was true in the 1980s when I started in corporate.

Since then, however, the trade-off has got worse because employers have made it worse. They have reneged on their side of the deal, salami-slicing away the benefits offered whilst simultaneously increasing demands for compliance and work. They have made the corporate role more precarious and unpredictable, whilst technology and organisational change has made it less likely that you will be able to work in the same area throughout your career, or stay in employment until your pension.

So now many of us end up having ‘fluid’ careers by default. Only they are not very fluid but more discontinuous chunks of activity that impoverish us financially, emotionally and intellectually, undermining our life and our mental health. In my case, a 20+ year corporate career followed a long period of flailing around trying to re-invent myself without much success, which is not an uncommon tale.

Gen Z have got this figured out. They are preparing for fluid careers, both mentally and practically. However, this seems to mean giving up on what many of would consider the basics of a good life - buying a home, having a family, building financial security - which can’t be a good thing for them or for society in the future. In fact, it’s a stark measure of societal failure.

We need to change how we think about careers and make adjustments to our tax and benefit systems and our social support structures to enable more fluidity in people’s careers. Employers need to shift their attitudes about career paths and individual life choices. And we need to think differently about work and how it shapes and fits into our lives.

Otherwise, the world of work will continue to fail people on a greater and greater scale until those who have a long and stable career will be the exceptions and the rest will be struggling to make sense of it all. That’s not a path to healthier society or economy, or greater thriving. It’s a road to nowhere.

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All By Myself

Well, that turned into a longer peregrination than I intended, so I’ll just cover one other issue this week - workplace isolation.

This always strikes me as a surprising and anomalous problem. After all, work is where we gather with other people to, well, work. Yet it has been a growing problem for some time now. That was before we went through COVID and lockdowns and the rise of Working from Home (WfH).

I have addressed this before, citing a variety of causes:

• increased workloads that have squeezed out time for socialising

• Technology disintermediating us, with one-to-one conversations being replaced with a message or an update to a project app.

• People being tied to their desks, where their workload arrives digitally, reducing the opportunity for serendipitous conversation

• Removal of communal spaces such as staff restaurants and lounges as a cost-reduction measure

• Surveillance and tracking of employee activity and KPIs based on online presence

• A focus on efficiency, which deems unstructured conversations (i.e. chats) as time-wasting and so to be discouraged

• Distributed teams that means people are not working with the people in their immediate vicinity

All these are things have made it less likely that people will strike up relationships with work colleagues, and so they feel less connected to the people around them, and consequently have a lower sense of belonging. It’s easy see that in the extreme, this could lead to workplace isolation, where someone hardly ever interacts with anyone but just sits in front of their screen processing the workflow continuously served up to them. It’s not hard to see the damaging effect that will have on someone.

Well, the good news is … no, there isn’t any. This is a problem that is getting worse.

It is clear that whilst WfH is great in terms of autonomy and work/life balance on the whole, for some it leads to isolation and a lack of personal interactions and that is negatively impacting their mental health. It’s not just speaking to people you know that’s important, it’s the micro-interactions that we have, such as talking to the barrista, the shop assistant and others that we encounter when we go out and about.

For those on hybrid schedules, going into the office doesn’t necessarily solve the problem because none of their colleagues may be in on that day, or they may not be able to sit with them because they don’t have assigned desks together. Additionally, they may well find they spend much of the day on Zoom or Teams calls, and so are not able to talk to others around them.

Our working day is providing less and less opportunity for the human interaction that we need, whether that is deeper relationship building or the more superficial chit-chat of everyday life. Indeed, the latter is often the precursor to the former.

And guess what AI is doing? Yep, it’s taking the problem and making it worse.

In Stow Boyd’s ‘workplace.io‘ newsletter (which I highly recommend), he talks about how AI is destroying the fabric of work, highlighting a Business Insider piece by Ako Ito - ‘The Antisocial Workplace’.

In it, Ito points to studies that show that using AI is causing people to increasingly choose to work on their own, and that subsequently they trust their teams less.

That’s not the only problem.

‘The coaching platform BetterUp found that some workers are turning to AI for the kind of feedback they used to seek from mentors and managers. Those employees tended to report lower levels of team coordination, along with higher rates of burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs.’

Ito recounts how she herself is using AI to refine her work and consequently talking to her editor less, which she sees is weakening their (important!) relationship.

AI offers us opportunities to coordinate actions in a more efficient way, removing the friction and speeding up the process. However, as we have seen time and time again, being more efficient is not the same as being more effective. In fact, it’s often the opposite.

That friction is where the human interaction sits. It’s where we connect with our colleagues, get to know them and how they behave, get a feel for each other and develop relationships. That means that when problems or issues that could cause conflict arrive, we have the basis of familiarity to negotiate our way through them together.

It’s where we find connection and a sense of belonging, meeting two key needs for us that, in turn, increases our productivity, well-being and loyalty.

The real problem here is not AI or hybrid or WfH or technology, although none of these help. The root of the problem is that management does not value human connection and relationships and has allowed them to be squeezed out of the workplace by the factors I have listed above. Worse, the system has been designed to minimise the time and space for connection, in the name of efficiency.

The value of human interaction needs to be recognised and designed into the system, given the time and space and priority so that it is one of things that the system produces and is seen as a core measure of the system’s success.

People matter. Organisations that recognise this and organise accordingly will thrive, whereas those that continue to pretend they don’t matter will find out all too late how much they do.

Firework

One last thing… (I couldn’t help myself)

So Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire through the SpaceX IPO that is launching as I write this.

It’s a con, a Ponzi scheme. Don’t take my word for it, take Paul Krugman’s. (Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme).

It’s the latest point on the graph that began with Netscape’s massive valuation at IPO in 1994, the first example of bullshit achieving escape velocity. It was the first time that the puffery was more substantial than the business it was inflating. It set the pattern for hyping technology stocks that we’ve have seen grow to this apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view).

It’s the same people behind all of these. Andreessen, Horowitz, Thiel and the rest of the PayPal Mafia and, of course, Musk. That’s not the full cast of ghouls, just the first ones that came to mind. It’s the same venture capitalists, investment banks, funds and the whole Silicon Valley money-go-round that has driven this forward whist making them all unbelievably wealthy. Literally, they are the richest people in the world, ever.

But this is the big one. The biggest punt ever. Of course, it’s got AI in it. How could it not?

It’s hard to focus on the prosaic matters of making the workplace better against this backdrop of epic nonsense, when reality seems to have become detached from, well, reality. When the valuations have broken free of any underlying metrics, when the rewards for individuals bear no relation to their contribution and do not reflect any concept of worth. When everyone seems to have lost their minds and be in the grip of a cult. (And I’m not even thinking about the political realm here!)

I predict that the share price for SpaceX will take off like a rocket (see what I did there?). One of Musk’s. The one that suddenly went sideways and blew up over the Gulf of Mexico, raining toxic crap over a huge area and innocent bystanders.

Then we can all get back to arguing about WfH vs RTO, just like the good old days.

Picture This

When looking at the future, even when it seems like everything is changing and all the old certainties have dissolved into a frothing tumult, it’s worth remembering there is one constant. Us. Human behaviour does’t really change. It’s why Shakespeare and Greek plays are still relevant today.

Which brings me to the Powerpoint problem.

I’ve written before about how difficult it used to be to communicate in writing, back before we had computers. Days of back and forth with the typing pool to get what you had written and what got typed on the paper to align. And then time for the physical transport of the letter or memo. And then the same time-consuming process at the other end before you got a reply.

Email truncated all of that into a day, then hours, and now minutes. The result? We are all buried in ‘written’ communication, much of it unnecessary and performative.

Back then, presenting information was even harder. You had to use an overhead projector, and produce ‘overheads’ or ‘slides’, which you placed onto the projector so that they would be displayed on a large screen.

The ‘overheads’ were sheets of clear acetate that you could write and draw upon, or even type on. If you wanted professional looking graphics, they had to be produced by a printer (I mean an actual person, not just a machine), which was expensive and time-consuming. Each ‘overhead’ was the size of an LP (that’s a vinyl disc for you youngsters) and had to be lugged around and sorted into the correct order for your presentation.

It was a pain in the arse and expensive, so you were very careful about how many you produced and when you used them. You front-loaded the process with careful thought and consideration about how to use this scarce resource.

Then along came Powerpoint and anyone could produce slides in minutes and immediately show them on their laptop.

We should have seen where this was going to go. Not just from the email experience, but also from IBM. You see, IBM were the big cheeses of computing back then, and they always had lots of glossily produced ‘overheads’ when they did presentation. But then their computers cost the the annual GDP of a small country back then, so they wanted everything to look reassuringly expensive.

They also had a special word for ‘overheads’, they called them ‘foils’. The quality and number of your ‘foils’ was a mark of your status in IBM, and your expertise at using them gave you great kudos. Your ‘deck’ of ‘foils’ was your measure of virility.

So what happened when Powerpoint democratised all this?

Yes, the volume of slides went up exponentially - and the quality and number of your slides became a status symbol. The more senior you were, the more slick and eye-catching your slides had to be. More and more resources were poured into producing slides, or ‘Powerpoint decks’ as they quickly became known. New roles were created for graphic designers to produce them. They started to include pictures, sounds, video, moving graphics. The decks grew in scale and complexity, more and more resembling film production.

Even at the lower level, where the resources were tighter, people still spent hours jazzing up their powerpoint, vie-ing with each other to have the biggest, whizziest decks. Powerpoint production became a massive time and energy suck.

And so a new phrase was born - Death by Powerpoint. The deck became the place where good ideas went to die. So much effort was put into creating the decks, which were too voluminous for people to go through properly anyway, that no-one got around to developing the idea and producing an actual product or service.

Organisations today are littered with Powerpoint decks, the hard drives and cloud storage systems stuffed with this digital cruft, gumming up the system, blocking out the light and costing money to keep them in their mummified state.

Has communication improved? Are people more thoughtful about what they present? Are organisations more productive, creative and innovative because of Powerpoint?

Are they buggery.

Creating a powerpoint deck has become a replacement for thinking, for sifting idea and reducing them down to their core. Much easier to put your semi-formed thoughts and vaguely related facts into a bunch of bullet points shown landscape on a screen because you think that makes you look smart. What’s worse, other people think it makes you look smart, or at least like your working. And the more slides you have, the more weighty your idea must be, and the harder you must have worked on it, right? (Ed: No!)

Why do the hard work of building something when you can create a powerpoint, and you get to wang on and look important whilst you read out what everyone else can read for themselves? The means has become the work. The artefact is the end product.

So, how do you think AI revolutionising productivity is going to go?

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Don’t You Want Me

Well, Navarun Bhattacharya has identified a problem with the deployment of AI that he calls ‘marginal utility collapse’. He points out that whilst AI is being presented as a supply side issue (capacity is coming , it will get cheaper etc.), there’s actually a demand side issue.

Put simply, AI outputs are adding to a flow of content that is already overwhelming us, they are choking a system that is already saturated. As he explains in this LinkedIN post:

‘Within … 5 yrs, LLMs have collapsed the cost of producing “intelligence at work”. You can generate 10 strategies instead of one;50 scenarios instead of five. The supply curve has shifted dramatically outward. But the demand curve hasn’t moved much. Because demand, in this context, is not desire. It is the ability to read, evaluate, understand, prioritize, trust the output, and importantly act. And that capacity is limited, by the human involved.’

That sounds a bit like the Powerpoint problem, doesn’t it?

Navarun posits that those that ‘… companies that will win in this environment will be those that manage marginal utility. They will: generate less, but more deliberately filter aggressively before outputs accumulate; attach ownership to decisions, not just insights; design systems that convert fewer inputs into clearer actions.’

I agree with him. Only I don’t see many organisations that have a good track record of implementing this sort of ‘less is more’ philosophy. In fact, most do the exact opposite.

Although the third annual survey of CEOs by Oliver Wyman Forum and the New York Stock Exchange purports to show how top CEOs are responding to this challenge. It’s not encouraging.

They are reducing junior roles and retaining older employees, particularly middle managers. That’s because they see the need for experience and judgement to be able to utilise or vet AI deployments and outputs. This is characterised as moving from a pyramid structure to a diamond. The obvious comment is that this is not terribly stable. I mean, where does the future middle come from? Oh well, that’s a problem for the next guy, I guess.

The survey also shows that CEOs are increasingly working on plans for the next 12 months or less, so the danger of the diamond toppling over is not even on their time horizon.

The survey additionally says that those who are getting the best ROI from AI deployment, above their expectations, are also redesigning workflows at the fastest rate. This suggests to me that AI is actually forcing organisations to redesign the way they work but also that some of the ROI attributed to AI may, in fact, be coming from reorganisation. Conflating the two is convenient because it justifies the huge expense (much like widespread practice of mis-attributing layoffs to ‘AI efficiencies’ does) but muddies the picture considerably.

We Built This City

But before we move on, let’s take a quick look at the supply side.

We know that suppliers are not charging anywhere near the real cost of their LLM services. Flat rate charging, whether it $20, $200 or £2000 a month, is going to disappear soon. Github CoPilot is moving to usage-based billing in June, so it will be interesting to see how that impacts usage. And those enterprises who have already embedded AI usage into their workflows, sacked the people who used to do the work, will now see a major hike in their costs which they haven’t budgeted for. Ooops.

But that’s not the only supply problem. Whilst there have been lots of announcements of new AI datacentre capacity being built, rather less is actually coming on stream. This is where the rubber hits the road, where the realities of building physical infrastructure drags the gravity-defying bubble of the AI boosters down to earth.

You need people to build stuff. Engineers, electricians, HVAC specialists, construction people, all sorts of trades and specialists. And the USA, where most of these data centres are planned, don’t have enough of them. They don’t train enough of them, either. And now they can’t bring them in from elsewhere because, well, immigration is not exactly favoured by the administration.

This is a major bottleneck and it doesn’t get solved any time soon. And no, I don’t think Elon’s robots are going to save the day. (It’s also a problem in the UK, for pretty much the same reasons. We’ve neglected training tradespeople too.)

That’s not taking into account the need to completely reconfigure the power network and massively expand capacity. And do the same for the water infrastructure.

It seems even AI agents need somewhere to sit. And there aren’t going to be enough virtual desks for some time. If ever.

It’s a buggers muddle, isn’t it?

Power To The People

So the answer to the question, “How will AI impact work in the future?”, is still unclear. Maybe we should ask the question “How much will AI impact work in the future?” as well.

It will be uneven, I think. There are reports from investment and fund management of AIs that can do the work in minutes that would take a team of PhDs several months. That’s highly-skilled, highly paid jobs being displaced. But it would be foolish to extrapolate across all industries and say all high-value jobs are at risk. It’s also clear that translators are being replaced by AI but there’s no shortage of hair dressers and nail technicians in my high street and they seem to have plenty of demand.

And it will certainly create jobs as well. When Excel was released, it was predicted that accountants would be hit hard. The opposite happened and the numbers of accountants grew three-fold (and don’t we know it!). And let’s not forget all those roles for crafting Powerpoint slides that came about.

Michel Zannini, who co-authored ‘Humanocracy’ with Gary Hamel, recently pointed out that many of the systems organisations built to create efficiency have unintentionally created bureaucracy.

That bureaucracy often starts with good intentions, such as creating consistency, reducing risk and improving governance. However, over time, it becomes more complex, it bloats. More layers, more decision gates, more standards to follow. Decision making slows and innovation becomes more and more difficult.

Not because people lack talent or motivation — but because the environment suppresses initiative before it has a chance to grow. This is how bureaucracy marginalises innovation. The people closest to problems often have the best ideas, yet traditional structures frequently distance decision-making from the front line.

This is not a new phenomenon. It’s an age-old problem of large organisations. If you’ve ever worked in one, you’ll know it well. If you’ve ever interacted with one, as we all have, then you’ll know it as the source of the maddening, frustrating and illogical interactions you rant on about when chatting to friends.

AI might address this but if it’s by delegating decisions to its algorithms, I can see that creating plenty of new problems. And I can see many way that AI can make the system worse, not just by gumming it up, as I’ve mentioned above.

But there are ways of addressing it, which are referred to in the book. Since its publication, other examples have emerged. For example, Bayer have reinvented themselves with their ‘Dynamic Shared Ownership’ model, introducing more self-management, fluidity and dynamism into their work organisation. It also makes it a much better place to work, a more human-centric one.

If AI does force organisations to consider how they might reorganise their work, then maybe some will see there are better ways to do it. Not centred around AI, but around the people.

Because organisations are communities of people and always will be.

I love to hear from my readers, so please leave a comment or contact me at colin@colinnewlyn.com. Or if you fancy a chat, go to my Calendly page.

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You can read more of my sparkling prose at my other substack, ‘Surviving Corporate’

Just An Illusion

I’ve said before that Corporate Life is an alternative reality, an illusory world where the usual rules don’t apply, where words mean something completely different, where everyone speaks in riddles whilst telling everyone how realistic and pragmatic they are being. To live in this world we have to believe many things that are untrue, and often contradictory, and we kind of know that but we can’t admit it. We pretend that it’s all normal when we know in our bones it’s nonsense.

It’s why, when we leave, we go through a period of disenchantment. It is because we have literally left the enchantment, the spell has been broken and we see the world as it is, rather than as we have been pretending it is for so long. This is one of the most painful realisations we go through because it means two things. Firstly, that we have been fooling ourselves and so are, by definition, foolish. And secondly, that the life we have been living has been hollow and meaningless.

It didn’t use to be like this. Businesses and organisations used to be connected to their customers, to their environment and to their employees in a very direct and physical manner. They were geographically bound, largely, to a town or a region or a country. They people that ran them were part of the community, mixing with the people who did the work. They answered to local communities and governments, they were part of the social fabric. The work you did was directly involved in the end product, whether that was the production of good or delivery of a service; or you were near enough to see it and understand how you had contributed to it.

But the organisations have become disconnected and abstracted over the decades, the product of a variety of forces - globalisation, market concentration, technology and automation, financialisation. The work has also become abstracted, conducted largely by moving bits and bytes around in the ether. The outcomes are not directly connected to the activities, people are not engaged directly with each other but are intermediated through tech platforms, much of the work is carried out in a virtual digital realm. What isn’t has been off-shored or outsourced, so you never see the end product. Companies that appear to be in one business actually create value in another e.g. Delta airlines in the US make most of their profit through their credit card link-up. They are a financial business that happens to fly people around as a their primary marketing channel.

It is this abstraction that leads to people feeling disengaged and detached from their work. It also leads to some seemingly perverse outcomes. I say seemingly perverse because when you look closely, you can trace the cause and effect but it looks perverse because it’s not what you expect from what you think you see, but in fact you are looking at an illusion, an echo of what used to be.

We have passed through the looking glass and now we are trying to work out what we’re looking at on the other side.

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More Than A Feeling

So we’re floundering around, looking for meaning and trying to make sense of the world and along comes AI, the ultimate abstraction. If we believe the hype (spoiler alert: I don’t), it’s an intelligence without a body or a soul.

AI is a double abstraction (I’m talking about the Large Language Models here, the stuff that been stuffed into all of our online tools, the chatbots that are going to ‘take all the jobs’). Not only the product but also the whole industry.

To summarise the work of Ed Zitron, this is a product that has yet to find a compelling use case after 3 years and its imposition on large swathes of the corporate workforce and much of the toolbase that they use. There is no ‘killer app’, there is no major revenue stream that has emerged. There is also no path to profitability because the two main AI companies, Open AI and Anthropic, lose money on every customer and have to raise enormous amounts of investment to keep going. They are promising to pay for ‘compute’ (a horrible word) that requires eye-watering amounts of capital investment but don’t have the future revenue streams to cover it, so they need to get more investment.

The big tech companies who are building the infrastructure (the hyperscalers & Nvidia, the chip-maker) are now proving investment to the AI companies, which will allow them to pay their compute suppliers, who are … er, the big tech companies. At the same time, the same tech companies are competing with the AI companies in case the latter go bust, something they make more likely by competing with them. So as well as giving money to Open AI and Anthropic so that they can give it back to them for the compute, they are also undermining that investment.

TL:DR It’s madness. The basic rules of business have been suspended. It’s a mania, a bubble. And yet it’s got the biggest companies and the ‘brains’ of Wall Street firmly ensnared in its madness.

We’ve all experienced that moment at work when you look at what’s going on around you, the ridiculous targets, the unhinged strategy, the inexplicable decision, and you think “This is all bonkers. Am I the only one who sees this?”. Well, this is that at the macro level. The logical endpoint of abstraction.

Wall Street buys into AI because they are only interested in how the stock performs and have lost sight of what the underlying businesses do. They aren’t interested because you can make tons of money manipulating the numbers or betting on the movements. The big tech companies are hooked in because they are run by ‘business idiots’ (another term coined by Ed Zitron) who have little understanding of the the business and no interest in the craft but just want to see the number go up. (A classic recent example of this is Boeing, who ditched their engineering and safety ethos in favour of cost cutting and pumping up the profits to the point where planes started falling out of the sky and they had spend huge sums repairing the damage whilst also taking an enormous hit to their share price).

This is where we are. Detached, floating free, untethered. Like a balloon in flight, at the mercy of the winds.

This doesn’t end well. We either get blown somewhere dangerous or come down to earth with a bump.

Out Of Touch

So this abstraction is why we feel disassociated from our work, and our life. We don’t have record collections to show our friends anymore, we have a playlist sitting in a cloud somewhere. We don’t have a bookshelf, we have files on our kindle that we don’t really own because we can’t give them to someone else. We don’t meet in person but sit in front of screens looking at a simulacrum of interaction but one with most of the information missing, the physical and sensory cues, the feel.

We don’t shuffle paper anymore, we manipulate pixels around a screen all day. We don’t have an in-tray and an out-tray and the satisfaction of watching the pile in the first go down as the pile in second gets higher, we have endless workflows serving up screen after screen without let-up. We don’t have a ‘knocking off’ time, a clear end to the day where we can forget about work, we have constant access to an endless stream of messages and information that creates a pressure to keep working into the evening.

