A few days after my mother died, I went back to work. I was in my early twenties, studying during the day and working nights as a barkeeper in an alternative jazz club. A colleague asked me how I was doing. I gave the answer you give when work is waiting and grief has no official place. “It’s ok.” He looked at me and said, “No, it’s not.” Then he patted me on the back.

I have forgotten a lot of clever things people said to me since. I have never forgotten that. Because he did not try to comfort me. He did not explain grief, manage it, reframe it, or turn it into resilience. He simply refused the lie.

The Board Room Version: Mental Health at work is not just a personal problem. It is also a systemic issue. Maslach & Leiter describe burnout as a result of 6 mismatches between the person and the work environment – not of personal weakness or failure. This is the official WHO description. Karasek & Theorell describe the worst combination — high demand, low control and low support — the iso-strain job. Deci & Ryan name the fundamental needs of humans — autonomy, competence and connectedness — their absence produces measurable harm to mental health. And this often happens at work. The result of all of this is 1 trillion Dollar loss of productivity per year. WHO and ILO published a policy what to do against it: Prevent — Protect and Promote — Support. If any, companies only do the latter two. The first and most important would be to reshape work environments and content. Organisations which do not systemically enable human flourishing do not just produce stressed employees. They produce conditions in which responsibility, creativity and engagement are not possible.

Maybe this is a good starting point for a discussion on mental health at work: not a program or a poster or a study or a clever book, but with the permission to say that something is not okay.

Because it isn’t. Because I have seen too many colleagues disappear some into illness, some simply gone. People I worked with closely. It happens again and again. I feel guilty. I should know better. I know that they are not weak links, I see work breaking them. I also see the despair of mental illness, I see the suffering, the changes. I see my own fear. I see my own powerlessness because I cannot change what is hurting people I care for. And on Monday morning I receive a newsletter at work. It tells me to Stay Balanced. 

And they keep coming, they keep giving me tips and tricks — DIY instructions for building a beautiful mind. Breathing, work—life balance, mindfulness, healthy eating, communication, all wonderful. All insufficient. Then they roll out the big guns. The EAP — yeah, also had to look that up — the Employee Assistance Program. The employer-provided, confidential support service in the form of short-term psychological — sometimes also financial or legal — counseling programs. That’s a good thing, right? Yes, it’s the company saying: “In our last manager training we have learned to detect that you are struggling. Here is a phone number.” 

The issue is that one major contributor to mental health issues is always dropped from the picture. The place where we spend a third of our day, the institution that gives us identity, a place where we belong, a second family, a place where we are managed and controlled. The company. 

And now for my recurring disclaimer and explainer: This is not done by conspiracy or villainous intention. It’s a systemic issue. Scientists have documented this consistently and studied it empirically for more than fifty years. 

Take burnout as the first very apparent example. The psychology researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter explained it in their book “The Truth about Burnout”. Besides the book’s slightly on-the-nose title it gives a good analysis of what burnout is. It manifests in feelings of Exhaustion — emotional and physical — Depersonalization — distancing yourself from work and its environment — and Inefficacy — work does not matter or you cannot be effective in it. This is of course a problem for anyone trying to do good work. Because these things correspond to the main resources we need to work: Energy — depleted causing exhaustion —, Involvement — destroyed by depersonalization — and Efficacy — literally the opposite of inefficacy. 

Those states of mind are not primarily caused by internal factors — you are not weak or have failed somehow. It is a mismatch between you and your work environment and conditions. These mismatches can happen in six different ways. Bear with me, but I need to explain them to you. Workload — too much of it — Control — when you have responsibilities but lack influence — Reward — effort is not recognized or compensated — Community — relationships at work break down — Fairness — decisions feel arbitrary or disrespectful — and Values — the job forces you to act against your beliefs. These mismatches most of the time appear in combinations. You have too much work and are not recognized for doing it. You are constantly controlled and have to act against what you believe in. This will over time erode you and lead to Exhaustion, Depersonalization and Inefficacy. You burn out.

The WHO has included this exact description in its International Classification of Diseases. Note that in the ICD burnout is not categorized as a disease but rather “a phenomenon in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life” and as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” So burnout results from the workplace and it is manageable. The organization has simply not managed it. The WHO does not say: the employee failed to breathe properly. It says: chronic workplace stress was not successfully managed. 

If we look beyond burnout, there is more research, medical research. In the peer—reviewed medical journal The Lancet the occupational health researcher Reiner Rugulies and his colleagues published an umbrella review on the connection between working conditions and Depression and Anxiety. Sorry, short explainer: an umbrella review is when you look at a lot of studies, analyze them and if they are any good and fit the same definitions you combine their results. In 2023 they found that various negative work conditions had differing impacts on the likelihood of depression or anxiety occurring. The factors were between 1.1 to 1.8. That is not a lot but the consistency of the results was proof that there was a clear connection. Additional analysis published in The Lancet confirmed this: Job strain or organizational injustice having a factor of 1.5 and bullying having a 2.58 times increased risk. In the same Lancet series, John Frank and colleagues demonstrated that work is a major social determinant of health.

And it’s not just the researchers, in a survey from Mind Share 84% of workers reported at least one workplace factor negatively impacting mental health. Most common was emotionally draining work — 37% — and challenges with work-life balance — 32%.

This is bad news, but as shown workplace conditions appear to be just one factor in all of this. Isn’t that just always the case? Yes it is, but that doesn’t make it better. Think of what we eat. We know there is bad food for our health. We know that poor nutrition is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease. But not everyone with poor eating habits gets heart disease. When these studies show only “modest” statistical effects between high-strain jobs and mental health outcomes, that does not mean the work environment is only mildly harmful. It means that the data mainly captures outcomes that become measurable — the people, the cases where coping mechanisms, social support, family stability were not enough. The data only shows the ones who break. It does not show all the people who have to bend.

Then there is something called the diathesis—stress model. Sorry, again explainer: In clinical psychology and psychiatry, the diathesis-stress model explains that vulnerabilities or predispositions and stressors work together to cause a mental issue or illness. It also means that sometimes it doesn’t. There is also a similar concept in physiological illnesses: Not everyone gets the flu if it spreads in your family for example. It may only manifest after a week with some people or not at all with others. Stress interacts with vulnerability. But that does not make the stressor harmless. It only means that people arrive with different thresholds, histories, and reserves.

Modest effect sizes in studies do not reflect modest harm, but varied thresholds. They do not fully capture the harm experienced by everyone in negative work conditions.

There are physical effects too, resulting from bad working conditions. Robert Karasek and Töres Theorell described the results of their studies in the book “Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life” published in 1990 and demonstrated the link to increased risk for cardiovascular disease. They showed that it is an outcome of higher blood pressure, elevated stress hormones and fatigue over longer periods of time. The health effects of long working hours have also been demonstrated by a joint WHO and ILO report published in 2021 — 745,000 deaths per year from cardiovascular disease can be attributed to working 55 or more hours per week.

All of this points to a clear and consistent connection between working conditions and mental and physical health. But how does this happen? What are the structural conditions that produce the damage?

There have been many studies done in this field. Two of the most substantial bodies of research come from Karasek & Theorell and Deci & Ryan. While both basically come to the same conclusions, it is worth looking at both.

For Karasek & Theorell I would love to show you their famous Demand—Control table but I don’t do excel here, sorry. They have basically mapped jobs on two dimensions: job demands — either high or low —  and decision latitude — how much control do you have also in high or low. That of course gives you five — ha tricked you, no it’s four — combinations or job types. Most interesting are the two where job demands are high and control either high — the active job — or low — the high strain job. That is for example the difference between a doctor and a warehouse worker. Both are very demanding jobs, but one has some authority over how the work gets done — not unlimited of course, just relative — the other has nothing much to say. Karasek & Theorell found that people with high—strain jobs are more likely to suffer from mental health problems.

That brings up an important point. The combination of high demand and low control can often be found in lower status jobs. Therefore mental health becomes a class issue. This has also been confirmed by Rugulies and colleagues in The Lancet. Occupational health problems occur disproportionately in lower status jobs.

Karasek & Theorell added another dimension to their Demand—Control Model: Social support. They then found that the most damaging combination is what they called iso—strain which has high demand, low control and low support. How surprising?!

Then what about the second pair of research buddies Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. They have independently and jointly worked on what is called Self-Determination Theory or SDT for more than 40 years. It’s the study of intrinsic motivation — an expression you may have heard before. In psychology it is quite an important concept of which they are among the leading figures in the field. And believe me that we will hear more from them. Regarding mental health only some of it is relevant. Autonomy — a feeling of choice — Competence — a sense of effectiveness — and Connectedness — a feeling of belonging — are fundamental needs of us humans. The absence of any one of them produces measurable damage to our mental health. Of course it’s not as simple as that, there are a lot of nuances. Like autonomy is not freedom from all constraints. That would be anarchy — sorry, no Chomsky here. Autonomy here is the ability to act with inner consent inside a world full of constraints. So you follow rules because you see the point and not because someone is watching. Another relevant point in SDT is that there is a distinction between controlling and informational input from the outside. The same kind of input can be experienced as controlling — then it undermines intrinsic motivation — or as informational — then it supports it. A company tells you how to lead a mentally balanced lifestyle — you know, just breathe and count — or it addresses the unbalanced workload. Now you guess which is the supporting one. Controlling management is by the way always bad for mental health. We have seen that Theory X leads to passivity and that is the lack of any kind of autonomy, competence or connectedness in employees. On top of that, it will reconfirm the controlling manager who puts even more controls. The Theory X death loop. The Theory X death loop operates at the managerial level. But something similar happens at the organizational level too.

Not a death loop but a cascading effect is what you can see in many companies happening. Staff or other resources get cut. At the same time the expectations expand — all for the customer! This accumulates, more for the customer, more for the shareholder, more engagement, more health. And no matter how many posters you put up, employees see that this does not make sense. You cannot have more for less. All of Maslach’s mismatches happen at the same time: overload, loss of control, reduced reward, broken community, fairness violation, values conflict. Deci & Ryan’s autonomy, competence and connectedness get eroded and more and more jobs become iso-strain jobs: high demand, low control and low support. 