And for what? It used to be that there was a job for life that also meant making yourself subservient to the organisation but the reward was a stable life, regular income, a chance to buy somewhere to live, to have a family, to build a rich personal life and save for a comfortable retirement. Now, none of that deal holds except they still want to the subservience to their needs, until they decide they don’t anymore and you get dumped.

We can rationalise all of this, find reasons for all the decisions that led to this (even if we disagree with why they were made) but we can’t rationalise away how we feel. And it feels wrong. In our bones, in our soul. A day of meetings on Zoom or Teams may functionally be fine but at the end of it we feel exhausted because it lacks physicality. It’s a day of living in an abstraction and we miss the connection that appears to be there but isn’t. So we feel disassociated but it’s not obvious to us why. After all, we’ve been talking to people all day, so we should feel connected, shouldn’t we?

Do you know where else you find the word ‘disassociated’? It’s one of the things you might experience if you are suffering from PTSD or Complex PTSD. Disassociation is a natural response to trauma while it’s happening. It’s also something we can all experience temporarily when we’re intensely stressed or extremely tired, or after drug or alcohol use. Some people may dissociate while experiencing war, kidnapping or during a medical emergency. In situations we can’t physically get away from, dissociation can protect us from distress. But it can also be harmful, especially if it’s persistent.

PTSD is not just caused by a traumatic event, however. It can be caused by a prolonged period of abuse or low-level trauma, the accumulation of distressing events that individually would not affect us. These events could be persistent bullying and abuse, or working in a toxic environment, or being robbed of agency and control.

I know from personal experience that working in a corporate environment can cause complex PTSD and that is partly because you feel you have to put up with because you need the salary to fulfil your obligations to others, or just to maintain your current lifestyle. You feel you have no choice but to remain, that there is no easy way to escape.

Isn’t that what we’re being told about AI? That it’s inevitable, that it’s coming for our jobs and resistance is futile. That we need to ‘get with the program’ and embrace it, learn to use it (more work, more pressure), whilst it is learning how to do our job and replace us (as I wrote about last week)? AI not only threatens our jobs and our lifestyle but also threatens to turn employment into a type of Hunger Games for knowledge workers.

And isn’t that what we’ve been told about the workplace for the past several decades? That it’s a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world, that we’re competing with the world now, that companies have to be efficient or they will die? That if cuts aren’t made and you don’t pick up the slack, you will lose your job. That you’re going to have to uproot yourself and move your whole life across the country, continent or world or someone else will take it. That there is no alternative, that it’s just economic logic (it’s not) and sorry, but you’re no longer required. That if your job is taken by technology, then it’s your responsibility to reskill and start again because ‘that’s the market’.

It could be a bit of a leap to connect the madness of modern life and work that is caused by the compounding effect of abstraction upon abstraction with mental health issues and symptoms of PTSD. But maybe it’s not much of a leap, eh?

No

There are signs this is beginning to dawn on people. Whilst we hear about the AI enthusiasts and the wonderful things that are doing with AI (none of which add up to a widely applicable use case, let alone a killer application), underneath the hype a backlash is beginning to emerge.

I’ve written before about the 40% of corporate employees who are avoiding or even sabotaging AI use, and how AI is ruining the (already broken recruitment) process. Now research shows that AI interviews are being used in 63% of US job interviews but that 38% of interviewees are rejecting the AI interview and dropping out of the process. What’s more, another 12% say they won’t carry on with an application if AI is required.

Meanwhile, Ryan Page PhD, a university professor, says that his students hate AI. He remarks that when he was in his twenties like them, technology was cool and allowed you to carry all your songs around with you and record an album in your bedroom (he teaches music). He was, like many of us, a bit of a techno optimist. In the intervening 15 years, the tech industry has completely destroyed that goodwill.

It’s point Ed Zitron often makes, that tech companies don’t make stuff that is cool anymore, or actually helps us much. They are more focused on farming us for data, and enshittifying their products to grab more of our precious attention, just in order to push the number up and make themselves richer. The people running the big tech companies are Business Idiots who know little about the technology and how it impacts their customers and care even less. These billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaires) could solve world hunger and child poverty, or just make cool and useful stuff like they used to, but instead focus on growth, dominance, self-enrichment and pushing us all into techno-serfdom.

Anyway, these students are now terrified of technology and what it could do to them, but at the same time feel obliged to use it, to look like they are keeping up and staying relevant. I really can’t think of anything more stress-inducing. It’s like having to eat something to survive that you know is damaging you, possibly irreversibly. And having to make that choice every day.

The Kids Are Alright

I try not to focus only on the bad stuff, I don’t want to be a ‘Boomer Doomster’.

I don’t want to be that old guy that talks about ‘the good old days’ when everything used to be better and who wants to turn the clock back to a time that never existed and can’t be returned too even if it did. I’m not ignoring the positives of the economic and technological developments that have happened over my lifetime. Don’t forget, I used to be a techno-optimist, a techno-enthusiast, in fact. That was my job, using the technology to build new products and services. I worked on email in its early days (yeah, sorry for that, but I’m not responsible for how it’s been misused and abused).

But the good times are over. The benefits of the market fundamentalism that became Neo-liberalism have been realised and largely sequestered by the rich and we are now reaping the consequences (which were predictable (to me as an economics undergraduate) and why I opposed it from the start). The same is true of globalisation as the real world firmly reasserts itself on the abstraction of global supply chains through the crises of COVID and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.

The technology industry has moved from being additive to extractive, replacing innovation and competition as drivers with market capture and cartels. Market concentration has reached a point where most markets are effective monopolies or oligopolies, pushing up prices, enabling super-profits and stifling competition and innovation. Financialisation has extracted value from every aspect of business and funnelled the gains up to top 1% (or 0.1%, in fact), and squeezed all the juice out.

We are reaching the end of the road and AI is the last stand of the fabulists who have driven and created this illusion. It’s the last abstraction, the last denial of reality, the last burst on the burner in this balloon of hyper-growth, free market, techno-capitalism. They’ve ignored the Global Financial Crash, they’ve ignored the rise of populism and nationalism, they’ve ignored the rise in geopolitical instability and warfare. Indeed, they’ve sought to turn all these signs of sickness to their advantage, seeing them as opportunities for growth. But you can’t defy gravity for ever. The basket eventually comes back to earth, and this is coming down with one hell of a bump.

I don’t know when. I don’t know what happens afterwards. I can’t say it’s going to be better, it could be worse. Maybe much worse. What I do know is that my generation, the one that led us here, the one that is still inflating this balloon of improbability, is not the solution. We’re the problem.

So the way I differ from most grumpy old men is that I don’t want to go back to a previous time and I don’t blame the younger generation. Quite the opposite. We need to move to a new model, we need new paradigms, we need to build something new to replace what is falling down. And I believe the younger generation are the ones to do that. Indeed, they are our only hope.

They can see what’s really happening, they aren’t taken in by the illusion. That’s why they aren’t signing up to the broken corporate contract, either seeing the relationship as entirely transactional or finding another path entirely, through entrepreneurship, creativity and self-direction. That’s why they are techno-sceptics and are rejecting AI. They are not entitled, needy airheads, they are smart, switched-on realists.

I just hope they are not too traumatised by the world we’ve created for them or too lobotomised by AI and other technology to be able to fulfil their destiny.

It’s going to be messy but let’s be hopeful, eh?

Devil Gate Drive

Back in the day, everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs. Steve was a rebel, Steve was dynamic, Steve was successful. Steve was creative, Steve was a genius, Steve was cool.

Steve was also a massive arsehole. But we overlooked that because, you know, genius.

Now, they still want to be Steve but they think being a rebel is wearing a hoodie to board meetings, they are dynamic like a toddler emptying a toy box and they are successful financially but still look like losers.

They are not creative, they are not geniuses and they are not cool.

But they are all massive arseholes.

Let’s start with Satya Nardella at Microsoft. He has the turtle neck. He has the shiny pate. He looks like a bookish Dr Evil.

He’s initiated a programme to reduce Microsoft’s US workforce by 10%, offering exit packages to 8,750 employees. So, I guess they are evaluating where people’s roles are no longer required, where their skill set doesn’t match the requirements, restructuring the organisation to be more effective, right?

Nope. They are saying that if your age plus your years of service add up to 70 or more, it’s time for you to go.

Wha..how…come again?

Yep, basically. If you are a senior employee, you’re no longer wanted. If you’ve got salt-and-pepper hair, you’re toast. Or if you’ve got a bald pate like Satya, it’s curtains (although not him, obviously).

So they are jettisoning all that experience and institutional memory and tacit knowledge. Why?

Well, they’ll probably say that these people are complacent and a drag on the business, but the real reason is that they are the most expensive people in the organisation. You get way more bang for your buck jettisoning a senior US employee than anyone else in Microsoft’s global workforce. The return on brutality is amazing!

Oh, and it frees up a load of money for Microsoft to squander invest in AI. And anyway, all the costs of losing all that experience and knowledge won’t land for a few more quarters, probably after Satya has retired to spend more time with his bonuses.

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The Devil Went Down To Georgia

Not wanting to miss out on the action, the other ersatz Dr. Evil, Jeff Bezos, is pushing AI Adoption across the business by aggressively monitoring how software engineers are using AI tools. AI usage is also being brought into performance and promotion discussions.

Amazon is setting some clear targets for AI adoption, with most software teams expected to triple their software code release velocity, and around 25 teams expected to increase it by 10-fold.

Amazon are a famously ‘hard-driving’ company (or ruthlessly exploitative of their workforce, you could say) and this is another ratcheting up of pressure. It’s not gone down that well with engineers, who have expressed concerns around centrally driven mandates, unclear success metrics, and the burden of self-reporting progress.

Still, if all these engineers are churning out more code, that has to be good right? I mean, it’s more productive, more efficient, isn’t it? And Amazon will need fewer engineers, but don’t say that out loud, or they might not work as hard to make themselves redundant.

Amazon expects 80% adoption of AI over time and advises managers to treat AI like any automation investment. So more code is good and more automation is good. What could possible go wrong?

I mean, it’s not like Amazon have recently suffered any major outtages taking down large swathes of the internet due to an automation snafu, is it?

Meanwhile, Jeff is busy sending his wife and her friends into space on his huge rocket so they can admire his enormous ego achievement, which is almost certainly definitely not a compensation for anything.

(You’re The) Devil In Disguise

Still, Satya and Jeff are practically senile by Silicon Valley standards. I wonder what the young thruster ‘Zuck’ is up to? I bet he’s showing them.

Yep, he’s going one step further than Jeff and tracking employees’ keystrokes, mouse movements and screens. Why? To gather real usage data on how employees interact with productivity software for Meta’s AI programme, so they can better design the AI that will replace said employees. It’s great, you can train your AI replacement without even knowing you are doing it!

Needless to say, it’s not gone down too well with the troops, who find it intrusive and creepy and want to opt out. Meta says they aren’t allowed to opt out but it’s OK because they are only going to use the data for AI training and not for performance monitoring, no really, definitely, you can trust us.

And why wouldn’t you trust the company who have never hidden internal documentation about how addictive their products are, or how they target minors, or how they help bad actors undermine democratic elections?

And Mark’s not done there either, he’s giving Satya a masterclass in how to get rid of people too. He’s also getting rid of 8000 employees, but across the global workforce. But he’s got a twist to it, and this is real evil genius stuff.

He’s announced the cuts but he’s not saying who is going to go until next month! So now everyone is scared shitless that they are going to get the boot. Brilliant, isn’t it? I almost feel an evil cackle coming on.

It’s actually even more delicious because only some of the layoffs are going to be disclosed in May, with more on the way ‘later in the year’. People’s nerves will be absolutely fried by the time the last of these happen. And they don’t even know when the torture will end!!

You have to hand it to Mark, he’s certainly showing the youthful dynamism, the toddler-in-the-toy-box energy, that drives the Valley forward. We’re lucky to have him, really.

Squeeze Box

This would all be senseless cruelty if it wasn’t being done for a reason. And that reason is AI. Of course it is.

These companies are heavily invested in it. No, really, I mean they are spending billions on it, on building data centres and developing models. So much money that even they, the most profitable businesses ever seen on the planet, need to make cuts to find the money they are ploughing into it.

Still, I’m sure they know what they are doing. I’m sure it’s all going to be worth it.

They say that we’ll be able to use AI to do the tedious, repetitive stuff, the work that is just execution. Then we’ll be free to concentrate on higher level work, we’ll have time to do the reflection and pondering that leads to creative breakthroughs.

Because that’s what’s happened in the past, with all this technology and automation, isn’t it? It’s freed us up to do better work and have more leisure time to rest and refresh.

Sorry, what? We’re working longer hours than ever now? We suffer from excessive cognitive load because of all the choices technology forces us to make and the ‘always on’ availability it enables? More of our work is busywork, dealing with the overload of messages and information that we are subjected to, running incessantly just to keep up and we are not any more productive? Burnout is at an all-time high and continuing to rise?

Ah, no, but this time, the benefits of the technology will be shared with us. They won’t see the extra time the AI tools free up as a reason to load us with even more work to ratchet our targets up by even more, I’m sure.

I mean, it’s not like they’ll be expecting us to 10x our output, is it?

Pardon? Oh, yeah, sorry, silly me. It’s not output, it’s ’software code release velocity’.

Oh…

Shit.

Burn

In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Prof Devi Sridhar (chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh) writes about how digital communication can push us into that ‘always on’ state and generate feelings of exclusion or rejection. Given that our top two needs are belonging and connection, these are extremely harmful to us.

She explains that studies show short text-based interactions are more stressful than in-person ones because they lack nuance and are prone to misinterpretation.

Also, the ‘two ticks’ feature, to show a message has been read as well as received, also causes more stress. A delayed or ignored message can trigger the pain areas of the brain causing social pain, whilst others feel pressurised to respond because they know they’ve been seen to have read it. This constant availability can overload the brain’s decision making system, leading to cognitive fatigue and emotional exhaustion.

Furthermore, sudden ending of communication, whether deliberate ‘ghosting’ or circumstantial, can also feel incredibly painful because it activates our biological alarm systems.

Whllst Prof Sridar is writing about this in a generally context, clearly, much of that digital communication is experienced at work, where it is inescapable. It is also imposed upon us by our employers, which confers responsibility for it on them.

All this technology has been rolled out with little consideration given for how it will affect employees, other than how more productive it will make them or how much it can replace some of them. It’s been a massive experiment, the technology simply let loose into existing organisational structures. Now we are seeing the consequences, and they are not good. Productivity may have increased but at the cost of burning out more people, faster.

And now we’re going to repeat the same process with AI, where the potential for harm is even greater.

I wonder what would happen if we designed the technology around the people, rather than forcing the people to bend to the demands of the technology?

I think it would be transformational. But I’m not sure it’s going to happen.

After all, evil overlords have to lord over us evilly. It’s sort of what they do.

Even if they do resemble cartoon characters, but with less depth and personality.

Relax

Some of you may have noticed there wasn’t a newsletter last week. Well, this is ‘weekly-ish’, that’s the promise I made.

Actually, I wrote one but it didn’t quite come together to my satisfaction. My thoughts were even more half-formed than usual and the connection so tenuous as to be invisible. I could have rewritten it last Friday, but it was my birthday and so I played golf and spent time with family and friends. I suggest you do the same - well, get outside, be active and spend time with people you love. It’s good for the soul.

P.S. Tim Cook is retiring. But he never wanted to be like Steve Jobs anyway.

The Party’s Over

“Work is no fun anymore”.

This was said by to me by someone who works in finance in the UK and is responsible for client relationships. He’d heard his older colleagues reminisce about the good old days of golf days, expense account lunches, cases of wine at Christmas and all the rest of ‘client entertaining’. Now, they can barely accept a free pen and any entertaining of clients has to be determinedly modest (for regulatory reasons, supposedly, but surely not minded by the Finance Director either.)

You might not have much sympathy for sales people having their expense wings clipped a bit (especially those who greatly abused the opportunity), or for the clients who no longer get lunch at ‘La Caprice’ with £200 bottles of wine, but these things were a source of enjoyment and fun that was part of the attraction of the job. And it’s not just the ‘good time charlies’ of the sales teams that have had the joy squeezed out of their work, it’s been happening across all jobs and all industries.

That’s the trend explored by the Wall Street Journal in their piece “How Working in America Became So Joyless - The loss of small perks and rise of AI have conspired to strip work of all fun; ‘It feels like a funeral in the office right now.’”

They start by recounting how Dell provided free coffee for workers as a ‘small dose of joy’ for them every morning. Then came the ‘buzz kill’ when they started charging for the coffee.

When I worked in BT, it was a more British response. They stopped the free biscuits at meetings. But the same effect. A small and relatively inexpensive ‘perk’ that just made office life a bit more pleasant was taken away and pissed everyone off. I mean, it was a kind of amazing example of efficiency, to annoy so many people so much for such a small amount of money …

The article talks about the ‘war on fun’ and how middle managers are on the front line due to their ever-widening span of control (something I wrote about last week). With an average of 12 direct reports, they simply don’t have time to engage with people properly and develop the relationships that make work more pleasant and more human.

And then AI comes along and amps up the whole thing. Expectations about productivity are rising, even though how AI actually helps here remains something of a mystery. One thing it does do is increase surveillance, which means employees are under even more scrutiny and pressure.

And it’s undermining job security and career certainty. As Suzy Welch, a management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, comments, “All the conveyor belts are broken”.

And the article doesn’t even include the regular rounds of sackings that are attributed to AI but we all know are just the normal pumping up of profits, to the applause of Wall Street. All this is happening in the Tech sector, which has always been seen as the best place to work, with the best benefits and opportunities, the one that has been the trend-setter for everyone else.

The problem is not just that the fun has been taken out. It’s that fear and loathing has been put in its place.

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Espresso

The fun is also about human interaction. What we enjoy in these moments is the connection with our fellow human beings, the shared experience.

My guess is that the people at Dell didn’t just enjoy their free coffee but would also take moment to chat to their colleagues, to share their ‘perk’ experience with coworkers. There’s something unifying about all enjoying a free coffee that is qualitatively different from one you’ve paid for - even if it’s just coming together to bitch and moan about the taste or the quality.

If you’re all getting coffee from the same place, it’s easy to say “Let’s grab a coffee downstairs and chat’. When there’s going to be an awkward “Who’s paying?” moment, it’s much less likely to happen. If you’re all going to your own favourite coffee shop, it’s not going to happen at all.

It’s the small moments of interaction that lay the foundations of relationships. You all get to know the barristas, you recognise the people who have a coffee at the same time as you, you bump into colleagues you might have been meaning to speak to. In a workplace that has increasingly driven out human interaction, where our exchanges have been intermediated by technology, these opportunities for people to rub up against each other are increasingly valuable.

Although, obviously, Dell doesn’t think they are worth a hill of beans. Well, not coffee beans, apparently.

You’ve Got A Friend In Me

This topic of relationships at work has been brought up this week by two of my favourite commentators on the workplace.

First, Bruce Daisley interviews Gillian Sandstrom about her book “Once Upon A Stranger” in this podcast ‘Your colleagues like you more than you realise…,’

Gillian talks about how we have anxiety about talking to other people. In fact, we have multiple interaction fears.

“But there’s long lists, so we worry about our behaviour, how we’re going to act during the conversation, so we worry that we’ll talk too much, or we’ll talk too little, or we worry about the content of the conversation itself, like will we know what to say, are we going to have those dreaded awkward silences? I think that’s actually people’s biggest fear.

We worry about what the other person is going to think about us. Are they even going to want to talk to us? Are they going to reject us?”

The good news is that the rejection rate is quite low, about 13%. The bad news is that if you fix one interaction fear, people will just worry about another one.

And then we have the likability gap, where we think we like the other person more than they like us. This can persist for a long time, over months of constant interaction, and it’s almost always untrue.

These mitigate against people starting up conversations. But the evidence is that people enjoy conversations with strangers, or with coworkers they don’t really know, much more than they anticipate. And the person you start the conversation with is almost always grateful for it.

These interactions humanise people, we feel more connected and closer to them and we feel more willing to work with them and to collaborate. After that quick chat about the weather in the coffee queue, it’s much easier to speak to them about a work matter later on that week.

In The Country

And next up, Christine Armstrong, who’s currently obsessed with the weakening ties between us at work, picks up on this in her vlog this week. She shares her experience of moving from the city to a village in the country, where she thought she would be bored and lonely. In fact, the opposite has occurred and she’s got fully immersed in village life. She attributes this to the fact that it’s a lot like the offices of her early career, where you bumped into people, things got organised and you kind of got dragged in, where you regularly had conversations with the people around you.

Again, it’s those little encounters and interactions that matter. They provide the social lubrication for relationships to develop, whilst they also make us feel like we belong somewhere, and make us feel more connected and happier too.

These personal encounters have largely disappeared from the workplace. A big reason that has occurred in my lifetime is the intermediation by technology. Face-to-face conversations have been replace by email, instant messages, or applications like product managements systems.

Then there’s the relentless focus on efficiency, where ‘idle’ conversations are seen as time-wasting. Workloads are constantly increasing too, so people don’t feel they have the time to speak to someone or lift their heads up from their desks for a minute. As mentioned above, managers have less and less time to spend with their direct reports due the much higher number they have to manage these days, so people feel they are not important and not valued.

Add on anxiety about speaking to people, heightened by our COVID experience; more distributed working across location and time-zone, requiring more asynchronous working through technology platforms; and hybrid schedules that means people are less likely to be in offices at the same time and so less likely have chance encounters, and we can see why this is becoming a widespread and deep-seated problem.

Anyone Who Had A Heart

The only way we start to fix this is for organisations to see these relationships as valuable. The current situation has not come about by accident. It’s not an unfortunate occurrence, this isolation and lack of connection is by design.

I don’t mean that C-suites have sat down and thought “How do we create a workplace where people don’t have any connection with each other?”. What I mean is that they have continually prioritised efficiency and systemisation over human connection. Faced with evidence that having a friend at work is a significant indicator of higher engagement, productivity and retention - things that they surely want to encourage - they are likely to scoff and say something like “What is this, playschool?”, dismissing the evidence out of hand.