And how do companies respond to this cascade: They send you a newsletter. In which they tell you what you have to do, where your shortcomings are. This makes your mental health, your feelings, your emotions a personal matter. It’s not the organization’s responsibility, you have to manage it. The problem with that is that emotions are produced by social interactions. Organizations are social systems by definition. Ones that we spend a third of our day in. You cannot design a social system, populate it with humans and then say that the emotional consequences of that system are purely private. And that is not psychology or philosophy or whatever. That is just not logical. 

Of course someone will say: Yeah, yeah, man up. Work is just hard. OK, let’s get that comment out of the way once and for all. Legitimizing suffering through work is an old moral assumption not based on any logic, not even any economic principle. It’s just stupid talk. Max Weber analyzed the moral legitimization of work and suffering a hundred years ago and since then nobody has shown otherwise.

So then if not stupid talk, then let’s hear from a CEO. Maslach and Leiter describe a composite figure they call Dave, a CEO whose position on mental health at work is unfortunately all too familiar: “Mental health is a problem of the individual. It’s not the employer’s responsibility. It doesn’t have any real impact on productivity. And there’s not much the organization can do about it.”

These four points are a seemingly airtight logical defense to any liability from the company’s side. In addition they are also all wrong. We have already seen that mental health is not just the problem of the individual but also of the social system the individual operates in, the company. We have looked at studies demonstrating that work conditions are at least a contributing factor to mental health. We have seen the models how this works. And yeah, what about the productivity claim? I wonder. How about 1 trillion dollars. That is the WHO and ILO stated global loss in productivity per year due to just depression and anxiety. Twelve billion working days lost every year. Or the 28% productivity loss that was found in the Mind Share Survey reported across all employees experiencing mental strain in their work. That is quite an impact I would say. As to what companies can do, there is quite a lot they can do. And more and more companies are doing some of them. Just not all and not the important stuff.

In 2022, the WHO, and jointly with the ILO, published clear guidance on what companies should do: an easily explained three-point program. Prevent — Protect and Promote — Support. Companies tend to do the second and third, but usually skip the first and most important. Your manager training and newsletter on mental health are Protect and Promote. The EAP program is Support. Prevent, that would be “Reshape work environments to minimize psychosocial risks and prevent workers from experiencing mental health conditions”. Well, that’s not breathing. 

Dave is not as generic a figure as you might think. I have experienced similar things, when facilitating workshops on ISO 45001. There was this one CEO who brushed off any responsibility concerning mental health of his employees by saying: “Well, I’m not their nanny.” He then put his name on the mental health newsletter anyway. I did not say anything at the time but I should have. The answer is clear: “First — correct, you are not a nanny. Nannies are for children. Adult employees need a leader who creates conditions for good work. Second — does anyone actually believe that newsletter came from your desk and not some communications consultant? Your employees certainly don’t.” In the APA 2022 Work and Well-being Survey 47% of workers said their company’s wellbeing and culture initiatives are mostly for show. Nearly half. The audience knows it’s a performance.

Since I mentioned ISO 45001, the management system standard for occupational health and safety, I have to stress here that it requires companies to evaluate their health and safety risks and address them. This currently already includes mental health risks but in its next revision — to be published in 2027 — is expected to further strengthen this aspect, which will align exactly with the WHO/ILO policy advice to Prevent. And with risk management in ISO 45001 we have an established process for it, even the excel templates are already made. The framework exists. The tools exist. The question is whether organizations choose to use them for what they were designed for.

This whole discussion always comes back to a simple point. Why should companies do something about work conditions which are obviously harmful to employees? There are some like me who say it’s foremost an ethical question. No economic activity should generate bodily or mental harm, because the worth of the human being is higher than the shareholder value. But even if we put ethics aside, doing nothing is strategically stupid. Even within the system of companies it does not make sense.

Reiner Rugulies did another study regarding leadership and mental health. Changes toward a more positive — supporting, less controlling — leadership style led to a decrease in depressive symptoms with employees. That demonstrates that organizational change produces measurable health outcomes. The WHO and ILO confirmed that organizational interventions — changing working conditions — reduce emotional distress and improve work outcomes. The same cannot be said if only individual stress management is implemented. Deci showed in a study he did at Xerox that autonomy-supportive management produces measurably better levels of satisfaction, lower stress levels and even reduced compensation demands — I can see the CFOs suddenly paying attention. He also demonstrated that managers can be trained in this, it’s not wishful thinking. A Lancet study showed that between 17% and 35% of depressive disorders in Europe would be preventable by just eliminating negative psychosocial working conditions. Controlling compliance systems are expensive to maintain. A method based on intrinsic motivation is self-sustaining. And for all you money-obsessed: 1 trillion dollars lost per year. 

Organizations that systematically prevent the conditions for human flourishing are not just producing stressed workers. They are producing the conditions in which genuine responsibility, creativity, and engagement become impossible.

Bing, another newsletter lands in my inbox. I think of the colleagues who disappeared. I think of what the evidence says about why that happens. I think of what it would actually take to change it. Then I delete the email.

I guess there is more to explore — just not in this newsletter. 