By constantly marginalising human qualities, by constantly seeking to create a machine where the employees are replaceable and interchangeable cogs, by constantly seeking to eradicate human variation and uniqueness, they have made the human experience peripheral to the workplace and how it functions.

Our two greatest needs as humans are for belonging and connection. And they have put them at the bottom of the list of priorities every time (often whilst saying they are doing the opposite.)

When people advocate for humanising the workplace, for making work more human again, it’s not some wishy-washy liberal idealism. It’s the way forward, because otherwise we’re heading for dysfunction and dystopia.

Go Your Own Way

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the ‘forced fun’ company socials or team-building away days. In fact, in the current environment I’ve described above, these are likely go down even worse than they have in past.

I’m talking about designing organisations from the ground up around the humans, placing relationships above everything else and embracing the glorious variation of talents in any group of people.

The way that Buurtzorg, the Dutch community nursing group have done, with their structure of small, self-managing community nursing teams networked through an intranet and supported by a handful of central staff.

Or the way the Morning Star organise their tomato processing business through a series of contracts between the people responsible at each stage of the process i.e. between the farmer and haulier, between the processor and packager. They chain these agreements into a highly flexible and functioning production stream but each is negotiated directly between two individuals.

Or perhaps the approach of Haier, the global white goods organisation out of China that consists of thousands of self-organising micro-enterprises, each focused on a specific customer segment. They operate in an ecosystem created centrally and supported through application platforms providing all the support the teams need to achieve their own market and profit goals.

There are many models already out there, if organisations want to change. Bayer is a prime example of one who has grasped that nettle, even if it is through necessity, with their Dynamic Shared Organisation model that echoes much of Haier’s approach.

Or you could look at something like Sociocracy, an approach that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organisations, drawing on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared goal or work process (Wikipedia). My friend Lizzie Benton has a free webinar next week, so if you want to know more about Sociocracy you can sign up here.

The ideas are out there. We don’t lack the means, now we need the will.

Wasn’t Expecting That

And finally, in this Linked In post, Dave Cairns asked Professor Nick Bloom what he would advise his children and students to do when applying for jobs in the environment AI has created. His first point was to apply for more jobs, simply on the basis that everyone else is because AI makes it so easy, so you have to match the numbers (250 applications, in case you wondered, where it used to be 100!).

His other observations are that networking is becoming more and more important, and that interview are coming back into fashion because employers can’t trust a written submission any more (he’d recently been asked to give a reference ‘in person’ i.e. by an Zoom interview).

My reading? AI slop is drowning the systems that we have put in place, and so the human element is becoming more and more important. Kind of ironic, right?

In fact, recruitment is going back to how it used to be before technology came along. When recruiters met people face to face and when job openings were often found through networks.

Mind you, that was back in the days when you used to talk to people at the office.

And going to work used to be a lot more fun.

The End

‘On the morning of March 31, thousands of Oracle employees across the United States, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay received termination emails from “Oracle Leadership” before most had finished breakfast. There was no prior warning from managers or HR. Access to company systems was cut immediately. The day of the email was their last working day.’

So begins this Forbes article on Oracle’s recent programme of 30,000 layoffs. Pretty brutal, huh?

This electronic severing, this butchery by email, is violent, callous and shameful - or, at least, it should be. It was once. Now it’s not just been normalised, it’s become ‘best practice’ for a certain type of company. An overtly capitalistic one, probably US-based, likely to be in Tech. And run by extremely rich men.

Before I delve into that, this is the logical extension of the way that employees are seen by these organisations, and the way that the organisation interacts with them. Employees are resources, cost items to be shuffled around to meet the needs of the finances, to be discarded when money needs to be freed up. They have no history to be accounted for, they have no value other than their productive capacity.

They are increasingly dealt with through technology, which has interceded where human communication previously held sway. Bosses, who have an ever widening span of control and so less time for each person, communicate largely through digital means. Workflows are managed by remote process owners or, increasingly, AI-driven systems. Performance is recorded on digital dashboards. Recruitment is done through screens, process and AI-agents, with human interviews left to the last stage or two.

Employees have been gradually detached from the organisation, held at digital arms length, alienated from the people they work for. It makes perfect sense that they would be dismissed in the same disembodied, perfunctory, soulless way.

It’s worth spending a moment or two considering the actual email employees received just before they tucked into their morning bowl of cornflakes. Some of them having spend decades with the organisation, let’s remember. So here it is, with what I think might really be in the minds of the people behind it.

“We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position. (Well, difficult for you. Frankly, we don’t give a monkey’s.)

After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs (and our bonuses), we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day. (So long, sucker!)

We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us. (I mean, not that grateful. You got paid, what else do you need? But HR made us put this bit in).

After signing your termination paperwork, you will be eligible to receive a severance package subject to the terms and conditions of the severance plan. You will receive an email from DocuSign to your Oracle email address with details on your severance and termination date. (Obviously, it’s a digital signature. We’re not risking you doing it in person at the office and getting all messy.)

Immediate Action Required (We’re still in charge here. Although this is actually in your best interest.)

To receive important follow-up information, including FAQs and separation documents to help you through this transition, you must provide a personal email address. (It’s your responsibility to make sure we do what is actually our responsibility. Neat, huh?)

Please click here to submit a personal email address immediately. If you make a submission error, please re-submit a new form. Please Note: The personal email address will only be used for correspondence regarding separation-related information and severance agreements. (This is the reassuring bit, OK? We’re not going to spam you. Although we could sell your data on…now there’s a thought!)

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Oracle Leadership (Yeah, you ain’t getting anywhere near us. We aren’t putting our names on anything.)”

Oracle Leadership. There’s an oxymoron for our times.

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More, More, More

“Why so cynical, Colin?”

Well, let’s look at why Oracle are sacking all these people. Oracle, led by Larry Ellison, briefly the world’s richest man in September last year, worth nearly $400 billion. Yeah, that Oracle.

Are they in trouble? Are they on their uppers?

No, the company is growing at a healthy clip. They are making good numbers on their operating cash flow. So why the sackings? Oh, bugger, it’s AI, isn’t it? It always bloody is, isn’t it?

Yep, Oracle have got into the ‘hyperscaler’ game, building AI data centres for Open AI. They are committed to $50 billion in Capex this year and they can’t fund it out of revenues, so they’ve decided to dump people to free up more cash.

Now, I’m not going to go into the wisdom of Oracle’s move into AI data centres. If you want a view on that, then go and check out what Ed Zitron says about it. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a bit of a gamble, though. The other hyperscalers (Meta, Google, Microsoft) are much bigger and can fund it out of their revenues (so far, although that’s about to change and they are dumping people too). If AI doesn’t deliver the forecast returns, it won’t kill them. For Oracle, though, it quite possibly will.

So all these people are being sacrificed for a gamble because Oracle are scared of missing out on the next ‘big thing’. And Larry’s ego is probably demanding he be No.1 billionaire again.

This week I listened to a podcast with Sven Beckert, about his book “Capitalism: A Global History”. He gave a definition of capitalism as “a specific economic logic where privately owned capital is productively invested to generate more capital, not just the existence of markets.“

This suggests there is no such thing as rapacious capitalism, it is rapacious by logic. The purpose of capitalism is the creation and acquisition of more capital. The fact that it operates through markets is incidental, as are any beneficial effects it brings for the functioning of society.

By this definition, the actions of Oracle, and the rest of Big Tech who are sacking people despite being more profitable than ever in order to chase the (false) promise of AI, makes perfect sense. The actions of billionaires to behave in morally questionable ways in order to acquire more capital, and more money than they could ever spend in several lifetimes, also makes sense. They are just capitalists doing what capitalists do. (They are also doing what capitalists do in other ways, which is use their economic power for personal aggrandisement and continuing enrichment, tilting the playing field firmly in their direction. It’s become more funnel than playing field, and only they are allowed to play there.)

I’d argue that we are now at the point where the incidental effects of capitalism are straying firmly into negative territory, the disbenefits exceeding the benefits. The rest of us (employees, taxpayers, citizens) are suffering the consequences. The deterioration of the working environment and growing precarity of our working lives is but one, albeit very prevalent, consequence. As Oracle employees can testify.

Vampire

It used to be that companies existed to build things, or to provide services. They made profits as a consequence, people got paid for their work, shareholders got dividends and the bosses got a decent bonus.

Now, they have become vehicles for financial jiggery pokery and speculation. The function of the business is secondary to what can be done with the cashflow and the balance sheet to make more money.

The focus used to be on doing something that met a need the world had. Sometimes that would be the prosaic, like making toilet paper. Other times that would be more aspirational, like trying to cure cancer. This is the justification that is often put forward in defence of capitalism, although that’s a category error. It’s actually a justification of markets over central planning, for most things. Although it’s true that capitalism has delivered lots of things that made the world a better place. And also Pop Tarts and automated sales calls, so it’s been a mixed bag.

But capitalists have largely given up creating new stuff these days. They are just looking for ways to make a financial killing and build more capital, and the easiest ways are to scam people, to socialise costs whilst privatising profits, charge rent on assets or establish a monopoly. Or a combination of all of the above. (Watch out for Musk’s float of SpaceX …)

So we come to Private Equity, the rise of which has been considerable in the last few decades and is explored in this Guardian article by Hettie O’Brien, ‘Want to know capitalism’s endgame? Just look at private equity – it has captured our everyday lives’.

As Hettie points out: ‘Private equity funds and related asset managers own water companies, apartment blocks, student accommodation, care homes, children’s homes, funeral parlours and more. The titans of this industry have perfected a cradle-to-grave model of investment focused on the places we live, work, grow old, and eventually die, capturing these core services and squeezing them for profit.’

The Private Equity model is to borrow most of the money to buy a company and place the debt for the borrowed capital on that company. That means the business now has to pay the interest on the debt as well as generate profits. Private Equity will claim they bring in more efficient business practices that increase profits but experience shows that the main ‘efficiencies’ are reducing staff costs (fewer people paid less), cutting quality and letting standards drop, selling off assets, cutting investment in staff training and capital projects, avoiding obligations and regulations, and tax avoidance. If you want a prime example, just look at what has happened to the UK’s water companies since they were privatised.

Pretty much all of these weaken the business in the long term and make it a worse place to work. The product or service is degraded. This will eventually lead to company failure, so there are two options. The first is to sell the business before the chickens come home to roost. The other is to provide the things we just have buy, that the government can’t allow to fail. Essentially, where the customers can be held to ransom and made to pay an ever-increasing price for worsening products and services.

For this, Private Equity charges nice fees and takes the profits it squeezes out of these organisations.

Which means that they have more capital to spend on buying up more businesses and assets to wring the juice out of. It’s kind of a virtuous circle, only without any virtue involved whatsoever. Maybe a vortex sucking wealth down to the devil is a better analogy.

Spinning Around

So let’s complete the circle. It seems that there are AI speculators that are finding prime sites for data centres and buying them up. They do the research and find those locations that have the power, the high-speed internet access and enough water to support these massive, resource-hungry AI data centres that the hyperscalers are looking to build. Then they sit there and wait for the likes of, say, Oracle, to knock on their door and buy the site from them. For which they turn a massive profit, paid for by a few thousand more jobs being killed off.

And we have been groomed to think this is all perfectly normal and OK and inevitable - or as Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.’

Only there is. There always is. We just have to find it, or wait for it to find us.

Because all this shithousery will eventually come to end. Consumed by its own pointless, soulless rapaciousness.

Ball Of Confusion

The way I put this newsletter together is often quite random. I find things that pique my interest and see if they are connected. I’ll get three or four threads and give them a pull and see where they lead. Surprisingly often, one of the threads pulls out one of the other threads, and so on until I find they are all entwined. Even when that doesn’t happen, in the process of writing about them I find a connection, either a causal link or an overarching idea.

Although, in another way, it’s not surprising because everything is connected, we just don’t always see the links. This was an idea I first came across when studying economics (although it is something that many of today’s economists seem to have forgotten) but most people will have first come across it in Jurassic Park, in the explanation of chaos theory by the Jeff Goldblum character. Today, people bandy around ‘quantum entanglement’ as a more impressive sounding shorthand for this.

So let’s go on this week’s journey and see where the threads led us. My guess it will lead to a bugger’s muddle of some sort, like a ball of wool the cat’s been playing with. That seems to be the explanation for most things.

It’s Not What You Say

So let’s start with an observation by Antony Malmo that if you want to build a cult then you should target experts in niche fields. He notes that when he studied cults he found that they often contain highly intelligent people with deep expertise in a narrow field, people with PhDs and the like.

Why is this? Well, in part because they think they are too smart to be duped, and because they often have a limited social social circle and poor social skills.

But it’s also because their deep expertise gives them a few very powerful lens for looking at their field but that these are very poor ones when looking at issues in a multi-dimensional, multi-stakeholder scenario requiring collaborative problem-solving.

To put it more prosaically, they are the eggheads with a brain the size of a planet who are so bad at life admin and basic functioning that you wonder if they should be allowed out on their own. The type of people who can write seminal papers on astrophysics but can’t boil an egg or put the rubbish out reliably.

Their deep expertise just isn’t useful. What is more useful in complex environments is breadth of thinking and experience that enables conceptual thinking. What you want is diversity of thought and mental agility. Of course, that’s what we look for when we’re promoting people, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Oh. Shit.

(Antony includes an extract from ‘Range’ by David Epstein that looked at the conceptual reasoning skills of university students. I read this after I had written my intro so it is with unbearable smugness that I include it;

The bit about business majors not understanding economics is SO on the nose too…)

Tower Of Babble

New research by Cornell University shakes us with the news that people who like corporate bullshit are the worst equipped people to make decisions. In other news, ursine mammals defecate in woodland areas.

To quote an Inc. article on this:

“The new research from Cornell University organizational psychologist Shane Littrell confirms what buzzword haters have always suspected. People who eat up meaningless corporate speak also tend to be bad at practical decision making and analytical thinking.

In short, the more you love corporate BS, the less well you’re likely to perform at work.

Good at corporate BS, bad at actual work.”

Still, it doesn’t matter because people who excel at the corporate bullshit don’t get very far because what companies really value is solid decision making and they are very good at identifying who is responsible. They don’t get taken in by the slick talkers and flim flam artists.

Sorry, what? Really? They get promoted all the time?????

YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME !!!!!

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Windmills Of My Mind

OK, just breathe. Relax the shoulders. Think calm thoughts.

We can use AI to sort all this out can’t we? It’s supposed to be brilliant at pattern identification and unearthing the truth in the data. And that’s all in really good hands, isn’t it?

People like Marc Andreesen, who runs a $90 VC fund that invests in tech. The guy who was behind Netscape, the first popular internet browser. A titan of tech. I wonder what he’s been up to lately.

What’s that? He tweeted that “Introspection causes emotional disorders.”

Pardon?

He said on his podcast (no, I’m not linking to it) that his goal is “zero introspection. As little as possible. Move forward. Go.” He claims self-examination is a modern invention, manufactured by Freud and the Vienna Circle in the 1910s.

“Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point,” he said. “It’s all a new construct.”

Say what? Just hang on a minute. I thought these tech bros were all into their Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Meditations’, which, unless I’m very much mistaken, was written before 1910. It is a book that is pretty much entirely about introspection. That’s what it says on the bloody cover, it couldn’t be much clearer.

Still maybe he hasn’t read it. Or any philosophy written in, oh, I don’t know, recent millennia!!

As Jay Latta points out in this LinkedIn post,

“When Marc Andreessen calls introspection harmful, he’s not describing reality. He’s defining a preferred operator profile.

Less reflection → less resistance → more output.

Good for their portfolios. Not necessarily for you.”

He doesn’t want people thinking, he wants them doing. Executing instructions. You know, like code. Because Marc is very smart, he’s very good at code and software. He wrote the first internet browser, don’t you know? Then he pumped and dumped it and made a fortune and created a whole new model for making speculative fortunes out of software companies.

Yes, the future is safe in his hands. Obviously.

King Of Wishful Thinking

Well, they’re not all like that, surely? I mean, take Meta, they’re enormous and big into AI. I’m sure they’re on the right track.

Oh look, here’s a piece about Marc Zuckerberg. He’s building a ‘CEO AI agent’, which the Wall Street Journal describes as ‘to Help Him Be CEO’.

It seems Zuck wants to have an agent that will answer all his questions rather than having to ask those pesky employees. He’ll just reach past them and grab the data, so then he can make decisions faster.

I mean, this won’t cause any problems, will it? I’m sure it will be fine.

I’m sure Zuck will understand all the data, be able to validate it and know the context that it’s been generated in. I’m sure he’ll pick up all the nuances and iron out the ambiguities and have all the knowledge and experience to apply the right judgement. I mean, why wouldn’t he?

And he’ll be able too take decisions faster! That’s good right? I mean, they might be wrong but if you can take them faster, you take a lot more decisions, which means your odds of making a good one are going to be higher, right? And it means he can flatten the organisation and get rid of loads of middle managers

Because what to do middle managers do, apart from get in the way and slow thing down? Yeah, well they deal with the people, OK, but you can get an AI agent to do that. In fact, Meta are already building one. And they translate the instructions from Zuck into things that people can actually do. But Zuck will be able to do that himself, and even faster!

Of course, he could restructure his business around the people. He could create small, self-directing and self-managed teams, networked together through a sophisticated technology platform that would provide enabling services, connect everyone and handle reporting and co-ordination. He could delegate decisions to be nearer the customer, unlock innovation and entrepreneurialism and improve responsiveness and resilience. Faster, better decisions, quicker to action and greater customer focus. That would probably mean less people too, and more fulfilling jobs.

Ah, but that wouldn’t let Zuck be the man sitting at the top, making all the decisions. He wouldn’t get to be Emperor of his own domain. Which would be a shame, because he’s read all those books on Rome, he’s got himself hench and he’s even got the haircut. He’s like Caesar but in a designer hoodie.

So he’s going to be making all the decisions, but faster. As fast as humanly possible. No, faster, because he’s going to get his AI, made in his image, to make some of them for him. It’s all going to be so fast. So much winning.

I’m sure it will be fine.

The whole organisation will run like a supercomputer, at Warp speed. Doing exactly what Zuck wants. Because he’s always getting it right.

Apart from the Metaverse. And virtual reality headsets. And those clunky glasses that only he thinks look cool. Maybe a few other things we’ve all forgotten.

But it’s going to be so fast. All those people, executing Zuck’s instructions to the letter. What could possibly go wrong?

Working at Meta is going to be so great. Well, great for Zuck. As for the rest, who cares? They’ll just be executing instructions. Lines of code in human form.

Welcome to the brave new world of work.

Fade Away and Radiate

Or maybe it’s already here.

Meqa Smith posted this week that she was detecting ‘a quiet desperation simmering just beneath the surface for a lot of people right now.’

She points the the constant ratcheting up of demands upon us in a world designed for profit maximisation rather than human thriving. Points I’ve written about at length. And I too detect that many are reaching a point of overwhelm, or despair. Or as Meqa writes:

“I feel like we’re getting to a point where the physical, mental and emotional impact of all this is becoming undeniable.

Where people are over of the hamster wheel way of life,

sick of the copy-and-paste way of doing business,

frustrated by the utter lack of critical thinking in day-to-day life and business, ready to scream if they read one more post written by Chat GPT, truly infuriated by the relentless political madness.”

She found someone had coined a term for this - “Quiet Cracking”. People are just about functioning but are running on fumes. They’re not complaining, they are going through the motions and falling apart in their own time.

The usual response from the macho management brigade, the likes of Musk and Zuck and Andreessen, is that if people get burnt out, we just replace them. It’s running a business model with people as a consumable, the apotheosis of (US-led) capitalism today.

Only they’ve burnt through all the people. The replacements are just as knackered as the people being chucked out. The cogs you are getting in are as broken as the ones you are swapping out.

It turns out that people do matter, after all. As Joni Mitchell sings in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

Well maybe the real apotheosis of today’s capitalism is when AI has replaced all the people and you have companies that just produce profit, without all that messy human stuff. Every company is a whirring, humming supercomputer of churning through the code incessantly, overseen by our tech overlords. The world created as they see it, through the very particular lens of software and automation. A world drawn in data and numbers, responding to their instructions and producing perfect outcomes all the time.

Only that’s not how the world is. You can reduce it to data and numbers but it’s not real, it’s an abstraction that throws out all the valuable stuff. But if you’re very, very smart and deep into computers then you don’t see that stuff. The art, the improvisation, the paradoxes, the love, the soul. You don’t hear the music, you hear an audio stream. You don’t see the beauty, you see a photo reel. You don’t feel the spirit because it can’t be digitised.

Listen to what these ‘geniuses’ say. It’s bullshit, and they are impressed by each other’s bullshit. So they make bad decisions because they believe their own nonsense. And they make bad decisions because they see the world through software and sci-fi and a very partial view of philosophy (or none, perhaps) but they are operating in a fiendishly complex world of inter-related unknowns and unknowables. And their bad decision are creating machines for a world that exists only in their eyes.

All the people who could tell them the errors they are making are also the ones who really like the bullshit, because they’ve been promoted to positions of power where they also get to make bad decisions. Like following the ‘geniuses’ without question.

Along the way, they decided us mere mortals weren’t really that important. That there were plenty of us to be used to fuel their machines.

But there aren’t. We’re spent because the world they are building is not fit for us. And now, when we’re not there to be used, it turns out we are important after all.

Oh my. What a bugger’s muddle.

As usual.

Mad World

Sorry, I’ve missed the last couple of weeks due to illness (☹️) and by going skiing (⛷️😎❄️🍻) and it’s taken me a while to get back into the swing of things because, well, the world’s gone fucking mad. Or, to be precise, madder. Scrolling through my social media feeds, the news, podcasts, newsletters and the rest of the firehose of content that I’ve pointed back at myself once again, I am struck at the bifurcation between the banal and boring and the ‘oh my god, what new hell is this!!!’. Is it any wonder we’re all frazzled and our brains are scrambled?