What would it actually take to change this where you work? Your thoughts: LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, The Truth About Burnout, 1997

Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do, 1995

Robert Karasek and Töres Theorell, Healthy Work, 1990

Reiner Rugulies et al., Work-related causes of mental health conditions and interventions for their improvement in workplaces, The Lancet, 2023

John Frank et al., Work as a social determinant of health in high-income countries, The Lancet, 2023

World Health Organization, WHO Guidelines on Mental Health at Work, 2022

World Health Organization and International Labour Organization, Mental Health at Work: Policy Brief, 2022

And the Data:

Mind Share Partners, 2021 Mental Health at Work Report, in partnership with Qualtrics and ServiceNow, 2021

American Psychological Association, 2022 Work and Well—being Survey, conducted by The Harris Poll, 2022

World Health Organization and International Labour Organization, Joint Estimates of the Work-related Burden of Disease and Injury, 2021 

Kathrine Sørensen, Johan Simonsen Abildgaard et al., Changes in exposure to positive leadership behaviours and subsequent changes in workers’ depressive symptoms, National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen

The images invade my mind, in faded color, another time. English policemen in groups of three with bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Multi-lens security cameras in huge black domes attached to the asbestos-lined ceilings staring at me like an army of HAL 9000. The cameras make an eerie buzzing noise when they rotate and follow me, at least I think they do. Hard to tell because I have trouble breathing. My chest feels too heavy, like somebody is pinning me down. I had my first panic attack in the spring of 1989 – at Heathrow airport. That’s post Lockerbie UK airport security – still pre 9/11 tough. But for a thirteen year old Swiss teen coming from the vast openness of glass-walled airports that was enough. I didn’t feel guilty, I was not afraid of being captured like a criminal. I just felt watched.

Some years later – my first serious job – I was trained as an Internal Auditor and experienced the other side. “What do you do if you find any non-conformity?” The elderly professor does not get an answer from the rows of mid 20s professionals in what they think is business casual. “You put it into your audit report. Do not enter into any discussion with the auditee. They will only try to justify.” First I was watched. Then I was trained to watch.

The Board Room Version: Control in the office is a topic since Taylorism. RTO is only the newest version of a game that is based on the same unverified assumptions. McGregor’s Theory X shows us that controlling management isn’t a way to deal with passive employees — it produces them. Foucault describes the perfect prison, the Panopticon and we see that offices have become exactly that — visibility as management tool, internalized controls. 42% only come to the office to be seen. Bernstein & Turban study open offices — face-to-face interactions get reduced by 70% — the opposite of the intention. Mintzberg would describe RTO as administration, not strategy. Office or home is the wrong question. The right question is for which kind of work are we designing.

Control is not my favorite topic, nevertheless an important one, in view of the history of work. Since industrialization the company has given the worker – especially the office worker – an identity in the form of status and title, a biography of self realization in the company, in the work. A great part of our lives is the career within the company, by the company. Then we have to swipe a badge each morning at the entrance. 

The most persistent control mechanisms in modern business start well-intentioned, dressed as science. F.W. Taylor at the beginning of the last century started to meticulously analyze office workers’ tasks. Just as he had done on the shop floor decades before, office work was now considered inefficient and ripe for optimization. Everybody was doing it in their own methods, with their own knowledge. Taylor studied it and extracted the most efficient version from what he saw workers doing. Sounds familiar? The special sauce of Taylorism – because at the time the thing caught on like wildfire and became a movement – is that he took the knowledge he gained and created instructions for management. This was intentional and part of the approach: Knowledge had to move away from workers to management, and with that the control over the work. I see myself so much in this. In my early work I would constantly find faster and easier ways to do work, first my own, then other people’s. Seemed logical or I always said, I’m just too lazy to do it inefficiently. The idea was the same. The difference is how he used the knowledge afterwards.

Taylorism took on some bizarre forms. System, a 1900 magazine inspired by the movement had articles on how to lick envelopes and stamps most efficiently. But besides the bizarre, the ideas were not villainous. They were based on a mindset we still recognize today. 

It comes down to how you see the people doing work – both administrative and operational – in a company. You can either think that people cannot take responsibility for company goals, need to be managed in what they achieve and how they work. Or you believe workers can orient themselves towards a clear goal. On their own, because they are intelligent beings.

Now, I’m going to use a term a lot of you already know – but keep your hands off the LinkedIn post creation button because it is more nuanced than you think. In 1960 Douglas McGregor wrote the “Human Side of Enterprise” coming up with the famous Theory X/Theory Y concept that explained the mentioned mindsets. People need to be taken by the hand – Theory X – or people just need to be pointed towards the finishing line – Theory Y. Sounds easy, right? Well the labels are simple, the assumption underneath is not. For management that means that Theory X is about control, and Theory Y is about enabling. And everybody thinks they are enablers, right? We are nice managers after all. Point is that the basic assumption is much more important than whether you are nice or mean. See you can be really nice and still think that you need to hold people’s hand constantly. I certainly did that a lot in my managerial roles – and with my kids too. Handholding remains a controlling management style — just the soft version. 

At least we are not the hard version. They use pressure, punishment and command. So that would be really bad. Well eventually it doesn’t matter, both produce the same end result with people. The hard version can produce compliance outwards, but inwards it will create resistance that will lead to avoidance, defensive behaviour and eventually passivity. Same for the soft version of Theory X. People who are constantly being guided and steered eventually will only work if you tell them to. Again passivity.