It’s also not surprising that people just tune out and watch cat videos all day. Or, in my case, skiing videos. And those woodworking ones where they take a lump of tree, pour some epoxy resin on it and make it into a beautiful piece of furniture. Oh, and ones with pickleball tips and tricks.

In the UK, the last time we had a Labour government was in 1997 and it marked the emergence of the idea of ‘spin’, which is the forceful presentation of the most favourable interpretation of events and positioning of messages. In truth, this had been part and parcel of politics forever but the Labour government, under their ‘spin doctor’ Alistair Campbell, pursued the tactic with both vigour and rigour to keep the party ‘on message’ and to attempt to control the narrative. (It should be noted that Labour were faced with a largely hostile, right wing press who didn’t like being challenged so robustly and having their misdemeanours called out, so the accusation of ‘spin’ became a useful stick to beat the government with).

So what’s this got to do with the price of fish, I hear you ask? Well, spin was nothing new to me at the time, I worked in marketing. It’s pretty much what we do. After all, you wouldn’t want to present a crap image of the company to the world, would you? That it had ‘escaped’ into politics wasn’t really surprising, it was part of a trend to more ‘retail’ politics where image grew in importance over substance.

It was effective and so, over time, it escaped into everything. Today, presenting an image is more important than reflecting reality. In fact, often the image is confected to obscure the reality. What we are being told has become increasingly detached from the underlining reality and what we actually experience. We feel this disassociation but can’t quite put our finger on it. For example, we are told that people are the most valuable asset and then see our colleagues discarded without reason and in the most callous way. We’ve found a word for it too - gaslighting.

It’s not quite lying because there’s a smidge of underlying truth, a tenuous link to reality.

Or there was. The came the ‘post-truth’ society, most obviously exploited by Trump. Now what is said is simply a story. Possibly true, probably not, impermanent and changeable. Whatever is said is contested. There’s no agreed version of reality, no undisputed facts. Everything is shifting beneath us.

In our desperation to get some grasp on reality, to find some stable understanding of what’s going on, we turn to commentators and experts to help us interpret this mess of facts and lies and create a more stable picture of the world.

It’s a sign of how much things are messed up that commentators are thriving right now, through podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels and the plethora of channels now freely available. (Look, I’m not knocking it. It keeps me off of the streets!).

And, ironically, one of the more popular commentators on politics in the UK is - Alistair Campbell. The original ‘spin doctor’. Well, it takes a kidder to spot a kidder.

Anyway, what this all means is that we can take nothing at face value, we can take nothing for granted or as settled. We have to evaluate everything, interpret and validate every piece of information, look for the hidden meaning and the tells of disinformation and lies. We have to be constantly vigilant not to fall for the lies, not to be sold on a story. It’s no fun and it’s exhausting.

And I’d rather be skiing.

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Little Lies

I guess the point I am making is that this used to be a fringe problem and now it’s everywhere. We are looking at the world through a fractured mirror, all the time.

Oh no, I’m going to have to write about AI again, aren’t I?

AI has got more spin than a room full of washing machines. From what it is useful for, the business case behind it, how it’s going to make money, to it’s impact on the world, none of what we are told can be tied down to reality.

But it’s also become CorporateLand’s latest favourite excuse for doing the same old shit they always do, namely sacking people to juice the numbers.

We’ve seen a wave of announcements from companies like Block and Atlassian of layoffs ‘due to AI’. Only when you look a little bit deeper (and I really don’t mean much deeper), you find there are many other reasons why they might be sacking people.

Firstly, most tech companies overhired during COVID because they overestimated the future demand for their services and, well, everyone else was hiring so they had to follow the herd. So now they are having to correct for their previous bad judgment, but rather than own up to that, it’s much easier to use the magic incantation of ‘AI’.

Secondly, unless you weren’t paying attention, stock markets are down when you exclude the AI bubble and business conditions are worsening. Trump’s tariffs, wars (Trump again), higher interest rates, the climate crisis. There’s a lot going on right now.

And thirdly, there are often specific issues for each organisation. Block invested heavily in blockchain and bitcoin, which hasn’t gone as they had expected. Again, rather than own up to their mistake, we get obfuscation and diversion by uttering the magic incantation, ‘AI!’

We’re now reaching the stage where companies can barely be bothered to ‘spin’ it anymore. Meta are dumping staff despite recording record profits. Yeah, but they have to, OK?, because AI and something something stay competitive.

But people are the most important asset, right? Just remember that.

Careless Whispers

In a LinkedIN post, Professor Jeffrey Pfieffer remarks that layoffs (or mass sackings, as I prefer to call them) are increasingly common and largely unrelated to the companies financial performance. Research has shown that they are actually contagious, ‘in that they diffuse through companies that share directors and are socially connected.’ (Those connections being wider than ever today).

They are a signal, to peers and to the stock market, that the C-suite is grasping the opportunities for growth (whether real or imaginary). They are an expression of managerial virility.

But of course, that’s not the story that’s told. No, it’s ‘AI’. It used to be globalisation. Or supply chain optimisation. Or outsourcing. Or offshoring. Or whatever other trends were being slavishly followed at the time. No-one says ‘we’re doing it because everyone else is and we don’t want to miss out’. No, it’s all ‘our company is uniquely placed to take advantage…yada, yada, yada’.

More stories disconnected from reality. More ‘spin’ that obscures.

The cost, as Pfeiffer points out, falls elsewhere.

‘Research going back decades consistently shows that layoffs increase mortality and morbidity, by increasing stress and depression, the suicide rate, and various unhealthy, stress-induced behaviors.’

This human wreckage is then cleared up by government and society. Or, in other words, by us. The victims, the families, the coworkers, the taxpayers.

I shared Pfeiffer’s post with this comment:

Layoffs (sacking people) are an everyday brutality of business carried out by careless people showing off to each other.

It’s also feels like reflection of our times. Careless people ruining the lives of others, just for show. The Great Gatsby 2.0?

(Yeah, he’s already building the ballroom, isn’t he?)

Little Boxes

It seems many bosses have had their way and dragged people back into offices. They say it’s to improve culture, collaboration and innovation but have presented no evidence of how it has a positive impact on those things and they aren’t measuring those things in any meaningful way, so everyone knows that’s bollocks.

Employees know the real reason is power and status, that having them all in makes the bosses feel important and it’s also more convenient for them when they want to interrupt productive work to hold some random meeting or ask a question that’s already been answered in the report they insisted on last week…

And now we have a war in the Middle East that is causing a leap in oil and gas prices, which makes travelling more expensive and is going to worsen the cost of living crisis. There’s also attacks by Iran on key choke points and vulnerabilities, places where people and resources are concentrated. You know, like production facilities, distribution hubs and, er, office blocks in cities. Currently, it’s limited to the Gulf and thankfully only a small number of targets but it can easily escalate and there is the threat of terrorist attacks elsewhere.

And we’ve had this sort of shock before, in 1973. It led to power cuts. We may be less reliant on oil and gas from the Gulf these days but if it remains shut for weeks, they are not an impossibility.

I’m not scare-mongering here, I’m just pointing out a risk scenario that has become significantly more possible in the last few weeks. The way to mitigate this is to distribute people and resources. You know, like we did in COVID. This would also reduce use of fossil fuels and help employees reduce their expenditures.

We could have moved towards greater resilience, learning the lessons from COVID and preparing our societies for the next shock (of which there are many possible sources, such as the climate crisis, another pandemic, natural disasters, cyber attacks, more wars, financial collapse and AI). I’m not some sort of savant here, I’m just paying attention.

So we could have learned some very important lessons from COVID and put ourselves on a much better footing for the situation we are facing now. Instead we decided to ignore most of that and try to wind the clock back.

Because culture. Or something.

Let’s see how that goes when everyone has to use to the stairs to get out of the high-rise office building you’ve dragged them back too.

Call Me Al

The latest issue of ‘Surviving Corporate’ is chapter 1.7 of ‘The Corporate Survival Guide’, entitled ‘Power and Status’.

It’s almost like it’s written by the same person, right?

It’s certainly not written by AI. No, not him, I mean Artificial Intelligence. This is definitely not artificial. Whether it is intelligence I’ll leave to you to decide. I’m on the fence about it myself, tbh.

Looking For Clues

It’s hard to read anything about the workplace today that doesn’t mention AI, in much the same way that everything talked about Work from Home in the aftermath of the pandemic.

What do these two seemingly disparate things have in common? Well, they are both external shocks on the workplace that threaten considerable disruption, and possibly transformation. They both challenge long-held assumptions about work and organisations. They both pit the interests of employees and society against those of employers and investors. They are both unavoidable, you can’t ignore them, you can’t wind back time and put the genie back in the bottle (not that it will stop some from trying).

These are all true but I don’t think they are the main point of commonality. What both COVID-enforced Work-from-Home and the introduction of AI into the workplace show is just how little organisations really understand about how the work gets done, by whom, what are the critical conditions and where the value is generated. In short, they expose the ignorance in most organisations (at least at the senior level) of what’s actually going on.

They expose the stories we tell ourselves about work as just that, stories. Comforting tales that allow us to carry on in blissful ignorance instead of doing the work needed to really understand what’s happening. Convenient delusions that allow us to avoid looking at the real issues, and to avoid facing up to them.

(I am generalising here to make a point, of course. I am sure there are some organisations who really have a deep understanding of how they work and what their people do to create value. I just don’t think there are that many of them. I certainly don’t see any evidence of their abundance.)

I started to think about this on reading about how the introduction of AI is reducing the number of entry level roles because it can do the sort of tedious, repetitive ‘grunt’ work that had traditionally been given to entrants. You know the sort of thing, the background research, the data-crunching, the Excel wrangling, the Powerpoint production. Low value work through which the new entrants familiarise themselves with the field, pick up an understating through a kind of osmosis, sit alongside experienced coworkers and absorb information.

The fear is that if AI soaks up all this work and these roles disappear, there will not be the necessary career paths for the future expert workers.

But I don’t think the problem here is AI. The problem of new entrants not having the opportunity to work alongside their more experience coworkers and learn is not new, it’s been a problem for the last 5 years. Only it’s been blamed on something different, it’s been blamed on Working from Home and hybrid schedules.

And I don’t think this problem suddenly appeared in the wake of COVID, I think junior workers finding it hard to get time to learn from their experienced coworkers has always been a problem. Getting time with boss has been a challenge for donkey’s years and it’s been getting worse due to rising workloads and broadening spans of control. COVID just made it more acute, and AI threatens to turn it up a notch or two more.

The real problem is that this is a crap way to bring people through. It’s unstructured, variable in quality and quantity, and likely to get squeezed out by other priorities. For the more experienced employees, it’s an extra, unpaid and unvalued burden.

It may be how it’s always been done but now it’s being exposed as totally inadequate. Sitting people alongside those with experience and hoping they absorb knowledge through some kind of osmosis is unlikely to be efficient and effective, is it? To take the way in which artisans learnt from their master and apply it to knowledge work in a modern organisation is not just daft, it’s almost criminally negligent.

AI is just the final nail in coffin, giving the the clearest example of how leaving people development to chance is a bad strategy because it eventually gets squeezed out by the pursuit of profits and efficiency.

The solution is to rethink and redesign the way we develop people and enable them to develop the skills and experience they need. We need to make it a conscious and deliberate part of an organisation’s operation, not leave it to chance and the good nature of the (already overworked) workforce.

They say that when the tide goes out, you find out who’s not wearing any swimming costumes. Well, AI is just lowering the water level. Just like COVID did. Instead of trying get the tide to rise again, we need to go shopping for some new swimwear.

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Hysteria

We are well and truly into the hysteria phase of the AI hype cycle. Yet another piece of alarmist bullshit came out recently, “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, from a self-proclaimed financial analyst company called Citrini Research. I say ‘self-proclaimed’ because this piece seems to lack any real analysis and as for finance - well, it’s got some numbers in it.

I started reading it and got about 6 pages in before I hit my bullshit overload function and had to go into the garden and shout at the crows to calm myself down. It’s basically a piece of fiction based on some utterly groundless assertions, mostly derived from the self-serving utterances of the CEOs of the AI companies that want to raise billions of dollars in investment. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), nowhere is any evidence offered to support these assertions.

So, to be succinct, it’s bollocks. Utterly transparent, weapons-grade bollocks. And yet it caused a sell-off of software company stocks because gamblers investors swallowed the story that AIs like Claude Code or Codex mean companies can build their own software applications (specifically software-as-a-service or SaaS) like CRM systems, HR systems or even massive ERP systems like SAP.

Dear readers, they can’t.

This is hysteria. This response shows clearly that the aforementioned gamblers investors have no idea what they are investing in. They are not being helped by a media that uncritically repeats this nonsense without any of the scrutinising, fact-finding and critical analysis they are supposedly paid to do. Which suggests they have no idea what they are writing about either, or they are too lazy or stupid to do their jobs.

AI is such a multi-layered phenomenon, I am thinking about writing a piece on just that. This story touches on a few but it certainly does not touch on what AI can actually do and what products we might actually be able to use in organisations in the future. It’s got nothing to do with the actual technology. Do not lose sight of that because that’s the only bit that matters.

Most people do not understand the complexity involved in delivering the everyday services they rely on. That’s true whether it’s getting the water to come out of your tap, the electricity to run your home, the networks that make your phone work, or the software systems you use for personal and work use. At their heart, those software systems are just a bunch of code running on a computer somewhere but that is really just a fraction of what is needed for you to be able to use them.

There is a maintenance operation to keep the code running and adapted to changing interfaces and systems around it; the technical infrastructure to keep the system available; the networks to deliver it to you. Then there’s the legal structures; the contracts; the legal conformance; governance and oversight structures; the data protection apparatus; the back up systems; the liability in instances of failure; the customer support; the billing and reporting systems; the financing and financial management.

And that’s all before we get to the daily challenges of just making the bloody thing work reliably, despite the best efforts of the meat-puppets (that’s us) to screw it all up.

But the investors gamblers and the ‘journalists’ aren’t interested in any of that. They are just interested in jumping on the next bandwagon to make money or build profile, which they will then leverage to jump to another opportunity just as this one crumbles to dust. They used to be interested in understanding, it used to matter, people used care. Today, however, it’s all about appearance and if you can front it out, you can blag your way to power and success. It’s part of the bigger picture of detachment from the reality that is blighting our political, financial and social system today.

Anyway, the sell-off created a bit of movement in the markets, which means professional investors cleaned up and the rest of us got left with the losses. And it generated a load of views and clicks and opportunities to write more bollocks about AI, so the media got their fix whilst we all got our time wasted and our anxiety ratcheted up a bit more.

‘Cushty’, as Del Boy would put it.

The Tide Is High

You know what they say, it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

The truth is that nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI and how it will impact the future. But that’s true of many other things as well. We don’t know how the current geopolitical tensions will develop, we don’t know how the economies will perform, we don’t know when and what the next pandemic will be, we don’t know how global warming will impact us (worryingly, it’s looking worse than the already alarming predictions). We don’t know a whole host of things that could turn the world upside down again.

Because I studied Economics at university, I am quite comfortable with this uncertainty. The economy is an impossibly complex thing, what happens is the outcome of billions of unknowable and separate decisions passing through billions of unmappable connections and interrelationships. Actually, it’s probably trillions rather than billions. It’s a lot, OK?

Economics made the mistake of thinking it could understand all this and model it, and so predict the future. Well, that worked out well, didn’t it? Conventional economics missed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and still can’t explain why it happened. The way I was taught to look at Economics is to consider the forces acting upon the economy and the way they interact and relate to each other in complementary and contradictory ways (sometimes both at the same time).

I find this a useful lens to look at the future, whether generally or of work. It’s what led me to come up with my ‘Forces of Crapification’, namely

• Putting profits before people

• Valuing efficiency over effectiveness

• An obsession with process and measurement

• The spread of mobile phones and the ‘always on’ culture

• Tech replacing human interaction

• Increasing work loads, hours and stress

I’m tempted to come back and revise these from time to time but I find most ‘new’ things fit into these. AI is part of tech replacing human interaction and will also increase work loads and stress (in theory it could reduce hours but a) studies suggest users of AI-agents actually work more hours b) employers are always going to push for more work if at all possible). The drivers for AI adoption are in the first three of my forces.

These forces have been getting stronger over the past several decades and so the real question is ‘What is going to change the direction of travel?’. As I suggested last week, in a conclusion that surprised me as much as anyone else, AI could be a factor. However, it can only one factor in the turnaround. I wonder what the others could be?

If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. It’s a line of reasoning I’m going to follow up in the coming weeks.

The Other Side

This week’s post in my ‘Surviving Corporate’ newsletter is titled ‘Uncomfortably Numb’. It’s about why we end up numbing ourselves to cope with corporate life and where that can end up (and how to avoid getting there).

Surviving Corporate is the companion to this newsletter, it’s where I look at the personal experience of being in corporate life and dealing with its aftermath (similarly to politics, all corporate careers end in failure. Well, most of them.) I do that from the view point of my personal experience, both what I went through and what I have learnt during my recovery.

I’d like to create a space for a conversation about how we deal with corporate life, and particularly the harms that many of us suffer. I believe it would be greatly beneficial to people to take part on that conversation, either as a contributor sharing their story or as an observer, where both could have their experience validated and know they are not alone. I hope it would become a place to create solutions and provide support, in time.

This conversation doesn’t happen for a few reasons. Employers discourage it because it draws attention to how potentially harmful the environment they are responsible for can be. Those who have been through be experiences and emerged the other side often want to just forget about them and pretend it never happened. And those who are suffering, either still in corporate or having been ejected, feel isolated and wrongly feel shame and guilt about their situation.

We need to break that silence and get this issue out in the open, both to help those suffering and to create pressure to make the workplace less harmful.

If you are interested in taking part in that conversation, you can register your interest on this form and I’ll get in touch shorty. Or you can subscribe to Surviving Corporate and just listen in for a bit.

The Eve Of Destruction

The AI frenzy continues to build. The latest flurry was boosted by a post by Matt Shumer that went viral, titled, with typical understatement, “Something Big Is Happening”. I’m not going to link to it because it’s alarmist nonsense and it’s also hard to read because he used an AI to write it.

“Who’s Matt Shumer?”, I hear you ask. Well, he’s not exactly an uninterested observer. He runs an AI start-up and invests in AI. He is what you might call an ‘AI Booster’.

And his piece says that AI is coming for your job (yes, you, at the back. Your job!). But you’re not helpless, all you need to do is buy all the best AI models now and start learning 24x7 how to use them.

Is that alarmist? Let’s see, he starts his piece with an analogy. And that analogy is - COVID. So, yeah, I’d say that was fucking alarmist, likening AI to the biggest mass psychological terror of the past several decades. Oh, and he has zero evidence to back up his many assertions, just his personal experience and other people’s baseless opinions.

Why does this matter? For lots of reasons, the rest of which I’ll cover in a future post, but here I want to talk about the misrepresentation of AI and the impact it is, and might, have.

We are being fed a story that AI is inevitable and it’s coming for us, so resistance is impossible, we just have to adapt (but what they really mean is submit). And this story is not true.

Much of the repeating of the story in not intentionally malicious (unlike Shumer’s piece) but a false interpretation of what’s happening to fit an erroneous, but heavily promoted, narrative.

I offer up as an example a piece by Charter on their recent ‘Leading with AI’ Workplace Summit. They say themselves:

“The headlines will focus on Sebastian’s (Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna) announcement that Klarna has reduced headcount 50% through attrition while growing revenue per employee from $300,000 to $1.3 million and increasing average compensation by 60%. But the real story is how he’s reversed his strategy twice in two years, and what that evolution reveals about where AI transformation is actually heading.”

So the summit was all about ‘AI’s coming for your jobs’, you might assume. Because that’s the narrative that is being reinforced here.

But you’d be wrong. And actually, I don’t agree with them about what the real story is, because to me the real story is that companies are redesigning work so that they can leverage the benefits of AI.

Microsoft, IBM, Dropbox, Thompson Reuters all had sensible perspectives on how to use AI. It’s not about adoption, it’s about outputs. It’s not about individual productivity, it’s about outputs.

In many ways, the points they made are reassuring. They can see that AI is not a silver bullet to replace jobs but a strategic opportunity to redesign the way their organisations function and the way the work gets done.

IBM are getting entry-level hires to design their own work so that it leverages the AI tools. As one leader put it.

“When you involve employees, you get the job redesign right because they’re the ones who really know it.”

OK, it’s a statement of the perfectly bleeding obvious but the fact that they said it is a massive step forward.

But, as Charter point out, the headline is going to be the guy who replaced 600 jobs with AI, because that fits the narrative.

Of course some jobs are going to disappear. AI is a technology of automation and that’s what automation does. But the real story is that jobs are going to change, and quite possibly for the better. For the employees, and for the business.

And if AI is the catalyst for that change, then some good might come from what is lining up to be a mother and father of a mess economically.

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Say It Ain’t So

Perhaps what we should be worrying about is what AI is doing to the way that we communicate.

We’ve seen massive changes over the past several years already. At the start of my career, not only did we communicate by written letters and memos but some were still using the stilted language of ‘business correspondence’ i.e.

“Dear Sirs,

further to my letter of the 14th inst., and not withstanding prior agreements, we wish to communicate that we are agreeable to proceeding as laid out in the appendices attached herein. We would appreciate your written confirmation by return.

Your inestimable servant,

Mr. Quentin Ponsoby-Smythe, MA, DSO and bar.”

Today, that would probably be a WhatsApp saying “It’s a GO!🚀”

Communication has become more informal, more frequent, faster, shorter and just, well, more! The gap between business and personal communication has closed and, for some, disappeared (as a quick look at Pete Hegseth’s signal messages about Yemen show, or the emails between Epstein and Peter Mandellson).

However, in all this, there has still been a space for longer form communication. Indeed, it has seen something of a resurgence through platforms like this and even through the growing number of books being published. We see business ‘leaders’ using these platforms to share their views on what is happening and to seek to shape the conversation. The Shumer piece I refer to above is an example of this and the incredible reach available if something goes viral.