It is the method producing passivity or even resistance. That is not something like human nature. But management will then read it as such. The method is working in a loop. Management is reaffirmed of their belief that people need to be controlled because they are passive. And so the system reproduces itself, another self-confirming death loop. Theory X does not merely describe passive employees. It produces them.

We assume and get confirmed people cannot be trusted to work on their own. So we start to design systems to control their work. Knowledge as we saw with Taylorism is one form of control, where people work is another. We enter the world of the office. Offices had many forms since they existed. From the smallish counting houses of the 1800s as described in Melville’s Bartleby or Dickens’ Scrooge, where everybody was together but status was in the space and the furniture they got, to the bullpen of the office factories of the early 1900s mixed with private offices only for the executive class. 

There were many experiments. Robert L. Propst genuinely studied how people worked in the 1960s and created the Action Office, a line of office furniture meant to liberate the office worker from sitting and being constricted to one fixed workstation. Unfortunately that was too costly and when value-engineered became what we today know as the cubicle, the cage of the office worker. There was Jack Nilles’ telecommuting experience in an insurance company in the 70s. Telecommuting was the idea to take workplaces closer to home, into smaller office spaces to avoid commuting – remember 70s first oil crisis. The concept worked but was cancelled promptly because managers were uneasy about work they could not see. There were non-territorial offices, the Chiat/Day experiment, nobody had a fixed workplace in the office building, you even got your laptop and cellphone only in the morning when you arrived at work. It failed of course too, imagine the effort and chaos of finding equipment and room each day. And then we had Covid. The largest – unplanned – experiment regarding workplaces. All office workers suddenly had their office at home. And that ended with RTO – the return to office mandate. There were many more. You can read about them in Nikil Saval’s “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace”. But the thread running through all of them is the same.

It always comes back to visibility. The counting house was the same room, the bullpen was one big office space, the cubicle was an easily observable prison cell. Whenever visibility was broken up as in the remoteness of the telecommuting, the chaos of the non-territorial office and the absolute disconnect in the home office, management always pushed back. 

The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote a great book about the general topic of control – I had to read it years back for seminars on the philosophy of law – called “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” in 1975. Interesting for us is his analysis of the Panopticon. In the 18^th century an English legal reformer – Jeremy Bentham – wanted to make the prison system more efficient and humane. He proposed a circular prison where one central guard could potentially observe all prisoners while the prisoners could never know whether they were actually being watched. If you are not picturing Guardians of the Galaxy then you are probably thinking of your own glass-walled offices or your open office spaces. Everybody is visible, everybody can be watched. Because this is not just a prison design. It is also a management philosophy.

Visibility and knowledge are the most prominent opportunities for control. Now, who does the controlling. We already said this is not per se villainous. If we look at Theory X we can identify three different types of management. We have what I like to call the clueless manager. He is the one who genuinely believes that people need to be directed and work needs to be visible. That is probably the norm. It is just an assumption — but an assumption never verified and with consequences. 

Then there is the signal manager. He is very well intentioned, probably thinks of himself as a Theory Y kinda guy, but he communicates still in Theory X. He is the one who says – and believes – he wants to help you but still will enforce control policies like RTO. But there is a gap between message and system. Remember Schein’s espoused values, the values somebody tells you and the basic assumption that you experience in a company. That’s exactly this at the individual manager level. And I guess you also remember what is more important to employees’ perception. It’s the basic assumptions. I used to belong to that group for a very long time during my career. 

Finally the third type of management is the deliberate actor. These are the people who exactly know what they are doing – controlling, pressuring – and think that’s exactly what is needed. We don’t like these, but they are real. It’s the 25% – or more since who likes to identify themselves as a bad actor – of executives in a 2024 BambooHR survey who said they’d hoped for voluntary turnover coming with their RTO mandate. So we still have these kinds of managers – sucks I know – but as said the other Theory Xers are also bad news.

The signal managers by the way were created by something called the Human Relations Movement. Interesting story, please bear with me: It started with the Hawthorne studies in the 1920s. Western Electric, a large electrical manufacturing company, funded a study at their Hawthorne Works plant trying to find a connection between light levels and productivity of factory workers. Well turned out there was none. But they found that being watched – by the researchers – actually had a positive impact on productivity. It was then coined as the Hawthorne Effect. Out of this the psychologist and management theorist Elton Mayo developed that social factors — attention, belonging, being seen as a person — matter more than physical conditions. Born was the Human Relations Movement. Sounds humanist, right? Not if you then use the workers’ humanity as a management tool. Then it just becomes a soft control mechanism. It’s the carrot, not the stick. Actually the basis for the whole thing is anyway shaky because a study in 2009 found that the original Hawthorne Effect was likely overstated. 

Another reason why brute force is not really required anymore for Theory X is something Foucault described as internalization of control. See, in the Panopticon the really devilish thing is not that the prisoners are watched all the time. But that there is a possibility that they are watched and they don’t know when. This constant uncertainty causes them to behave as if they were watched constantly even if they are not. The control gets internalized. Same thing is happening to you in your open space office or at least 42% of you. Remember the BambooHR survey on RTO mentioned before? 42% of employees said they show up to the office only to be seen. Panopticism makes behaviour visible. Bad management mistakes visible behaviour for real performance.