However, the tide of AI slop is about to wash over this. I don’t just mean the obvious rubbish that is being produced and shoved out over social media, such as Donald Trump dumping crap all over his countrymen from a fighter jet. Again, the Shumer piece is an example of what I am talking about, as it is clearly written with AI and is terrible to read.

Using AI to write will make writing more mediocre, more average and just worse. This is what The Register has called ‘semantic ablation’ in their opinion piece ‘Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation’

It’s not the catchiest of names is it? But it’s a real problem. AI is a prediction engine and so it looks at the distribution of probable next words and picks one out of the middle of the distribution. This means that it discards any unusual words or syntax deliberately. Over time, it trends to the mediocre, it removes any colour and quirkiness, and it stops the development of language. (I paraphrase what the article says here, so don’t @ me if you think I’m wrong, read the original!).

It’s why we find AI writing so hard to read. It’s the written equivalent of the monotone computer voice, you understand what it’s saying but you can’t listen to it for long because it’s so lifeless.

And no, it’s not going to get better, for the same reason it’s not going to stop confidently bullshitting (what the industry has euphemistically termed ‘hallucinating’) because these are features of the way it is designed.

AI takes away the fundamental qualities of some of the very best and groundbreaking writing. Like coming with new analogies. And stating sentences in ungrammatical ways. Making up new words, like ‘decrapify’ and ‘enshittification’. Deliberately playing around with sentence structure and grammar to grab attention.

All the things that make writing distinct. That give someone’s writing voice. AI will never sound truly distinctive. It will never write anything like the iconic advertising slogans, because they are, well, original. They didn’t follow precedents, they didn’t follow the rules - quite often, they deliberately broke them,

What an AI writes is beige, repetitive, and derivative. Because that’s what it’s designed to do.

That not what we want to read. And that’s not how human thought and language progresses.

On The Border

Another new phrase (to me, at least) that I heard about AI is that it has a ‘jagged frontier’. What that means is that it is stunningly good at some things and unbelievably bad at others. Yes, it can scan a mass of scientific papers, identify the ones that are relevant to your area of enquiry and summarise the findings in a matter of minutes, but it will also tell you to eat a rock a day for vitamins or use glue to get the cheese to stick to your pizza.

The solution? You have to try using it and find out what it’s good at and what it’s bad at. You have to discover that frontier for yourself through trial and error.

This is like telling someone to find out the layout of a room by shutting their eyes and walking around. Sure, you’ll bash into walls and fall over furniture but you will eventually find out where everything is! And, bonus, you won’t need to switch the light on when you go into the room at night time!! Bruised shins? That’s just the cost of learning.

What this actually means is that AI models, by which I mean LLMs, are unreliable. Worse than that, they are inconsistent. You try something and it might or might not work.

This is very bad news for adoption. We humans don’t like to play Russian Roulette every time we use a new bit of technology. We don’t trust something that is a genius one minute and an idiot the next. It’s unnerving.

AI adoption is still in the pioneers and early adopters stages. It has yet to ‘cross the chasm’ to early adopters. Already signs are that adoption by corporate users has stayed low and shows little sign of upward movement. That’s when companies have made it available to everyone, provided training and encouraged its usage. That’s despite tech companies stuffing it into every conceivable orifice of their products. That’s despite the costs of usage being unrealistically low, way below cost.

I don’t think it’s going to make it across that chasm. Certainly not in it’s current form. Better products than AI chatbots have failed.

Messy

I first wrote about AI in May 2023 (Putting The Chimps In Charge), and it’s been popping up more and more ever since. At one point I am pretty sure I said “And this is my last word on AI”, a promise I have very clearly not kept.

Now it seems almost impossible to write about the future of work without mentioning AI. This is not, however, a reflection of how AI is actually impacting the workplace. It’s a reflection of how much we are being told AI is going to affect the workplace. Not just affect it, transform it!

This is a perfect fusion of the most used bullshit word of the year with the most hyped load of bullshit of the year.

We are in a period of frenzy. The AI boosters are boosting harder than ever and everyone is chasing around trying to grab a piece of the action and be sure not to miss on ‘the next big thing’. The atmosphere of FOMO is so thick you cut it into bricks and build a castle with it.

But let’s not forget what organisations are. They are communities of people working together for a common set of outcomes. (Not the same outcomes but overlapping and mutually supportive outcomes). An organisation without people is not an organisation, it’s a filing entry.

And, as David Oks argues in his excellent substack piece ‘Why I’m not worried about AI job loss - We’re not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine’, people are bottlenecks.

“The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we’ll need humans to deal with them: we will have, in other words, complementarity.”

We often underrate how inefficient things actually are, and that inefficiency is caused by us in several ways. Laws, culture, personal preferences, rivalries, politics, and simply being resistant to change, to mention a few. Those inefficiencies come down to us, we are the bottlenecks.

And as Oks points out;

“Production processes are governed by their least efficient inputs: the more efficient the most efficient inputs, the more important the least efficient inputs.”

(That’s us, by the way.)

The more useless we are, the more important we become! And AI is making us both more useless and more important. How good is that? What a delightful paradox.

This is not an entirely new insight, however. Ever since the first factory, we’ve been the weak link. We’re the sand in the gears of the machine, whether that’s a grimy Victorian mill or a sleek, futuristic office full of hipster coders.

“Ah,” you say, “but the promise of AI is to replace the humans!” Well, good luck with that. Tech boosters have pushing that promise of full automation for over a century, as I mentioned last week.

As anyone who has launched or sold a product to ‘the public’, the human capacity to utterly fuck things up is a marvel to behold. The variety and novelty of ways they find to bugger up whatever it is you’ve given them will astonish and bewilder you (and drive you to drink or drugs or probably both).

It’s our secret superpower. But let’s not tell the machines. Let them find out for themselves what a ‘jagged frontier’ looks like.

When The Sun Goes Down

I’ve always believed that you can’t talk about the state of the workplace in isolation. You have to look at the broader economic, social and political trends and how they impact the organisations that created the work environment.

This interconnectedness has always been there, or course, but has become more intensified over the past few decades and especially the last ten years. In that time we have had Brexit, Trump, COVID, the invasion of Ukraine, Gaza and Trump again. These are partly a reflection of a rapidly changing media landscape, a rise in right wing populism and the undermining of major institutions of nation states and the global order.

The connection of previously separated spheres of interest was encapsulated by the front-row presence of the Tech Broligarchy and Wall Street’s Big Swinging Dicks at Trump’s inauguration. Finance, Tech and Politics in one deadly embrace. (Deadly for whom, exactly, is still playing out. But it’s not good for the majority of us).

And then we come to Epstein. The latest release of documents has given us a view into a web of relationships across elite networks that were not widely known about (although Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Geoghegan and other investigative journalists have been pointing to the connections for some time).

It’s not just the connections, which are alarming in themselves. It’s the way that the members of these elites talked to each other and about the rest of us. The most shocking is the casual acceptance, or at best wilful blindness, about Epstein’s depravity and abuse of young women. The man should have been a social pariah after being convicted of trafficking young women for sex but it seems that a significant percentage of his contacts found a way to gloss over that and maintain the relationship.

It’s this that draws my attention. Those who joined in with abuse of young women, enabled by Epstein, are clearly appalling and must feel the full force of the law whatever their status. Those who defended him and are now revealed as seeing him as some sort of victim, their reputations are forever tainted by this and they should suffer the consequences. These are easy to condemn.

But it is those who turned a blind eye, who never challenged Epstein’s behaviour, who found euphemisms to skirt around his crimes, who failed to exercise proper moral judgement, they are the ones who enabled Epstein. They allowed him to continue to harm and abuse young women, they were the ones who decided not to stop him.

To put it plainly, Epstein was a nonce. If Epstein had been an ordinary working class person, he would have excluded from civil society. He would have been in fear of his safety, he would have been run out of town. He would have been sent to prison for a very long time, and would probably have spent most of it in isolation for his own safety.

This is not just a case of ‘one rule for us, another for them’. It’s about how bad behaviour and even depravity gets normalised in elite groups. It’s about how moral codes get loosened and fall away, how the guardrails get eroded and how we end up with horrific outcomes.

Because we have seen this in corporate life also. Behaviour that would have been unacceptable back when I entered the workforce in 1980 has now become acceptable, and in some cases is applauded. Probably the clearest example of this is the attitude to sacking people (layoffs or redundancies, as they are euphemistically described). It used to be the last resort, seen as a sign of failure of management, a last ditch attempt to revive a business. Then it became an acceptable strategy, with suitably anodyne labels like ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’. Still something used in extremis, a one-off adjustment to match changed circumstances.

Then it became something that Wall Street applauded, and encouraged as a way to increase profits. CEOs got praised for ‘cutting out the dead wood’ and ‘getting rid of the fat’. Then it became a regular event, a tool for gussying up the numbers for the reporting period, to juice the stock price.

All of this took no account of the devastating impact on the employees, on their families, on the social structures they were part of. The moral code of the social contract was slowly weakened and reduced until we reached this point where it no longer exists, other than as a joke on the ‘woke’.

This is moral rot. If you think of a wooden beam, it can be rotting inside for a long time but still look solid on the surface. As the rot spreads, it reduces the structural strength of the beam until, one day, it suddenly collapses. The external signs of rot may have become more obvious before the failure but the extent is only revealed when it fails.

We can see the signs of rot are growing. Are we going to do something about it, or continue to ignore it until it collapses?

Well, we’ve been ignoring it for a long time now.

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Wassup!

Back in October 2022, I wrote a bit of a skit about how Elon Musk got the money together to buy Twitter. I imagined him and his fellow tech bros and billionaires as a bunch of Essex boys meeting down the pub on a Friday night. This is what I wrote:

As part of the legal action by Twitter to make Musk buy it after he said he didn’t want to (who could have possible thought things would go so badly after such a promising beginning?), a slew of messages between Musk and other ‘titans of Tech’ provided hilarity and incredulity in equal part. Instead of high-flown discussion and sagacious comments on the situation, we were found desperate willy-waving and sycophantic hero-worship. It sounded more like a bunch of Essex wide-boys down the pub on Friday night trying to out-blag each other.

Imagine a scene from ‘Only Fools and Tweeters’. The boys gather at the bar of the The Nags Head.

El-Boy: OK, boys, who’s in on my latest bash? I’ve got this consignment of Blue Ticks, genuine article, straight from the factory in China. I’m going to knock ‘em out at 8 folding-ones a go, they’ll go like hot-cakes. We’ll be rolling in it, I can’t fail. Only I need to raise a few more quid to get them in.

Lozza: Go on, I’ll put in a score.

El-Boy: Jacko, you in?

Jacko: What about Lozza?

El-Boy: He’s in for a score.

Jacko: A score? Tight bastard. I’ll go a pony.

Wazza: Come on boys, El-boy’s got this well sorted. I’m going large. Put me down for a monkey.

Lozza: Yeah, he is a stone-cold genius, after all.

Jacko: Blindin’.

El-Boy. Cushty. Lovely jubbley!

Maybe, by this time next year, Elon will be a millionaire.

(For my non-UK readers, the above is a cultural reference to “Only Fools And Horses”, the peerless BBC comedy show written by John Sullivan)

It was meant to be a joke, not a documentary. But the casual approach to money, to decisions that affect thousands, the glib and superficial understanding and reasoning, the callous sociopathy, we now know is not restricted to matters like these.

It’s not that those who hold the money and power to rule over us are no better than us, it’s that they’re a bloody sight worse than us. And now they don’t even care that we know.

It was always hiding in plain sight, now it’s got big neon arrows pointing at it. It can’t be ignored any longer. Maybe this is the moment the tide begins to turn.

… Baby One More Time

Seth Godin recently posted about how the narrative in our head is a choice and if it’s not serving us, we can change it. It’s not a novel thought or one that’s seldom heard. However, Seth refers to Jeremy Bentham and his theory of the Springs of Action. He writes the following:

200 years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote a pamphlet on how we use words to tell ourselves stories. It’s archaic and dense, so few read it any longer. I asked Claude to give us a summary.

He then provides a link to the summary document, which is an interesting read. Bentham’s core philosophy is that the motives behind an action are irrelevant, what matters is the outcome. That is the only basis on which we should judge an action. Bentham was the founder of utilitarianism (not mentioned in the paper), so he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Anyway, the point that struck me was that Godin had got Claude to provide a synopsis. I don’t know to what degree he then edited it into the document he presents but he could have just found an existing synopsis and linked to that. Or edited it to suit his needs. But he didn’t, he effectively got Claude to make a new one, which is not very efficient.

And Claude isn’t any more efficient. If I go to Claude and ask it to do the same thing, i.e to create a synopsis of Bentham’s original paper, it will go and do it all over again. And produce a different, although undoubtedly similar, output.

This is personalisation of access to knowledge, but is this a good thing? Especially considering the cost - economically, environmentally, intellectually? The likes of ChatGPT have been punted as being like having your own PhD researcher but a real person would go and find existing summaries, not write a completely new one because they would judge that to be a waste of time and effort.

It’s not just unnecessary duplication but one that could degrade shared understanding and knowledge. There’s a reason we work from standard texts and models, to provides a common basis, a lingua franca. Over time, understanding layers upon understanding, deepening the knowledge pool.

AI interrupts and dislocates this process. It allows everyone to create their own reference material, so everyone is working from a slightly different information base. Or, given the way the LLMs create confident bullshit (what they euphemistically call hallucinations), slightly wrong information base.

Is using AI (specifically LLMs) in this way actually useful?

Come to that, are LLMs useful?

Let’s apply Bentham’s own philosophy of utilitarianism to that question. The dictionary* defines it as:

1. The belief that the value of a thing or an action is determined by its utility.

2. The ethical theory proposed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Well, three years in and we’re still debating how useful LLMs are (and don’t forget, we are not paying anywhere near the true cost of using them), so they are failing on that score.

As for achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, that certainly is not the motivating factor behind AI development at the moment. Given the level of anxiety related to the impact of AI on employment and the economy at large, and the likelihood that the benefits, should they emerge, will accrue to elites of technology and finance, it’s a definite fail so far.

Still, you can now get it to create a picture of your dog in Studio Gibli style. Or one of your darkest deprived imaginings of your preferred sexual perversion. So that’s all good, right?

Won’t Get Fooled Again

In a recent post, Brian Merchant of Blood In The Machine points out that what we are seeing with the AI hype is nothing new, in the the history of automation technologies, the ways that they impact working people tend to follow similar patterns.

He goes on to say:

One key lesson is that stories about the incredible power of a new technology have historically been used by entrepreneurs, bosses, and elites to override norms, standards, and laws, or bend them to their favor. Factory owners who adopted mechanized looms in the early 1800s argued that the rules on the books shouldn’t apply to them because they were using new and improved technology. On those grounds, they eventually convinced the British Parliament to tear up most of the laws protecting cloth workers altogether. Decades of immense working class suffering ensued.

This is echoed in the calls by tech CEOs for a ban on AI laws and deregulation so that this ‘new and powerful’ technology can flourish.

Their claim that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is about to arise and unleash untold economic and social benefits is also an echo of earlier times. As far back as the 1800s, the inventor of the early computer, Charles Babbage, and the writer Andrew Ure notably claimed autonomous, human-free factories were just emerging as a way to obscure the brutal working conditions in real-world factories.

The other promise, made sotto voce to CEOs and investors, is that AI will replace labour, that you can automate away the problems and costs. This was also part of the pitch for autonomous factories, avoiding having to deal with the problems of factory conditions and child labour abuses.

There’s nothing new under the sun. AI is just another promise of jam tomorrow, turbo-charged by a surplus of capital chasing extra-ordinary returns and a sociopathic disdain for the people affected.

Halfway to Paradise

‘Hybrid is dead!’, announces Brian Elliot of Work Forward. To be honest, it was only a matter of time.

Hybrid was always a staging post for organisations in change, something they were all forced into by COVID and lockdowns. Once people realised they could be untethered from their desks and work from anywhere, that genie was never going back in the bottle.

How can we be sure? Well, Nick Bloom, the Stanford professor and remote work authority who did the research, has dropped the word ‘hybrid’ from the title of his upcoming book. What more evidence do we need?

You want more? OK, well, despite all the Return To Office CEO chest-thumps over the past year, work-from-home has stabilised at around 25% (this is for the USA). And this is where the problem lies, the fixation on location. It’s incidental, really. What is important is how teams collaborate, where they gather and when being in person matters.

Looking at these puts the focus on how the work is done, and that’s going to lead you to redesign work to take account how things actually are and the opportunities that have arisen (like, er, AI).

The fact is most teams are distributed (in large organisations, at least) and what you need is flexibility. Rigid binaries like ‘Office or Home’ are not useful in the context that organisations find themselves in.

So whilst the chest-beaters are dragging people back into the office 5 days a week, successful organisations are redesigning work to create flexibility and deliver better outcomes. They are also reaping the reward of 30% reduction in employee turnover that flexible working provides, which provides a compelling economic case.

I mean, it would be boastful of me to say that I predicted this. But I did. Not because I’m particularly smart but because it was obvious. Those chest-beaters are ignoring it through wilful ignorance and the overriding need to inflate their own egos. It won’t end well for them.

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Empty Chairs At Empty Tables

In another bombshell, Charter tell us that ‘Half of your meeting attendees are bots’.

This is the growing practice of people sending AI bots along to meetings so that they can attend other meetings or wrangle with the pile of other stuff they have to do (some of it may even be useful, productive stuff. Maybe.)

So the bots turn up instead and send them a transcript of the meeting that they will probably never read because it will be lost in their inbox but they can still say they attended. Or, perhaps more importantly, they don’t have to say they can’t make it because, as we all know, it’s much more acceptable to attend a meeting and read emails surreptitiously than actually say no and have to give a reason why.

The problem here (and this may surprise you to hear me say this) is not AI. Nor is it the availability of AI bots. The problem is the excessive number of meetings people are invited to, the vast majority of which are ineffective and dysfunctional at best, and a massive time suck on everybody. (It’s estimated that meetings cost over $1.4 trillion annually and have more than doubled in number since the 1960s).

Why is this? Because meetings are visible, attendance is a big part of productivity theatre and projecting importance. Whereas as actual collaboration and getting stuff to happen is largely hidden.

Anyway, the article makes the point that AI is an amplifier and in this case it is amplifying dysfunction. It also has some sensible suggestions for how you can tackle this. For those organisations that don’t and continue blithely along (experience suggests this will be most of them), then where will it end?

Imagine you call a meeting and a number of people send AI bots instead. You use a note-taking bot because you don’t have time to take notes yourself and it automatically sends the meeting notes to attendees. Their email bot automatically compares the notes with the transcript the meeting bot took and generates a report of differences, which it sends to everyone. That triggers another wave of emails comparing their differences with the circulated one until the whole thing becomes a fire-fight between everyone’s agentic AIs.

Meanwhile, as I described last week, all of this is available for surveillance by the management AI bots. They conclude all of the attendees to the meeting are indulging in ‘make work’ to waste time, and generate a report to the HR AI to discipline them accordingly. The HR AI reviews procedures and concludes these employees are surplus to requirements, and so dismisses them all instead.

One of the sacked employees decides to exact revenge by disabling the exit bot which should delete everyone’s email accounts, so the various bots continue the firefight after the employees have left. The whole organisation’s IT system begins to slow due to the bot activity and they are also served with astronomical energy and compute bills. However, as the IT systems become more sclerotic, the accounts system slows and the bills don’t get paid. Consequently, the company has its power and compute cut off and is forced out of business,

Fantasy, you say? You should read some of the shit the AI company CEOs are spouting to pump up their businesses.

More Than Words

Ah, AI. The magnificent and ever-expanding bubble, the inverted pile of piffle that towers ever higher. That sucks up huge amounts of money and resources and still has no path to profitability.

Well, if it did, then after three years of incessant puffery, you’d expect some people to be using it. So Gallup looked at ‘How much are US workers using AI?’.

The TL:DR is more than they were but not that much. About a quarter use it frequently, whilst under half use it a bit. Unsurprisingly, the tech industry leads adoption, with those numbers rising to a bit over a half frequently using it and three quarters sometimes using it. If tech is that much ahead, that means many other industries are going to be below the average.

What I found really interesting is that the gap between leaders and employees is growing, as you can see in the following graph:

If you’re looking for a correlating factor here, let me suggest that it is bullshit. Who deals in the most bullshit? Why, Leaders, of course. Avidly followed by Managers, who are almost as fluent. Whilst the poor sods on the front line trying to get stuff done, they have little time for it.

I have pondering for a long time how to make the point that AI is going to be a force multiplier for stupidity. I think we can safely say that bullshit is a marker for stupidity, and so now I have some evidence.

AI may be an amplifier for good or bad as was observed above, but when it comes to stupidity, it’s going to be like putting rocket boosters on it.

Mark my words. There’ll be enough stupidity to stretch to Mars.

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More Than This

Talking of which, there’s been quite a lot of online chatter about an interview with a co-founder of an AI startup, in which he said the following:

For goodness sake, what is wrong with these people?

The most striking bit is ‘marry early’. I mean, what catch, eh? They won’t be there most of the time because they’re working or ‘lifting heavy’, and when they are around they must be an olfactorial delight on that diet. So much to offer.

The man obviously lives in fantasy land. No, not because of the ‘marry early’ thing, but because he’s obviously blagging furiously and spinning nonsense to get investors to pony up for his start-up, whipping them into a frenzy with his stories of AI taking over the world and making us all redundant.

Ooh, maybe his AI company finds the perfect life partner for you and handles all the messy stuff like the proposal, the prenup and the wedding arrangements, so you just have to turn up and say ‘I Do’. Then you get down the gym and lift heavy, so the whole day’s not wasted.

This above extract is from the Financial Times article, entitled ‘Grindcore is the new hustle culture’, which would explain why it’s so execrable. However, Grindcore is not a new term but is an extreme music genre pioneered in, of all place, the West Midlands of the UK. That proponents of this heavy metal/punk fusion go by names like Napalm Death, Brutal Truth and Agoraphobic Nosebleed probably tells you all you need to know about it.

I was going to say that the FT have made a boo-boo here by mixing the two things up but, on reflection, it seems rather appropriate. The only real point of difference is that the music genre has a degree of humour (black, admittedly) that is starkly absent from the Silicon Valley version.

What a time to be alive, eh?

The Other Side

On my other substack, Surviving Corporate, my latest post is about the ‘Working Wounded’, a phrase that resonated with my own experience of corporate life. Are you ready to acknowledge your wounds and start to work on healing? It took me an inordinate amount of time to get to that point.

I want to help people shorten that process and lessen the harms and damage that you can experience in corporate life, which is why I write about my experience. I also want to facilitate some discussion about these topics, to share and validate experiences, find community and explore some personal actions we can take. If you’d be interested in taking part, you can sign up to the waitlist here.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

There’s always two views of the future, the utopian and the dystopian. So it is for the world of work.

The utopian view is that one where organisations are built around enabling people to thrive and contribute to society and the wellbeing of mankind and the planet. It’s one where everyone is able to realise their potential, all employees are treated with dignity and fairness, find purpose and meaning in their work, have autonomy and freedom over their work and are paid enough to live a good quality of life.

The dystopian view is that organisations are built around power and money, are exploitative and rapacious and only benefit the elite of society. People live miserable, soul-draining, precarious existences, forced to serve the demands of their masters. They are controlled through technology, callously exploited and consumed for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

I was going to write that what mostly happens is that neither utopia or dystopia is created but something somewhere in between. However, now I’ve written them out, it’s clear that both outcomes are possible. Indeed, we can find pockets where they are already here. So the question is, which will come to predominate?

History tells us that that will be determined by human nature. Will our better angels prevail, or will our demons consume us? Clearly, there are people pushing in both directions, so we need to look at what weapons they have available to them.

For the future to take a utopian bent, all that is required is a rising of the human spirit. There are enablers and accelerators for that but we already see it happening, so those things only impact the breadth and speed of its spread.

The dystopian future, however, is about suppressing the human spirit, it’s about control and power over others. Exercising that power is a constant endeavour and its effectiveness is determined by the power of the tools available. That control is both physical and psychological and technology and AI is ramping up capability in both areas.

What’s more, these tools are being applied by degrees, their impact growing over time so that we are becoming accustomed to levels of control we would not have accepted a few years ago. Are we being walked into a dystopian future, into techno serfdom?

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All Along The Watchtower

Nick Bloom, the Stanford Professor who is an expert in remote work, posted recently about the surprisingly high number of video calls being transcribed on Roam (a video-calling platform like Zoom and Teams). He expected it would be around 5% but Roam’s data shows it is 25% of all calls that are transcribed.

My first thought is that people who are already overwhelmed by meetings will now have loads of transcriptions to read through of the meetings they couldn’t attend, or, even worse, the ones they have already sat through. That’s not exactly going to ease their workload, is it? What the hell happened to note-taking?

But there’s a more sinister problem here. These transcripts are verbatim records, which can be fed into an AI to check that people are not saying the wrong thing or sharing information that they shouldn’t. Individual contributions to meetings can be policed, at scale.

‘Oh Colin, you’re getting paranoid, companies aren’t going to do that,” you say.

Well, they shouldn’t, I agree. But they can, and some will. In fact, one of my readers told me that their employer already fed all emails into an AI to look for this sort of thing. Effectively, all conversations on company platforms can be digitally captured and analysed. Not only text-based ones like email, instant messaging and app-based but actual conversations in meetings.

So the only ‘private’ conversations at work will be those you hold in person, face-to-face. As long as there aren’t any recording devices in the room. Well, you can always meet in corridors. Except your movements in the building are being tracked too. So they might not know what you said, but that can figure out who you spoke to and when.

The digital panopticon is here.

East Germany was the most surveilled state in the world, and the Stasi were the feared secret police that tracked everyone. They had officers on every street corners, they cultivated informers across society it was said that one half of the population was recruited by the Stasi to spy on the other half). This was huge state apparatus that took a lot of effort to build and money to sustain. Now, companies can buy a far more effective apparatus on the open market. Palantir would love to speak to anyone interested in getting one.

Amazon already track their warehouse workers, monitoring and controlling their every movement (including their bowel ones) like they are malfunctioning robots. Soon, it will be coming to an office near you.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

We’ve fallen into this perilous situation. We’ve assumed the expansion of technology is a good thing and have ignored the inherent dangers.

This is not our fault. The early benefits of technology (I mean computers and digital tools here) were considerable, providing new capabilities and making our lives much easier. The internet and smartphones revolutionised how we live our lives. We saw the tech companies as the good guys, something they were very keen to promote and put considerable effort into sustaining that image, even as their behaviours began to go in darker directions.

We lapped up the gadgets, we embraced the software and apps, we enthusiastically ‘went digital’. Our music, our films, our pictures, our thoughts, our personal information, all got turned into bits and bytes. And then sucked out of our direct control and into the cloud.

For a long time we have accepted that a lot of information about us is held digitally, in the cloud, beyond our control. Some of it is gathered without our real consent (yes, we ticked the box accepting the terms for using the various platforms but what other choice did we really have?), whilst we voluntarily submitted other pieces. And some lay in between, as a consequence of taking a service, almost unwittingly agreed on our part. Whatever path, it’s all up there, and all available to being exposed by bad actors.

And so we come a salutary tale of a massive data breach of the therapy notes of thousands of people in Finland. This happened back in 2020 but has come to the surface again as the BBC interviewed one of the people affected, who has written an account of what happened to them.

A hacker stole the records from the patient database of Vastaamo, a company that ran 25 therapy centres across Finland. They demanded a ransom from the company and also from the individual patients but eventually released all the records onto the dark web anyway. (They were caught and convicted in 2002, sentenced to 7 years in prison).

Meri-Tuuli Auer was one of those patients and she describes in the interview how she was devastated by the hack and suffered poor mental health. It is thought that at least two people killed themselves as a result of the exposure.

This could just be a tale of a small company that was not vigilant enough with its cyber security, one that didn’t take its responsibilities to protect the confidential patient information seriously enough. In this case, the data was extremely personal, and so had an outsize impact. However, these breaches are not that uncommon, and smaller companies are specifically targeted because their cybersecurity is under resourced.

But what about independent practitioners? They must be safer, right? Well, there are a number of platforms that therapists and coaches can use to store patient notes on, all handily stored in the cloud. Where I am sure they are absolutely safe. No?

Did you realise that your conversations with your coach or, more concerningly, your therapist, are sitting somewhere in the ether, vulnerable to being stolen by anyone? Or perhaps sequestered by a State (imagine if the Stasi had been able to lay their hands on this sort of stuff)).

Did you agree to that? Explicitly?

Has anyone asked if the benefits of digitising these notes on people’s inner feelings and thoughts outweigh the risks of them getting stolen and released for all to read? Or is it a case of the benefits falling to the provider and the risk falling to the client?

If you are a coach of a therapist, I suggest you stick to paper notes. That way, a bad actor has to physically break into your office and steal them from your filing cabinet.

Although, no doubt, some idiot has already fed all their digital notes into ChatGPT to see if it can identify any patterns, or help them write a book. And who knows where that personal information about those patients is now?

Blowin’ In The Wind

In other news:

The Guardian had a feature on Ed Zitron, of whom I am a fan, and his scepticism about the AI boom. (The TL:DR is there are two main problems. The first is that there is no killer application for the likes of ChatGPT, certainly not of the scale needed for the LLMs to be viable products. The second is that the business case doesn’t stand up, o

the numbers don’t add up and the investments cannot be recovered.)

This follows a profile of him in the FT. It seems that, finally, the right questions are being asked in the right places. Although this is after a massive failure by analysts and the financial media to provide proper scrutiny.

I wrote about Psycho Bosses in my other substack, Surviving Corporate. If you’ve had one (and the odds are depressingly high) you may find it of interest.
I’m intending to have some facilitated discussion about these and other issues I address in the blog. If you’d like to take part in one of those, to share your experiences and explore ideas of how to avoid or recover from the harms of corporate life, then put yourself on the waitlist here.

Me, I’m off to play some songs on my ukulele, read some books of the ink on paper variety, go for a walk in the forest and play pickleball. And none of it will captured digitally. (Especially the ukulele playing. No-one wants that!).

Broken Strings

It’s been a tough start to the year.

Let’s start on the work front.

Bruce Daisley points out the horror of the jobs market in his Newsletter, as 53% of UK workers say that they are looking for a new job in 2026. Firstly, that’s a lot of people dissatisfied with where they are right now, and it’s probably because of the culture. Secondly, the jobs market is so irretrievably broken that a lot of them are going to find their job search an emotionally draining and ultimately unrewarding experience.

My last foray into the jobs market was after I was made redundant in 1999. Even then, it felt like it was pretty broken, as it began to go online and automated screening started to be used. Now it’s being hit by AI slop, as both sides of the market have effectively increased their ‘fire power’. Applicants can apply for hundreds of jobs with little additional effort, which means that hitting a 1000 applications is not uncommon. Would be employers are being flooded with applications and are using AI screening to ‘manage’ the load. It’s not just AI filters screening AI-generated applications, it’s AI interviews, interminable selections processes and all sorts of other horrors inflicted on applicants (as I wrote about in a recent edition of this missive).

These two effects are netting off, so employers are still struggling to find good quality applicants and employees are unable to find new opportunities. The outcome is unchanged, only we are setting fire to more of the planet in the process of going nowhere.

So a lot of people are going to become even more disillusioned, more people are going to stay in posts they are at best indifferent about, businesses will stagnate and productivity will continue to stay where it is.

Still, I guess it shows there are some applications for AI. Not exactly useful ones but, hey, it’s a start, isn’t it?

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Don’t Leave Me This Way

Daisley also highlights a study by the Guardian that shows how UK businesses have rolled back their commitments to LGBT rights. This appears to be following the lead of the Trump government in the USA, which has taken direct action to discourage support for LGBT communities by business.

So why would UK businesses be influenced by the position of the US government? Well, quite a few of those businesses are owned by US corporations, or US investors, or are reliant on working with US companies and selling to US customers.

The growth in US ownership of UK business has been surprisingly high in recent years and yet is hardly remarked on, despite the fact that around two million people now work for US companies and tens of billions of dollars per year are transferred across the Atlantic to American owners. (For more detail, listen to this interview with Angus Heaton, author of ‘Vassal State - How America Runs Britain’). So the simple answer for many is that they are simply doing their master’s bidding.

The second answer is the dominating effect of the US on UK businesses and the media. Business discourse in the UK is mostly an echo of the US, and we tend to follow where they lead.

And thirdly, the weaponisation of LGBT as being ‘woke’ ideology has made it a hot potato for many companies, and now that support for LGBT communities may have consequences, their commitment has been shown to be merely expedient.

This is a reflection of the prevailing winds in the world of work right now, and they are harsh. I often decide not to write about a topic or a story because it is from the US and, I remind myself, the UK is different, but I think we now have to accept that difference in narrowing. Whilst we do have protections against the worst behaviours, we have to acknowledge exactly what it is many companies and CEOs would like to do if they were given free rein, and that the US government is actively pushing for the existing constraints to be removed.

And that they are using their considerable power in a ruthless fashion.

Burning Down The House

In this we see a few threads that are coming to predominate.

• A worsening job market, even for those in previously well-paid roles.

• Dysfunctional systems.

• A lack of autonomy (in the UK) due to foreign ownership, especially American.

• The ability of AI to make things worse without any compensating benefits.

• An excessive reliance on the US.

• An increasingly hostile attitude from some governments and employees, notably in the US.

I would add to this the enormous concentration that we have seen across most industries, where several are now oligarchies or effective monopolies. Many of these are almost hidden from view, such as the eyewear market, where the wide variety of brands available hides the dominance of one supplier.

I’ve hesitated to hit the panic button or succumb to the easy response that ‘Oh my god, the whole world’s going to shit and all the people in charge are utter bastards’ but I think we have reached the point where we have to say

OH MY GOD, THE WHOLE WORLD’S GOING TO SHIT AND ALL THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE ARE UTTER BASTARDS!!!!

Well, that makes me feel better!

Until I wonder what to do next.

The sad conclusion that I have reached is that the most sensible assumption for people employed by a large organisation to hold is that the people in charge are utter bastards who will screw them over in a heartbeat and to act accordingly. Because if they are not already like that now, it only needs a takeover to make them so.

It seems increasingly unlikely you will escape that fate in your career because of the finance-driven consolidation that seems unstoppable. Not least because it’s the only solution they have to producing share price growth in a dysfunctional economic system (I mean, apart from invading countries and stealing stuff and we don’t do that colonial shit anymore, do we? Do we?? WHAT????!!!! You’re fucking kidding me!!!!).

The good news is that there are still a lot of smaller organisations that can chart a different path. Indeed, that’s where the majority of people work. And in smaller organisations, you can have a lot more influence to effect change and build a better way of working.

Damn it, that hope just won’t die, will it?

Are Friends Electric?

In further cheery news, it seems that all those stories about corporations laying off staff because of AI are exactly that - stories. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that employment in the US has been falling (the last quarter had the lowest level of job creation ever outside of a recession) and that the layoffs are real, it’s not down to AI.

According to research analysis by Oxford Economics, “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale,” and they suggest instead that companies may be using the technology as a cover for routine headcount reductions. (More detail in this Fortune article “AI layoffs are looking more and more like corporate fiction that’s masking a darker reality, Oxford Economics suggests”)

Why? Because they think it’s good for investor relationships. Not only are they dressing up bad news, like earlier over-hiring, into a good news story, they are telling their investors what they want to hear (job reductions are well-received on Wall Street).

When asked about the supposed link between AI and layoffs, Oxford Research’s Cappelli urged people to look closely at announcements. “The headline is, ‘It’s because of AI,’ but if you read what they actually say, they say, ‘We expect that AI will cover this work.’ Hadn’t done it. They’re just hoping. And they’re saying it because that’s what they think investors want to hear.”

The reduction in entry level posts that is also evident seems to be because companies have learnt to replace people with process, enabling ‘jobless expansion’. High levels of graduate unemployment are also likely to be a factor due to a cyclical glut of graduates.

So, despite what the media spin is, it’s all down to cyclical factors in the economy. Good old supply and demand.

The robots aren’t coming to take over everyone’s jobs, so you don’t need to worry about that.

However, when the markets realise they are not going to get a return on the stratospheric levels of gambling, er sorry, investment in AI, there’s going to be one hell of an adjustment. Now, that is something to worry about.

Creep

All this seems somewhat trivial given what’s happened geopolitically this year, almost entirely initiated by Trump. The return to ‘Spheres of Influence’, the trashing of international law, the kidnapping of a leader of a sovereign state (yes, I know he’s an utter toe-rag but that doesn’t justify it), the stated intent to interfere in European liberal democracies, the ongoing tariff wars, the threats of invasion against a NATO ally and the consequent destruction of NATO itself - jeez, it’s only been a fortnight!!

All of this is incredibly destabilising. If we are ushering a new age of ‘might is right’, where does that leave us to determine our own fate? The rules-based order has underpinned an unparalleled period of stability and prosperity, not only in the advanced economies but around the world. Businesses have thrived with the certainty that it has brought, trade has blossomed and living standards have been lifted. But now?

This all undercuts the foundations on which we have built our societies, our economies, our lives and our careers. I’m not going to predict what the future holds but it’s not looking great.

It’s all terrible but the worst of it is that Elon Musk has enabled the creation and distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). The richest man in the world could solve major world problems with his own wealth if he wished (I mean, like child poverty, for example) but has instead decided to promote depravity and to seek to normalise the sickest of behaviours. And what power do we have to stop him? Because there are no moral constraints anymore and any legal measures will be met with indifference or active hostility.

This is where we are now. It’s another AI story. It’s another story about moral collapse in business. It’s another story about excessive market concentration. It’s another story about exploitation and abuse. It’s another story about dehumanisation, lack of empathy and callous indifference. It’s another story about how we are impacted by the whims of a damaged man-baby who wasn’t loved enough by his father.

Only this one sickens me to my stomach. I don’t know what we do to fight back but we can’t just stand by and accept this.

Welcome to 2026. Like I said, it’s a been a tough start.

Things can only get better, right?

(I’m not just whistling in the dark, am I? Am I?)

Paranoid Android

I recently had an advert inserted into my LinkedIn feed for a service that promised it would create an AI-version of Coach Colin (that’s me). The pitch was that it allows coaches to work with more people, enable them to scale their unique coaching style.

You basically train the AI so that it can mimic your coaching, asking the questions that you would ask, giving the suggestions you would give. You can use it to work with clients who have fairly simple challenges, or to take them through the standard question sets that you tend to use, freeing you up to work with more complex client issues.

So you can use it to service lower value clients, saving the real face-to-face stuff for those with the big bucks! Fantastic, right?

Oh no, sorry, I mean ‘Horrific, right?’.

If you wanted to miss the point of coaching entirely, you surely couldn’t find a better way.

What makes coaching so powerful is the relationship between the coach and client. Studies into therapy have shown that it is the most important factor (at around 60%) influencing the likelihood of a successful outcome. It’s more important than the qualifications or the skill of the therapist. Way more important. It is generally accepted that this also applies coaching and other talking therapies and my experience supports this.

Now some might argue that you can have a relationship with an AI but it’s not going to be the same type of relationship as you have with another human. A relationship is not just about what you say to each other, it’s about how you feel, it’s about all the subtle visual, aural and kinetic cues you give each other, it’s about connections that work beyond our understating and beyond description.

As a coach, you hold the space for the client to explore themselves and their inner world, with you by their side on that journey. Sometimes, the coaching experience becomes otherworldly, it escapes the dimensions of space and time, and that’s where the magic happens. It’s a deeply human experience.

The thing is, you don’t know when that’s going to happen. It can sometimes happen really quickly, although more often it takes a while and several conversations before it starts to occur. And you never know where the coaching conversation will take you. You can be working with a client on some quiet superficial stuff when suddenly they open up and reveal a depth and complexity that they’ve been concealing from the world for ages.

You would never get there if you filtered people at the beginning because how people present themselves is misleading. And, as any coach will tell you, the ‘problem’ is never the problem.

So what your ‘Robo-Coach’ is offering is an ersatz version of the coaching experience. It’s kind of similar but deeply lacking in what makes the real thing the real thing. For example, coffee was scarce during WW2, so people used a chicory-based substitute called ‘Camp Coffee’ (innocent days back then!). If you’ve ever tried Camp Coffee, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It makes the cheapest instant coffee taste like nectar, and the best espresso like a supernatural experience.

So, no, I won’t be signing up for ‘Camp Coaching’. I won’t be replicating myself in an AI that essentially dehumanises something profoundly human, and pretends it’s progress. RoboColin is not coming to your screen anytime soon.

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Computer Love

This is, however, an example of how AI is being applied carelessly and reductively.

A lot of what you do as a coach is to ask questions. You tend to use the same ones, and there is often a familiar progression. In a simple coaching environment, where the client is dealing with some pretty basic stuff, you can practically plan out different conversation paths, a sort of decision tree you can walk them through.

And, yes, you can put that into an AI and it will work for a certain set of clients dealing with a certain set of issues.

But that’s not coaching. Or, if it is, it’s the worst type. Because coaching is not just about questions, and especially not about ‘killer questions’ (despite some coaches wanting this to be the case so they can stroke their egos about how great they are).

It’s about listening. Really, deeply listening. And then responding.

But, of course, you can’t codify that. It’s basically freestyling by the coach, and it’s often described as a dance between coach and client. It’s part of that all-important relationship.

AI can’t do that. But it can formulaically take people down well-trodden paths. So it does that and that’s called coaching and we are encouraged to ignore the real stuff. Problem is, it might be able to deal with the ‘problem’ but it’s never going to get to the problem.

Look, a lot of conversations we have are formulaic. A lot of the work we do is also formulaic, with predictable patterns, limited variety and narrow scope. But that’s like the groundwork, it’s the foundations on which the really valuable stuff is built. If you stick that into an AI, then you’ll just get lots of foundations but very few useful buildings. And even fewer skyscrapers.

Every coach (well, the good ones) will tell you about a coaching session where they asked a question at the beginning and then the client took over. Sometimes, the client just talks, having a dialogue with themselves out loud. Sometimes, the client says nothing as the dialogue rages within. Often the client says ‘Thank you, that’s the best session ever’ and the coach is left sitting there wondering what they did. What they did was create the space for the client build their skyscraper and quietly support them doing it.

And they did that through the depth of the relationship, the quality of the listening and the profound connection that had been built with the client.

What the AI can do is something reductive, robotic, shallow and cold. Let’s not mistake that for something worth having.

Imperfect

Of course, this RoboCoach platform is not really aimed at me. It’s aimed at those coaches who are driven to be ‘successful’, who want to hit ‘six-figure earnings’ and reach as many people as possible with their special magic gift.

It’s aimed at the coaches who promise to fix your problem with their 10-step process or their six-month programme, or their 2-week ‘boot camp’. It’s aimed at the coaches with the glossy websites and the sharp headshots that show their gleaming teeth against some exotic backdrop - probably where they do their ‘exclusive high-achievement retreats’.

It’s for the coaches who present themselves of paragons of successful living, who live healthily, have a daily regime of self-care and self-development, who exercise regularly, read extensively, and manage their life to achieve perfect balance and harmony. They are totally sorted. They have completely got their shit together. And have the instagram feed to prove it. Because that’s what it takes to be a good coach. Allegedly.

By contrast, I’m a bad coach.

I have not got my shit together.

My body is not a temple.

I drink more alcohol than the recommended amount. Most days, in fact.

I don’t meditate every day. Or hardly ever.

I don’t journal regularly.

I don’t improve by 1% every day. Or week. Or month. In fact, some days I go backwards.

I don’t exercise enough.

I don’t do Yoga.

I eat too much chocolate and too many cakes and biscuits.