I know BambooHR is not the most scientific source for a study, let me redeem myself by telling you about one published in the oldest scientific journal: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, first published in 1665. Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban studied employees transitioning to more open office architecture. I think you have all heard that the main reason management gives for open offices is to increase collaboration between employees. Well guess what. The study showed face-to-face interaction decreased by 70% while digital interaction increased. It had the opposite effect of what was intended. People did not collaborate more when made visible. They withdrew. Headset on, email sent, privacy found in their laptop. 

Out of my own experience I see two problems here. Genuine collaborative thinking requires a quiet space, not open-space noise and chaos. In addition we who facilitate workshops and meetings have experienced that a clear time frame is also required. Nobody can continuously collaborate for eight hours, we just don’t have the cognitive capacity for that. This also applies to coaching and mentoring. The cardinal rule among professional coaches is that sessions need to be purposefully planned. Unplanned, they either don’t happen or happen badly. Companies also bring up informal exchange — the coffee corner conversation, the chance encounter — as reasons for presence. Planned, purposeful exchange serves those goals better than hoping that proximity produces them spontaneously. Because we are professionals, we want to do better than hoping. 

To make this a hundred percent clear — presence is not the enemy. Some work requires a room, a table, and people in it. And remote work does not automatically solve this. Plus surveillance software can turn the home office into a digital panopticon the same way as open offices can. Onboarding, learning and culture are always important topics to be considered. But what is important to remember is that the issue is not the building. The issue is the assumption underneath. The question is not office or home. The question is what kind of work we are designing for. And more importantly — what kind of humans we are designing it for. And who gets to decide.

This comes down to something fundamental and I am happy to introduce one of the brightest and at the same time hardest – at least for me – management theorist to read: Henry Mintzberg. In his book “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” he explains, well, that. Strategy and Planning, how people have done it, that it is not the same and how it should be done properly – at least the strategy part. Essentially, planning is administration projected into the future. Strategy is not the plan itself, but the pattern that emerges from decisions, learning, adaptation, and action.

What’s interesting for us is how he would analyze this situation: A policy – like RTO or moving to open offices – can look like strategy because it is formal and measurable and enforceable – but it may only be the planning machinery based on an untested assumption. A policy can formalize office attendance. But it cannot formalize trust, culture, creativity or useful collaboration. And you cannot call badge swipes culture. You see that very well if you compare the planner voice and the strategy voice.

P: “How many days do people need to be in the office? Who will track it? What are the rules?”

S: “What kind of work requires presence, and how do we design for it?”

Planning turns strategy into administration. That can be done after we have the insight. But it’s dangerous instead of insight.

And it’s not like we don’t have insight. We don’t need to rely on untested assumptions. We have more than a century of experience with office work. Taylor studied work excessively. OK, he screwed up what he did with the knowledge, nevertheless it’s there. Mayo observed how workers tick. Propst was obsessed with office furniture and setup, tried out stuff, failed, tried again, failed harder and left us the cubicle. Nilles proved that telecommuting worked, the grandfather of Remote Work. We have the European Bürolandschaft. Chiat/Day made two attempts, beside the chaos office, they also built a kind of work village. We have at least two years of Home Office experience gained with lots of pain and sorrow. Technology practically adapted in weeks, not months or years it usually takes.

All this knowledge, this experience is available. None of it is consulted to learn what could be done. How work could work better. Why is that? Some of these experiences were too expensive, yes. And the environment is changing so fast, that some evolutions are hard to endure. But these are only Sachzwänge. They are hurdles to be overcome, not show stoppers. 

Yet we are still sitting in office factories that are worse than actual factories nowadays. 

Control has become that important to business — important enough to prohibit us from finding a way of working that is actually humane. All of it based on an unverified assumption.

Sometimes I think we should maybe be a bit more like Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”

I think there is more to explore — and perhaps more to refuse.

You should have an opinion on this one: LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911

Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 1933

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975

Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, 1994

Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, 2014

Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, 1853

And the data:

BambooHR, The New Surveillance Era: Visibility Beats Productivity for RTO & Remote, 2024

Ethan S. Bernstein & Stephen Turban, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018

I feel like the mad hatter, not because I don’t like to waste time – who would want to offend that guy – time I mean. Also not because I have too many hats in a literal sense – only have two – the proper ones: fedoras – but because I have to wear too many of them at the same time. Well, I choose it to a certain extent. I am a caregiver – a household man -, a writer, a thinker and a consultant – a craftsman – plus an employee – a salaryman. I wear three hats and yet none at all. The household hat often disappears like the Cheshire Cat, grinning me down with dirty socks and another meal to prep. The craftsman hat is never quite sure if he needs to be good or be paid — or if he even exists. And the salary hat is the maddest of all. He was made to earn a living but gets tossed around by an unpredictable weather system in which he is constantly changing colors. And all of this is just work. 

The Board Room Version: Work has developed over 700’000 years — and with it who we are. From hunter/gatherer to farmer to craftsman to factory worker to salary man: Work was gradually separated from life and became a biography. Keynes’ 15-hours-week has not become reality — not because it would not have been possible, but because we need work as moral duty and as an identity. Today we have multiple work identities — Gig Work, part-time, changing jobs every three years — the identity dissolves. The deal between company and employee has been broken. What remains when work does not give us identity anymore?