I don’t set myself goals.

I am not always working at self-improvement.

I shout at the television when Question Time is on.

I have occasional bouts of road-rage.

I sometimes judge people. Especially the idiots who think it’s OK to park on the pavement.

I don’t stick with things.

I sabotage myself with increasingly clever self-deceptions.

I sometimes get bored of reflecting.

I make ‘To Do’ lists and then mistake writing it down for getting it done.

I prevaricate in a spectacularly broad number of ways

I think going out and having a skinful is sometimes the solution to the problem. (And sometimes it is).

I am terrible at asking for help.

I don’t always practice what I preach. At times, I seem pathologically unable to follow my own advice, even though I know it’s right.

Sometimes, I just get so angry at the world I can barely speak.

Sometimes, I just want to tell everyone to eff off and leave me alone.

I’ve never got around to finishing my coaching accreditation.

I am a somewhat imperfect human being.

But I am a good listener. Man, can I listen.

I am stumbling through life like everyone else (yes, even those ‘supercoaches’ beneath their social media-friendly facade). Including you.

I’ve always struggled to develop my coaching activities because I can’t promise anything from my coaching. That’s not how it works. I don’t know if I can help you with whatever challenges you have. As a coach, my role is to help you find the answers that you already have within you but I don’t know if we will be successful because you have to do most of the work. So that’s a lot of uncertainty, and uncertainty doesn’t sell in today’s world.

But I can promise to listen. Without judgement, with complete focus on you, in service of helping you find a way forward.

I can do the bit AI will never be able to do. The bit that makes coaching special, the bit that opens to door to the magic.

So, if you fancy a damn good listening, get in touch. Let’s have a chat and see where it goes.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

So as this mad year of chaos and uncertainty draws to close, before we plunge into another year of the same but probably more so, it only remains for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Oh, hang on, that’s not quite as cheery a sign off as I had intended. So let me leave you with a few suggestions on how to enjoy the holidays.

Turn off your phone, stop scrolling the endless feeds of misery and fear. Close the laptop and leave the messages to pile up in the ether. Go and talk to real people, your friends and family. Better still, go and listen to them. Tell them what they mean to you, hold them close and tell them you love them. Immerse yourself in the real world and cherish every moment of it. And laugh as much as you can.

That’s what I’ll be doing. And I’ll raise a glass to all of you, my readers, to thank you for your attention and the conversations that we’ve had during the year because I really appreciate both.

And let’s do it all again next year. Who knows, it might be even more fun.

Happy Holidays!

The King Of Wishful Thinking

They called it ‘the sponge’. The layer of senior and middle management between the board and the workface. The board would lay out strategy, give directions, issue mandates, all intended to change how the business operated on the ground. But the sponge absorbed it all, and everything below them carried on as usual.

It worked the other way too. Whatever unrest and dissatisfaction, whatever new ideas and initiatives were happening amongst the workforce, none of it percolated up to the board. The sponge soaked it all up.

The sponge was a major frustration to the board of BT in the late 1980s. What they didn’t understand is what the sponge actually did. It was a necessary buffer between the board and the workforce, reducing friction and conflict. It was an essential interpretive layer between the high-flown language of strategy and the realistic actions to be carried out on the ground. It evened out the ups and downs, it absorbed the everyday shocks, it was the lubricant that kept the machine moving.

Of course, there were some problems with the sponge. There were some managers who were resistant and insisted on doing their own thing. They would interpret any command from on high in a way that suited their interests, even if that was clearly contrary to the spirit of the command. They would be capable of mental acrobatics and linguistic dexterity such that they could claim black was white and keep a straight face. The CEO of my division was one of these and the logical contortions he was capable of made Alice in Wonderland seem like real life.

What the board should have done was identify and remove these managers. What they did instead, of course, was call in the consultants (I can’t swear to it but I think it was McKinsey’s).

So what we got was the largest organisational restructuring programme in Europe, Project Sovereign. The concept was simple. There would only be six layers of management between the board and the workface. Managers would have between 6 and 10 direct reports. This delayering would dry out the sponge and create a much more responsive organisation. Generous voluntary redundancy packages would ease the pain of shedding thousands of employees.

The new org charts were published and those of us that remained fitted into neat, flat structures. There was a period of confusion as we tried to figure out how to do our jobs in this new structure and how to plug the holes that had inevitably emerged. Then, as the fog cleared, something entirely predictable happened. The sponge began to grow again.

The new structure just didn’t work. Managers were either over-stretched because they had too many direct reports, or were underemployed because they now didn’t have any and had to wait for approval for decision the could previously take themselves. So gradually lots of ‘dotted lines’ began appearing on the org chart. A dotted line showed the day-to-day reporting line. Often this dotted line was to the person who used to be your boss but was now supposedly at the same level as you.

Over time, the dotted lines got thicker, because why would your notional ‘boss’ do your annual appraisal when they didn’t manage you day-to-day - and probably didn’t really know what you did or, in some extreme cases, who you were.

And so within about 18 months, the new structure had morphed into something that more closely resembled the old structure. Not because managers didn’t want the new structure (although there was no doubt some of that) but because it just didn’t work. Reality meant you need more than six levels of management. Life was more complex. Who knew?

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Harder Than You Think

I was reminded of this by a great article Stefan N. wrote on his Synexia substack, “The Hierarchy of Work Complexity Is Inescapable (Even at Buurtzorg)”.

It was one of those times when you read something that causes a fog to lift and brings clarity to something that has been lurking, only part-formed, around the edges of your consciousness. A real ‘aha’ moment, when a truth is revealed that then looks so blindingly obvious you wonder why you couldn’t see it in the first place.

So what is this great insight? Well, let me use Stefan’s own words:

“What I understand now is almost too obvious to state: you cannot remove complexity; you can only choose where it lives and how to absorb it. And if you don’t make that choice consciously, it will find its own habitat anyway, usually somewhere dysfunctional and with a high cost.”

The way I interpret this is that in a conventional hierarchy, the complexity largely sits in the middle management layer. That’s what ‘the sponge’ does, it handles the complexity. Not always very well but well enough to stop the organisation being overwhelmed. What we’ve seen over the past few decades is that complexity has increased and so the load on middle management has risen. This has had two effects. The first is to make the role of the middle manager much harder (almost impossible, some might say) and that has led to higher levels of burnout.

The second is a big increase in middle management because that’s the only way a hierarchy can respond to increased complexity. (This is my interpretation, not Stefan’s!). There have been several attempts to slim down middle management, to delayer, but it just grows back again (as it did at BT after Project Sovereign).

Attempts to apply the self-management model of Buurtzorg and Haier elsewhere have been unsuccessful. This is because they have been applied superficially, simply removing management without relocating the complexity, all the while proclaiming “Hierarchy is dead!”. You can flatten your organisation but the complexity doesn’t go away, no matter how hard the board might wish it. It moves to the most unwelcome place instead.

Here’s Stefan observation:

‘The truth is that Buurtzorg doesn’t eliminate complexity at all. It simply relocates it into different structures: architecture, software, contracts, professional norms, and the macro-institutional environment of Dutch healthcare. And once you see where the complexity has moved, the whole model becomes not just plausible but elegant.’

(Buurtzorg, the dutch community healthcare provider, has nurse practitioners who work in teams of up to 12 and they self-manage. They are supported by a team of coaches, who they can call upon when they have problems; a small central support team that provide back office services; and an intranet for information, knowledge sharing, co-ordination and collaboration. It is significantly more effective than its competitors, both in terms of outcomes and costs.)

He identifies 4 different types of complexity - operational, co-ordination, integrative and environmental. ‘Buurtzorg’s achievement is not that it removed these loads, but that it redistributed them: operational and coordination complexity live inside the teams, while integrative and environmental complexity live in the architecture (e.g. the intranet) and the institutional environment. That’s the real design innovation.’

So simply taking Buurtzorg’s structure and plonking them down in a different country won’t work, because the complexity that sits in the Dutch healthcare system, for example, needs to find a new place to sit in a different institutional environment.

With Haier (the world-leading white goods producer from China that consists of thousands of micro-enterprises (typically under 15 people), operating within a broader ecosystem supported by a suite of networked applications) we see a different approach. ‘Haier uses internal markets, dynamic contracts, and competitive bidding to allocate and absorb complexity’

In both these case, they can reduce the hierarchy because they have moved the complexity elsewhere. That’s the ‘power move’ that makes it work.

They are not post-hierarchical, they are post-managerial.

(The above is my interpretation of this article and what I took away from it. If I have mangled it in the process or been superficial, I apologise. It is quite technical in places, and the discussion that it generated with Dr Richard Claydon, Otti Vogt and others gets deep into management theory and philosophy and I’m not sure I followed all of it! But if you’re into that, it’s well worth reading it all - you can pick up the trail here.)

P.S. I’ve just realised that this could be summarised as ‘organisational design is like squeezing a tube of toothpaste with the lid on. It doesn’t matter where you squeeze it, the toothpaste just moves somewhere else’. The toothpaste here being, in part at least, the complexity. The reason this occurred to me is that this is exactly how my bosses at BT described how that organisation failed to respond to the many reorganisations that they tried (and yes, it’s where this week’s title came from). Needless to say, none of their organisational wheezes took any account of the complexity, they just wished it away.

All The Small Things

What should also be noted is that these organisations are based on a few simple, yet powerfully elegant, guiding principles. They have a clearly articulated vision about what the organisation is about.

In the case of Buurtzorg, they had a clear idea of how neighbourhood care should be delivered.

In the case of Haier, their animating principle is ‘zero distance to customer’. Their micro-enterprises are directly interacting with their customers and empowered to respond to that customer demand quickly. A second principle is that ‘Everyone can be a CEO’, which firmly places a premium on enterprise and initiative and also embodies their hyper-capitalistic model.

To add another, Morning Star is a large US tomato processor that uses self-management through contract commitments that are negotiated between the individuals that handover to each other in the process. It has two guiding principles that everyone signs up to. They are:

• Never use force

• Honor your commitments

The organisational structures grow out of these principles, these philosophies, if you like. These organisations are successful not just because of the efficiencies their organisational structures produce but because they have a unifying purpose, what you could even call a credo.

These are profound perspectives. They are not arrived at easily or by chance and they certainly aren’t going to come in a consultant’s powerpoint.

Conventional hierarchical organisations are struggling to cope with the increasing level of complexity. It’s overwhelming its organisational home, middle management. The response is to increase process and control, which makes the organisation more rigid and less capable of managing complexity. Or to remove layers of management, which has the same effect. They are effectively wishing the complexity away, as evidenced by the increasing level of mandates to be in the office and have contact days in order to improve co-ordination, collaboration and ‘culture’ (but which has the opposite effect).

New models will emerge but a deeper level of thinking is needed than the ‘copy and paste’ approach of moving to a ‘flat’ organisation or implementing self-management (which can often become managerial abandonment).

Are the leaders we have in place now capable of that depth of thinking? I’m sceptical but even if they are, will they get the space and time in our current capitalist system? Will they be able to escape the pressure of stock market expectations for growth and profitability, the quarterly scrutiny of analysts, or the reward structures geared to short-term performance?

Hurry Up And Wait

To that point, recent research by Microsoft shows that an employee’s opinion of their manager is positively affected by the manager’s speed of response. If there is a delay in the manager’s responses, the employee rates them less highly.

This is reflective of a trend we have seen for decades, where speed of response is valued more highly than the quality of the response. As I noted two weeks ago, this began with the telephone, which made hesitation seem like indecision, even if it was actually someone being reflective and thoughtful before answering. It led to management valuing people who could ‘think on their feet’, judging them by their speed of response rather than the quality of their thinking. The fast but superficial took precedence over the deep and thoughtful, even though the former often led to more heat than illumination.

The arrival of email sped this up, and instant messaging accelerated it again. Social media has been another accelerant, emphasising not only speed but brevity. However, without the time and skills to craft these responses, meaning is lost and they become more shallow and superficial.

In a work environment that increasingly values busy-ness over effectiveness and presentation over substance, it seems inevitable that management should be measured by something that is not only pretty meaningless but is itself a sign of poor management and leadership.

We are prioritising speed of bullshit over depth and substance. And, yes, AI will probably make it a lot worse.

More, More, More

If you like this then you might like my other substack, Surviving Corporate, which is for people who are struggling in a corporate career, or dealing with the aftermath and recovering from the damage. It’s based on my own experiences and the things I’ve learnt along the way.

This week’s post, Eaten by Lions, is a draft of the first chapter of my ‘Corporate Survival Guide’ book project. Further chapters will be published every other week, alternating with posts about my experiences, learnings and thoughts of surviving corporate (well, actually not surviving and then recovering).

This is an audio version, read by me, not some creepy AI creation.

Higher Ground

It sounds very grandiose to talk about ‘the future of work’, as if we are masterfully looking at the broad sweep of history and peering into the future, using our powers of perception and great wisdom to predict what’s going to happen.

Actually, it’s all bollocks. I should know, I do enough of it.

Because what are we referring to when we talk about ‘the future of work’? Well, we’re talking about office work, white collar work, the sort of work you do sitting at a desk in front of a screen. OK, for some, it’s escaped the office and the screen might be a phone, but it’s essentially the same sort of work. It’s what people employed in big organisations do, in WEIRD societies - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Or to be even more specific, the USA, which dominates most of the discourse.

We’re not talking about the work done in factories, in shops and warehouses, in hospitals and care homes, on farms. We’re not talking about work done by the other 88% of the world’s population, in cultures that are very different to our western one, driven by different social norms and ethics.

Well, maybe we do talk about some of those a bit, in passing, as a footnote. Mostly, we just project our WEIRD worldview onto them and talk about ‘adjustments and adaptations’ because why wouldn’t they want to copy us?

The last point is reflection of the fact US business colonised the world in the post-war period, with most global organisations growing out from the USA. They bought all that, why wouldn’t they buy whatever’s coming next? Especially when all the tech companies are US-based.

Of course, we simplify and limit the scope of ‘the future of work’ so that we can get our heads around it. Otherwise it is just too massive an issue to think about. But we shouldn’t lose sight of that and must recognise the limits it puts upon our conclusions.

Besides, we are beginning to see some of this breaking down. The USA is certainly Western and Rich but Educated, Industrialised and Democratic? Well, maybe for now, but the trends aren’t looking encouraging. And new global companies are growing from other parts of the world, from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), from the Middle East and soon they will be from Africa. As in so many other areas, the context is fragmenting. Some of these global organisations will look very different to the norm that we’ve become used to (Haier being an obvious example).

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Same Old Song

When we look forward, our tendency is to see it as an extension of the past. It’s essentially a ‘the same but more so’ view because (and this is going to sound ridiculously obvious) we can’t imagine what we can’t imagine. We build upon our past experience, our history, because it’s all we have to go on (unless we are truly a visionary or on some good quality psychotropic drugs, neither of which apply to most of us).

However, this is even more of a problem because our recollection of the past is partial, flawed, biased and just plain wrong at times. We forget stuff, individually and collectively. We make up stories and myths about events. We mistake correlation for causality, we make false connections and inferences. History is written by the victors, or at least the ones with the loudest voices, not by those with the best memories.

By way of example, Navarun Bhattacharya (who I mentioned last week) is writing an excellent series of posts about the ‘Hidden Origins of Modern Work’, in which he highlights inventions that have shaped work today. They aren’t all the ones you’d expect.

The first, ‘How a Bed Mechanic May Have Helped Build Modern Bureaucracy’, is about how the safety mechanisms invented by Otis Lifts led to much taller buildings, which in turn cemented the concept of hierarchy by making it a physical reality (the ‘top floor’ was where all the bosses’ offices were).

His other posts cover, so far, the typewriter, the Xerox photocopier, the telephone and email. The consequences of the introduction of these technologies has far outstripped the original expectations and they continue to shape the way we work today. And yet, we take them for granted and fail to join the dots between their introduction and today.

If we have an incomplete recollection of the past then we will fail learn from it and our attempts at looking forward will be greatly hampered.

There are two other effects that shape the future that we need to consider.

The first is that of unintended consequences, which these examples demonstrate nicely. The Otis Lifts’ safety brake brought us hierarchy. The typewriter brought information at scale and administration (or bureaucracy, if you prefer). The photocopier brought the CYA culture. The telephone promoted speed and verbal agility over reflection and writing. Email made every written communication automatically a document too, putting every conversation ‘on the record’.

None of these massive impacts, we which take as given today, were foreseen when these things were introduced.

The second effect is that change often comes from the edges, which means it is largely unseen and unnoticed until it hits the mainstream. That means the catalysts for change are very hard to spot and predicting their impact is almost impossible.

Yet, still, we try. Well, we have to write about something!

Supermassive Black Hole

There are two further factors that we need to consider about the future.

The first is timing. There’s a great video of Tomorrow’s World (a popular BBC science programme back in the day) in which they show how we could be working from home in the future, instead of going to an office. Sadly, I can’t find it but I do remember it was broadcast in the early 1980s and was not far off the mark from what many of us do today. Obviously, the tech was rudimentary, clunky and huge. It used a BT service called Prestel (full disclosure - I was working there at the time) where we use the internet today, and a dial up modem and telephone line instead of broadband and wifi. Mobile phones weren’t even considered back then.

Where it was wrong was that it was hopelessly optimistic about how near this was. My recollection is that they suggested it was about 10 years away. It wasn’t really something people would do at any scale until, well, 2020, when COVID forced organisations to embrace the tech. Some of that delay was to do with the development of robust, low-cost, ubiquitous networks and cheap technology. However, a lot of it was to do with adoption of the tech and the changes to work practices, these being the larger factors. If it wasn’t for COVID, it still wouldn’t have been widely adopted.

We often focus on the technology but adoption has as much, if not more, to do with human behaviour and organisational groupthink. We’re still waiting for the flying cars we were promised back in the 1960s but even if they do arrive, there’s a good chance we will decide we don’t like them for some not entirely rational reason

The other issue is discontinuities. We think of the arc of history as a smooth progression but actually that’s a story we create to quieten our minds, as we long for stability and predictability. In fact, history is really the story of us lurching from one crisis to another, with disruptions appearing seemingly from nowhere and upsetting the apple cart on a more-or-less continual basis.

I’ve already mentioned the most recent, COVID and the associated lock-downs. Before that was the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, since when productivity has flat-lined. Whilst it was a big one, crashes of this nature roll along every now and then as they are a product of the capitalist system we have. The breaking of the AI bubble may well cause another one, which may be as big or even bigger than the GFC.

We have wars going on right now in Ukraine and Gaza that are impacting us. The current geo-political upset as the global order is reconfiguring itself is likely to see more conflict, not less. In reality, there are armed conflicts happening somewhere in the world on a constant basis. We only really notice when they impact us directly.

Climate change is having ever-greater impact and this will only increase in the coming decades. We sort of know what to expect but not where or when it will impact.

And then there’s tech. Right now, all anyone can talk about is AI. Anyone who tells you they know how AI is going to impact us is a liar or a fool, or possibly both.

This collection of complex, wicked problems is often referred to as the ‘polycrisis’ (or more colloquially, the clusterfuck) and we seem to be a time of unique peril and instability. The future looks more uncertain than it has ever been.

Makes you wonder why we even bother, doesn’t it?

Say What You Want

We talk about the future of work because it is fascinating and exciting (maybe in an ‘oh shit!’ kind of way at times!) and because we know the world is going to change, possibly dramatically. Certainly for those directly affected. I might think that AI is massively over-hyped but I understand the impact on the translators whose livelihoods have already been automated away by it and I don’t underestimate that. We should not conflate the general and the specific.

The discussion is necessary though, so that we can think about possible scenarios, their impacts and how we might adapt and avoid the most destructive outcomes. However, whilst the discussion is useful, it is not definitive.

This is where the problem lies. Too much of the discourse is directed to providing certainty. This is demanded by real estate investors who want to know what to do with assets. It’s demanded by those who want to bet on the stock market and pick the winners. It’s demanded by the investors and entrepreneurs that want to get in on the next big thing. It’s demanded by the C-suites who want to plan the next 5 years.

One thing we know about today’s attention economy is that where there’s demand, there will be supply. So we get lots of experts pontificating with certainty on what’s going to be the future of work and where you should place your bets. The business media is full of confident prognostications of where the various related markets are going. CEOs are making big, bold assertions about what’s going to happen next.

The result is just a cacophony of nonsense, a trumpeting of tomfoolery. They are all bullshitting.

Meanwhile the interesting stuff gets overlooked. Stuff like how people’s attitudes to work are changing, how their priorities are shifting, how their decision-making is changing. Like how organisations are experimenting with new ways of working, new ways of organising and new ways of being. Like how people are exploring alternatives to the status quo, questioning what was previously unchallenged and collectively creating new structures of power. These things that are happening outside of the mainstream, below the radar, at the edges of attention. That’s where the future is. So let’s look there.

I’m often reminded of the Henry Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed”. So, despite all that I’ve said above, I continue to look for the signals, the pockets of the future that are already here, the things that are going on at the edges.

It’s not just that that’s where the future is. That’s where the hope is, that we can reverse the downward trend of the past several decades and create a world where work is something that adds to our lives rather than degrades it, for the majority rather than just the minority.

Talkin’ Bout A Revolution

An example of this is the Corporate Rebels self-management summit that took place last week in Barcelona. Corporate Rebels started exploring and documenting organisations who are taking a different approach ten years ago. That’s around the same time I attended an unconference in London called “Why aren’t organisations shifting?”, where I met a whole bunch of people who thought, like me, that we need to change work and we obviously couldn’t continue the way we were (we were wrong, as we now know. It seems we could carry on the same destructive way for much longer…)

It felt like the coming together of a tribe. Then Laloux’s book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ came out and spurred a lot of interest and activity. It looked like we could become a movement. Sadly, it never reached breakout velocity and began to peter out until COVID lockdowns came along and finished it off.

Corporate Rebels were also looking to create community but were struggling too until they began to build a network of Rebel Cells. Now they’ve held their second summit. They feel that it is starting to feel like a real community, that it could become a movement. It’s starting to have major impact. It’s moving from the fringe into the mainstream.