Doesn’t matter if you think of work as abstractly as the use of energy with a purpose or closer to us as socially organized human activity. All is work. We feel it when we do it. We recognize it when we see it. Or do we?

A small group of humans are moving through the landscape. They are small and old, tall and young, female and male. When they are hungry, they look for food, gathering and hunting. When they need shelter, they build it, they cook and clean. They care for the small ones and teach the young. They have households without houses. They are equal and everybody contributes. What they do is live. If I would tell them that I write about the history of work, they would not understand. Because it’s life for them, there is no separation. 

One day – nobody knows exactly why – they stop moving. Probably they just find nice plants to eat. They make the land their own and the land provides them food. They plant more, but have to wait until the plants have grown. So they need to plan ahead and store food. Time becomes tangible. Households become a farm, then a village.

They become more. And they own, then own more. Small villages become small cities. They become so many that they start to do different things. And since they don’t know each other, they need to know, who does what. I’m making pots, I’m a potter, I make swords, I’m a blacksmith. The profession becomes a standing in the group. Once there are enough of one kind, they form groups themselves called guilds to protect the quality. The individual becomes legible through a craft.

Cities become bigger, more craftsman need to produce more and therefor new entities form. The factory becomes the place of work. So many working people need to be organized. Work gets counted and recorded. Time becomes a clock. Seasons become days then hours. Work and the household get separated for the first time. A man leaves. A woman stays. She becomes invisible because she has no factory and no clock.

The factory worker becomes the office worker becomes the salaryman. Work becomes a sequence, a title and a story to tell, not a product you make. Factories and offices multiply into enterprises. Payment, status, stories replace the physical. The worker is an idea, a biography tied to an enterprise. 

Then the company fires him.

 Cute story, isn’t it? And it’s essentially how work has developed in the last 700’000 years. Just not quite as neat. 350 words cannot give justice to all that time. Jan Lucassen’s 200’000 words in “The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind” does a better job. Besides being much more accurate and less touchy-feely, he manages to cure some of my misconceptions. I – being brought up in an old-fashioned social democratic household – always believed that industrialization was the big evil turning point for the people, the worker. You know, early industry-fed capitalist villains hijacking the poor worker from the homestead, jailing him in the factory, cutting all ties to the man’s family and his home. Inventing the whip of the factory whistle. For me it was like the smoke filled, human flattening factory in Dickens “Hard Times” – don’t be scared to read it, it’s a really short novel. 

But as often when you look at historical development on a large scale, villains lose their faces and events become development. Control, discipline and hierarchy were no inventions of the industrialist. They were caused by the focus on time and surplus. When farming gradually replaced hunting and gathering the perception of work and life changed as well. And gradual here means 10’000 years and more in some regions. Just imagine that, that sounds more like evolution, less like history.

See, humans did not just stop working one day – hunting food – for today’s hunger and started planning for tomorrow’s – or better next year’s – harvest – farming, it was a long transition. You gathered some berries, ate them and at the same time planted some wheat that you could eat next year. Work slowly became something that was perceived as time bound. In addition – probably because planning was more demanding – the future harvest mattered more than today’s berries. With that development the need for surplus was created. You had to bridge the time between two harvests — your family has to eat daily, not just seasonally.

Surplus creates a resource. A stock of food. The person who cut the wheat does not have to be the same person who stores it. Somebody can control the wheat. The wheat that many harvested. That opens the door to inequality. Humans are no longer equal. 

The city is just the next natural step: more stock, more people. This enables specialization. First someone harvests the wheat – the farmer -, someone grinds it – the miller -, someone bakes the bread – the baker. But it goes further — not everyone needs to produce food anymore, there is a stock of it. So someone only makes pots – the potter -, someone only forges tools – the blacksmith. In the cities people who do the same form groups: the guilds. They organize the work, create a standard.

As there are more and more people doing the same things, they need bigger places. The household workplace becomes the workshop, becomes the factory. Factories need owners, factories need supervision, more control. That is where my union inherited heart starts to bleed. The worker is away from home, under control, working not for himself, but for others. And all of this before industrialization really took off.

The second big misconception I illogically always believed in is that some activities simply died out. We don’t have hunter/gatherers anymore, the subsistence farmer has been killed by big corporations, there are no guild members in today’s society. But history is not as clear-cut. Lucassen shows that all forms of work survive in one form or the other. Again I thought too much in sudden change. All of these developments were slow and gradual and mixed with the old remaining. We still have guilds today. We have builders, mechanics, carpenters, electricians. They have licenses and have standards. The subsistence farmer is found in many forms, from remote location farming to families planting in their gardens to this day. And the hunter/gatherer household? What happened to that? It still exists in our modern household. The preparation of food, the providing of shelter, the care for young and old ones. That is all still here and it is still one of the largest groups of workers. She – yes, still is mostly a woman – used to be so visible that she was the center of the life-work-household. In today’s work we simply don’t see her, because we don’t count her activities. 