This shows that it takes time for things to emerge. That there are paths that lead nowhere. That it is by coming together in conversation, building relationships, making sense of the world collectively, that we build something different. That a strong idea cannot be suppressed for ever, it’s time will come.

There are other organisations and events (such as the the ZeroDX Awards conference that I mentioned recently, which is organized annually by Haier, Thinkers50, and Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini’s MLab) doing complementary work, working with similar ideas, exploring the same ground. Connecting people, bringing them together and enabling the conversations that will create change. We need as many of these as possible, in all parts of the world.

This is where hope lies, because whilst I am just making shit up when I talk about the future of work, I do believe it can be better than it is today. And talking about that possibility and developing the ideas and actions is the key to getting is there.

What’s more, coming together and having real conversations is something that AI isn’t going to replace anytime soon because this is what humans do and AI is just a soulless chatbot.

Slip Slidin’ Away

Leadership is one of those slippery words that gets bandied about all over the place but doesn’t actually bring much clarity to the conversation. It means different things to different people, as evidenced by the fact that everyone and their dog seems to have their own definition of what it means.

It is such a nebulous concept that it can be co-opted by anyone to support their point of view, or be chucked into a conversation to confuse the debate and deflect attention from what really matters.

This is not helped by the fact that there are shedloads of research, papers, books, and podcasts on the matter. It has spawned a huge industry of education, consulting and coaching on leadership and of leaders, which has signally failed to produce more or better leaders, at a time when we desperately need both.

One of the problems is that we fail to separate the act of leadership from the individual. We focus on the individual traits of ‘leaders’ rather than looking at the systems that the individuals are operating in or the context where leadership takes place. So we end up obsessing over the personal qualities of the ‘leader’, which are poor indicators of their ability to provide effective leadership.

Another problem is that we conflate status and formal power with leadership. Just because someone is in a ‘leadership position’ (which is really just a label assigned to a place in the hierarchy) does not mean they are capable of providing leadership. We can all recall people who fit this bill and understand the problems they cause, which varies from stasis to chaos but are never good.

We also conflate leadership with management. We call managers ‘leaders’ when they aren’t, nor do they need to be. Some managers will provide leadership in some situations but many won’t nor will they be required to do so. To understand this, we need to be clear about what the difference between management and leading is.

One definition (as I have said, there are more to choose from than you can wave a stick at) that I like is “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”, although we should note that this only addresses the distinction between the two. The manager executes a defined process, managing and marshalling resources to produce the desired outcome. The leader decides what the desired outcome is and creates process to achieve it.

Of course, it’s not such a neat separation between the two, there is clearly overlap. It’s matter of degree. Managers will mostly just be managing. They don’t need to provide leadership most of the time. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, a range of skills and capabilities are required for a business to be successful.

I take the view that everyone can ‘lead’, in that they can perform acts of leadership at some point in some situations. Maybe it’s not absolutely everyone but it’s most people. That’s the leadership that organisations need to unlock but which they mostly ignore or actively suppress in pursuit of ‘efficiency’.

Some leadership, huh?

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No Sense

This focus on Leadership was inspired by a post by Navarun Bhattacharya (someone well worth following for his thoughtful and insightful posts), which in turn was about a talk by Gary Hamel called ’The League of Leaders’.

Hamel begins with the point I made above, that ‘Leadership’ has lost its meaning and become confused with management and hierarchical position. Hence the expectation that managers are leaders. In fact, leaders are something quite distinct, he says, they are someone who ‘catalyzes proactive change by inspiring and mobilizing others to do more than anyone thought possible.’

On this basis, leaders can be anyone, they become through doing. He goes on to say that they can only be seen in hindsight, once the change has happened. That rather rings true, doesn’t it? We all know leadership when we experience it, when something happens because an individual (or individuals) took action or behaved in a certain way, or most likely did both.

So leadership is really something we experience, whether we are the leader or the followers. That’s why we struggle to abstract it and put it into words, that’s why it refuses to be contained and be put in a nice neat box. Defining leadership is like trying to catch smoke with your hands, you can never really grasp it, some of it always escapes. Just as you think you have it, it changes shapes and drifts away.

Nevertheless, Hamel identifies four traits that leaders share:

🔹 Vision — a future they feel destined to create.

🔹 Daring — the courage to take personal risks.

🔹 Tenacity — a do-or-die persistence.

🔹 Resilience — the ability to rise after failure.

I don’t have any issues with these traits but obviously we are falling into the trap of identifying leadership with the traits of the individual, which hasn’t really got us very far, has it? So I would rather say that people who carry out acts of leadership will have these qualities, in that moment and that situation.

The problem with tying them to an individual who we deem a ‘leader’ is that they are supposed to embody these traits all the time. That’s just not how it works. People are not constantly visionary, daring, tenacious and resilient. Some people might only have one moment in their life where they do something extraordinary, an act of leadership, where these traits appear and align.

It could be a modest vision, they just see something to change that may be small but they know would be better. The daring might be to just push over the line of what is normal/acceptable/comfortable. They could just be quietly persistent, keeping at it without taking excessive risks. Their resilience might just apply to that thing, that moment, where they have the inner conviction to keep going despite the setbacks.

What we need to do is design organisations for those moments, to provide the opportunity for everyone to come to the fore when they are needed and the circumstances allow them to shine.

Of course, this won’t sell many books or much consultancy so Hamel has to speak in more grandiose terms. It is all couched in the language of the heroic leader, a subtext to practically all the literature on leadership, a concept that is deeply ingrained into our collective psyche. But we should remember that heroes don’t always wear capes, which is also rather what Hamel is arguing.

Hamel then issues a challenge:

“If someone truly visionary, daring, tenacious, and resilient (as described above) joined your company, how long would they last?”

His answer: “not long, unless we redesign the system”.

Here he has hit the nail firmly on the head. We’ve all seen people who display these qualities and who provide the sort of leadership Hamel extols be crushed and rejected by the system. I’m guessing quite a few of you have, indeed, been through that very experience. I certainly did when I went from the playground of the first half of my career into the prison of the second half.

The reality is that organisations actually suffocate these traits by design. They reward conformity, compliance and playing safe. They value consistency over step-change, they want rationality rather than conceptual leaps. Cold, hard logic (for which read ‘the numbers’) is prized, passion is rejected.

Hamel’s conclusion is correct, we need to change the system to enable the type of leadership that we need to emerge, from everyone who can provide it.

Fix You

Hamel has some solutions, ways in which the system can be changed to give ‘the space for leadership to breathe’, as Navarun poetically puts it. These include;

• smaller, empowered units.

• promotions based on impact, not rank.

• peer-chosen leaders.

• space for internal entrepreneurship

• flatter structures, and,

• hiring builders, not stewards.

This is learning lessons from the likes of Haier, VINCI and Intuit. Organisations who have radically changed their structures and how they operate. They have typically created multiple self-organising teams, networked together through technology, who are able to autonomously experiment and iterate to create new products and services.

There are many other ways of reorganising structures and ways of working, including things like DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organisations), co-operatives, federations and the like.

And, of course, the Pirates of the Golden Age. What Hamel has presented is exactly what the pirates did. It was how this small group of renegades beat the navies of the imperial powers, despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned. They operated as individual crews, joining together into large flotillas for specific missions but otherwise independent.

The crew all voted on who got to be Captain and Quartermaster and could vote them down if they didn’t perform. People built their reputation and their roles based on their deeds, which meant that everyone was treated equally. Women and former slaves and other minorities had real freedom and often took leadership positions. Anyone in the crew could carry out an act of leadership, too. Apart from the Captain and Quartermaster, every one was treated equally. Organisations don’t get much flatter than that.

This is the ‘in’ to making change happen. It’s hard to change the system and you probably don’t have the power, status and resources to do it. You might be able to change part of the organisation and if you can, you should. However, we can all be a bit more pirate. We can form a crew at any level of the organisation, we don’t need permission. We can make change happen around us, we can adopt the pirate approach and enthuse our colleagues (because, let’s be honest, everyone wants to be a pirate, don’t they?). We can start to break rules and replace them with better ones. We can use our agency and exercise our freedom.

These are acts of leadership that anyone can do.

The pirate approach embodies all four of Hamel’s traits but as a crew, not as an individual. Collectively, we can create the vision, find the courage, encourage each other to keep going and pick each other back up after the inevitable set-backs.

Because what Hamel doesn’t point out is that leadership is not just an act, it’s a collective one. That was what the leading management thinker Peter Senge understood with his definition (yes, another one!) that “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future.”

So let’s go act.

The Ugly Duckling

“The unacceptable face of capitalism” was a phrase used by British Prime Minister Ted Heath in a 1973 parliamentary debate that took place after it was found that Lonrho, an international mining company based in the UK, was making large pay-offs to win business, aggressively exploiting tax loopholes and indulging in other shady business practices.

Heath went on to say that ‘one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind.’ In other words, Lonrho was an outlier, a rogue organisation.

Fast forward to today and we see the practices that Lonrho were castigated for are no longer those of an outlier but have been completely normalised. Whilst the UK government is still critical of many of these behaviours, its attempts to address them are labelled as ‘anti-business’ and said to be detrimental to growth. Meanwhile, in the US and elsewhere, governments are at best indifferent to these business practices and at worst, supportive.

It seems that the unacceptable face of capitalism has undergone considerable cosmetic surgery. It’s been botoxed up the eyeballs, pumped with collagen, had its nose straightened, been smothered in fake tan and is now held up as a paragon of beauty.

No doubt the rest of the body of capitalism has had a boob job, a bum lift and liposuction like you wouldn’t believe. Or it’s pumped up with testosterone, had a back, sack and crack and given six-pack like a corrugated iron roof. Either way it’s covered in tattoos and piercings, all hidden under a business suit until the weekend comes and it’s time to pa-a-a-a-rty.

The unacceptable face of capitalism, once shunned and despised, is now the one most likely to win Love Island.

What a time to be alive!

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Money For Nothing

A sign of just how much the guardrails have been obliterated and the constraints taken off, our favourite rich idiot has just been given a $1 trillion dollar pay package.

No, he hasn’t actually got the money yet, it’s dependant on Tesla achieving certain targets over the next decade. As this includes selling several millions of things that don’t actually exist yet, it seems unlikely he will get the full amount. Although, given that the board who voted for it is full of Musk flunkies and fan-boys, they may well find another way to give him the money.

In any case, that’s not really the point. I mean, it’s not like he needs the money, he’s got more than he can possibly spend in his lifetime already. No, the point is that it’s an obscene amount of money, the point is that he can demand it and get it, the point is he’s the first person to get paid a trillion dollars. It’s a show of power, it’s a middle finger to everyone else, it’s a massive ego stroke for a megalomaniac.

If Prime Minister Heath disapproved of Lonrho’s CEO Tiny Rowland, he’d be having conniptions over Musk.

And how does Musk treat those who work for him? Pretty appallingly. Of course. Because that’s no longer the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, that is capitalism. That’s ‘hardcore’. That’s what Wall Street likes to see.

This is world we live in, these attitudes to employees are being pushed even harder. They want to squeeze you even more and some politicians are encouraging them to go further still. It’s happening in plain sight.

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

I listened to a podcast discussion between Brian Elliott (Blood in the Machine) and Cory Doctorow, the blogger and author who coined the term ‘Enshittification’.

Doctorow points out that Tech workers were cosseted by employers because each one was worth about $1 million of profit annually and they were in short supply. The employees were able to leverage that scarcity, not only in terms of pay and conditions but also over ethical and moral issues. They would refuse to work with companies they considered unethical, or on products they disproved of.

However, now that scarcity is now reduced and the employers are flexing their muscles. Dissent on ethical or moral grounds is no longer tolerated and will lead to dismissal. Debate is stifled or ignored, their bosses not even pretending to listen to their opinions. Perks are being withdrawn, conditions weakened and pay suppressed. Not to mention massive layoffs.

Doctorow warns Amazon’s tech workers to look at how the warehouse staff are treated - highly surveilled, algorithmically managed, driven to burnout, just replaceable meat puppets - and know that is coming to them, as soon as AI enables it. It’s coming for every other white collar worker too, unless they are employed by a progressive organisation. It’s already arrived for some.

What’s the response? To organise. Whether that’s unionising or forming some other sorts of collective grouping. To come together to push back, to acquire strength in numbers.

He also points out that tech workers are not simply substitutable with AI because they hold large amounts of process knowledge, they know how the system works, how to get things done. This is broad, contextual knowledge that is undocumented and which AI cannot provide. That is where their power lies now that scarcity has gone. As some companies have already found, getting rid of the people who have that knowledge has a real cost and they have to be brought back, if they are still available. What if those returning demanded change that benefitted all workers?

The other option is get out of the system, which is much harder to do than to say. Although in every crisis, there is possibility and Doctorow speaks at the end about the emergence of a Post-US internet, something he believes is already happening. An example of countries and organisations using their agency to reduce their dependence on others.

Like all meaningful change, it takes time and persistent effort. We can’t know when the change will be effected but we do know the time to start is now.

(BTW, Doctorow insists the act of rolling back Enshittification is to be known as ‘Dis-enshittification’. This seems to be taking what is already a somewhat inelegant mouthful and making it even more awkward but it does makes ‘Decrapify’ seem poetic by comparison, so I don’t mind.)

Looking After Number One

In this newsletter, I’ve tried to alert readers to the dangers of working in a corporate environment. I’ve referred to my own experience, where I got damaged because I believed that the workplace was a benign environment only to find it was full of potential causes of harm (which became actual ones, in my case). Over the 40 years since I entered the workforce, I believe it has gradually got worse. Protections have been weakened, benefits salami-sliced away, the balance of power tilted in favour of employers, ethics have been watered down and accountability has been dispersed.

But I think we have reached an inflexion point. It’s getting much worse, much more quickly and they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. They don’t care, they want to exploit employees as much as possible, without constraint. They are either buying up or cosying up to governments to get employee protections and tiresome regulations removed. It’s the naked use of power to get what they want.

Although this may seen as a return to the ‘good old days’ when bosses used to lock the doors to the factory and starve the workers into submission, or send in the troops in to shoot the ring leaders.

Either way, it’s time to take action to protect your interests. As well as organising collectively, you can take steps to look after yourself and prevent yourslf being harmed. Setting and holding boundaries, prioritising outside interests and hobbies, spending time with family and friends, looking after your health through exercise and good diet, doing things that replenish you. This is the subject of the Corporate Survival Guide that I have been writing. They are simple steps but often hard to take because of the time and energy demands of work. However, they are essential to your survival.

Even if I am over-egging the dangers (and I don’t think I am given the evidence before our eyes), this is in your long-term interest. It’s good to create distance between yourself and work, to develop a fully-rounded identity that exists outside and beyond your work. It’s good to develop habits that protect you from burnout, nourish and replenish you and give you space to grow and develop.

It’s an act of rebellion too. They want you to be dependant, they want you to be enmeshed in their system and under their control. This is how you fight back and protect your freedom. To have agency over your life and choose the path you want to follow.

NOTE: I’ve included a recoring of me reading this out as an experiment. Let me know if you like it! (Apologies for the sniffs and the odd stumble!)

I Want To Break Free

The question of whether companies should use AI to give more power to high-up managers or to liberate workers is discussed in this Bloomberg article by Adrian Wooldridge.

He thinks most will wrongly choose the former and we’ll be paying the price for this mistake for decades. (I think he’s right, btw)

AI can be used to build a panopticon, which was an idea that Jeremy Bentham had for a prison where a single man could guard a large number of prisoners, being able to observe them all from a central point. (If you want to see an actual panopticon, the victorian prison at Lincoln Castle was designed according to Bentham’s ideas). Indeed, it is already being used by some companies like Amazon and J P Morgan Chase to closely surveil and monitor employees, even gauging their mood and their levels of collaboration. Well, they are measuring something and claiming it’s that.

The algorithms are monitoring and controlling employees in a deeply intrusive and demoralising way. The monitoring covers everything from toilet breaks to keystrokes to interactions in meetings. This is ‘digital Taylorism’, where every process and task is broken down into a series or steps that can be monitored and controlled so that the ‘performance’ of each employee is optimised, or at least sustained at a set standard. And people hate it.

This is, however, simply more of the same, an intensification of the forces of crapification of work. It’s dehumanisation taken to a new level, all enabled by AI.

The alternative is to use AI to liberate employees. But that is hard, that would mean changing how organisations operate and how work is designed. That would require trust in employees, giving them the freedom to use their judgement and initiative. That’s never going to catch on, is it?

Well, some companies are doing that and employees love it because what they really want is autonomy and a sense of community (i.e. collegiality or relatedness). They are in the minority right now but we have to hope they will be the insurgents, they will outcompete and eventually supplant the incumbents.

Because work is supposed to set you free, not put you in prison.

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If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It)

Michele Zanini added some commentary to this article in his Linked In post , noting that

‘if we deploy AI using industrial-era management assumptions, we won’t get the sustained performance improvement that comes from unleashing the initiative and ingenuity of people at work.’

He goes on to point out that we’ve been here before at the start of the century when the internet was supposed to flatten hierarchies. Instead it led to an increase in managers and administrators as bureaucracy exploded. And that despite the massive spend in technology, productivity has grown at a miserly 1.7 percent a year for the past decade, way below the trend.

I’ve made these points before (referencing Hamel and Zanini’s work), and wrote about the bifurcation of work that I think AI will bring as recently as September this year.

We are at a crossroads and several organisations are not just heading down the wrong path but running down it as fast as they can.

Zanini agrees with me (see what I did there?) that we need to rethink how we lead, manage and organise or the investment in AI will deliver very little. We have to do the hard work of redesigning how we work that so many organisations have been avoiding for so long.

Simply bolting AI onto existing organisations and working methods is like attaching a rocket to a car to make it go faster. There is a point beyond which the physics can’t be overcome, no matter how much power you apply - and we’re already very near that limit with what we have.

Some of these CEOs who seem to think, nonetheless, that strapping a rocket to the jalopy they are driving is a good idea will find out that AI is actually an accelerant of crap. And will probably make the car disintegrate.

Walk This Way

I also think using AI for this digital Taylorism will accentuate another problem caused by the crapification of work. We’ve already seen that as everything is reduced to defined processes, split into tasks and tightly controlled, organisations have become more rigid and brittle. They struggle to respond to the increasingly volatile environment and to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity that have become features of that environment.

AI could not only set in stone the existing processes but make them opaque and harder to change. The organisation will become even more rigid and brittle, and also possibly unpredictable as the algorithms are given more and more decision making. There could well be unforeseen consequences that are difficult to prevent and manage because their causes are hidden in the black box of the AI.

This is the opposite of how organisations need to be. They need to be agile and adaptable, able to flex rapidly. They need to be able to sense and respond to changes in their environment, to work with uncertainty and ambiguity, and with complexity. They need to enable the emergence of new ideas and approaches, to evolve and develop in harmony with their ecosystem. This requires new forms of organisations, not what we currently have turned up to 11.

The key differentiator will not be efficiency but creative problem solving, the sort that autonomous, engaged, motivated human beings excel at.

Instead of using AI to replace humans in the processes we already have, my friend Antony Malmo suggested we should really use AI to improve co-ordination across the organisation, something its ability to assimilate large amounts of data and apply fuzzy logic is ideally suited to.

Co-ordination is incredibly hard in a modern organisation and explains at least some of the explosion of bureaucracy that Zanini highlights. It’s what all those extra middle managers and administrators spend most of their time on. It’s a problem that grows exponentially the more things you try to co-ordinate. Moving from, say, four product groups to five product groups (as Microsoft did some while ago) doesn’t increase co-ordination by 25%, it increases it by more like 250%.

I’d probably argue that a big slice of that co-ordination is unnecessary and could be reduced by adopting a more decentralised model (like Haier’s or something like a DAO - distributed autonomous organisation). However, AI could give a step-change in effectiveness in the coordination that is necessary.

This is the type of thinking that seems to be missing in the AI discussion at the moment. This is what’s on the other path.

Just An Illusion

“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training,” said Elon Musk recently.

This is, no surprise, arrant nonsense that could be easily disproved by 10 year old. What AI has actually ‘consumed’ is all the stuff on the internet. That is neither ‘the cumulative sum of human knowledge’ or, one could argue, even actually knowledge, as a cursory glance at any social media feed will tell you. Or about 10 tweets from Musk’s own timeline on X. No, maybe only 5.

For all that AI ‘knows’ (that is, has stripped and encoded from digital sources), it actually knows very little. What is does know, it does so as a parrot ‘knows’ words. It knows the price of everything and value of nothing.

I’ve just come back from a week in Marrakech and I can tell you there’s a lot of stuff there that AI knows nothing about. It doesn’t know about the sensory overload that I experienced on the first day, for example, that left me feeling rather dazed and discombobulated until I found a quiet and comfortable bar and a cold beer.

During our stay, we visited the Atlas Mountains and had lunch in a Berber house. The Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa and their history goes back thousands of years, beyond even the Ancient Egyptians. The Berber culture is distinct and ancient and contains its own knowledge and wisdom. They speak their own language, with its own alphabet. Even though a standardised form of the language was created and recognised as an official language of Morocco in 2011 (alongside French and Arabic), very little of that knowledge has been written down, as the tradition has been to share it orally. Only a minuscule amount is on the internet, most of it is beyond the reach of AI.

The Berbers who live in the Atlas Mountains were badly affected by the 2023 earthquake, which destroyed many of their homes, traditionally built from mud. They are rebuilding in concrete, which will be more resilient to earthquakes. They have adopted other aspects of modern life where it serves them but they remain rooted in their traditions and customs that have existed for centuries. It was striking how different their lives are to the inhabitants of Marrakech, driven by a different worldview.

So, no, AI has not consumed all human knowledge. Much of the Berber’s knowledge hasn’t even succumbed to Caxton’s invention yet.

When people say AI is in a bubble, they are not just talking about a financial one. It’s in a cultural one too. And a rather small one at that.

Perhaps that itself is a kind of prison for it’s creators.