Counting had become important. Large surpluses needed to be counted and recorded. More people in cities made counting and recording more important. Ownership cannot exist without record, otherwise it is just possession – shout out to my private law professor. The factory needed to pay wages and order resources. All needed to be counted. But see, what happened with all that counting, we mistook the count for the whole picture. We counted only what needed to be counted, not all there is. There was no need to count household activities, so we stopped seeing them. But that work still existed, still does to this day.

This has a connection with how we define work and what work has become after industrialization. Before we were mainly creating with our hands and later with the help of machines. That is where value was created. The result was what defined us. Then the thing we produced wasn’t our own anymore. The act of making, the production became the value. We identified with the working, not the result. We became the worker. With that we also became part of production. We were as much a resource as a machine was. But work started to move to the office, away from production. Because someone needs to plan, coordinate, file, schedule, invoice, sell, ensure, analyze, control and manage. We were no longer producing, but still belonged to the larger system. We were no longer part of production but still part of the system, part of the company. The company has departments and positions and titles. Gradually these replace the void of non-production. We are not what we create, nor how we do it, but where we are in an organization. The organizations become larger and we changed positions within them. There is a path, a narrative, a progression. First intern, then office worker, then manager. It becomes our biography.

The biographical identity —work as a story told — was never for all. It was only for the ones that left production behind. The craftsman still had an anchor in his craft. It was the salaryman’s journey. 

The company had signed off on this, not because anybody wanted to do harm, but because it was the natural next step. There is no villain here. Work had fully become our identity and we could not let go of it, not just the office worker, also not the company, at least in the beginning.

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that technological progress would eventually reduce work to a three-hour shift or a fifteen-hour week to satisfy our needs. Sounds wonderful. And yet there is a strange feeling reading it. Can you pin it down? But Keynes’ prediction never materialized. He was not wrong because it would not have been economically possible. There were productivity gains, there was technological advance. He was right to a certain extent. What he didn’t see at the time is what we can see today. James Suzman described this in his “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time” in 2021. The productivity gains of the last 90 years were not shared equally. Capital has gained disproportionately compared to what workers were paid. We all know that, no secret there. Wants were expanded in that time, we expect more of life than in the 1930s. Organizations function because they organize work, need the attention and commitment of the worker. If they have the worker for less time, they cannot achieve that. But there are outer restraints. The most damning reason is probably that the worker himself needs the work to define himself. On one hand they need to write their biography, their career in order to have an identity. This takes time, sometimes a lifetime, certainly not a 15-hours week. On the other hand because of the moral obligation we have towards society and ourselves, we feel that we have to work, that we should not be lazy. Max Weber gave it a name, but most of us can feel it without footnotes. Just observe what your reaction was when you read Keynes’ prediction. The prediction feels wrong, not because it’s impossible, or even because it wouldn’t be a nice thing to have. It feels wrong because it threatens something we didn’t even know we were protecting. Our identity. Our biography. Our answer to the moral test. Are we good humans?

Well, we are not at the end of the story. One last shift is happening and we are still in the middle of it. We have become what we work for, what we produce, where we do it and eventually what our job title says we are. But what happens if all this changes? What if you are suddenly expected to change your identity every three years? Refreshing? Or is it unstable and maddening? This is where we are today. The exact number of career changes doesn’t matter – three, five, a dozen depending on the last advice on LinkedIn. And that is not always in sequence. Involuntary low-wage part-time jobs, gig work, on-call work, dependent self-employment, labour leasing have created simultaneous multiple work biographies. The worker has become a human with multiple personalities. Suddenly we do not just feel like a mad hatter, we have become one.

Mad and homeless. What has happened is not just that we have several identities. We have none. Or worse. The household had become invisible, the fruit of labour had moved ownership, the craft dissolved into a deal with a company for title and standing, for identity. Now, as work diversifies, even that identity is disappearing. That deal has been broken. The system has broken it. The actual systemic error is that companies still need what only an intact identity produces. They split the workforce but still need the engagement. They removed the conditions for identity but still need the effort. The hatter is not just mad, he has also lost his hats. What has he left?

I guess there is more to explore.  

How many hats do you wear? – LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Jan Lucassen, The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, 2021

James Suzman, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, 2021

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854

I have this T-shirt – well you saw the picture. D&D – Drucker & Deming. 

Always makes me laugh – me and the very, very few people who get it. Still I love to wear it to expert exchanges, knowledge sharing events where I think I meet the three other people in the world who both know the game and the wizards of management theory. They could summon ideas like a level 20 – well let’s say at least 18 – wizard with 20 INT and spell save DC 19plus with slight frame and a bit of a belly. Too much? I know. I turn them into wizards, while they are just great thinkers. And I make their methods look like magic.

The Board Room Version: We confuse the Image of methods with the methods themselves. Boorstin tells us that the Ideal is replaced by the Image. We are only interested in how we are seen, not in what we must do. Similar Goffman, describes the Frontstage vs. the Backstage — the show becomes the only important thing, forgotten is, how and by whom it is created. RCA, PDCA, ISO, Continuous Improvement become brands instead of tools — we like the sticker but ignore the uncomfortable truth they can show us. Who does not face the mistake cannot solve it. Don Quixote saw giants where there were only windmills. The Image eats the reality.

I can be a horrible fan-boy at times. I always revered Steve Jobs for his visionary genius to use unix as a base for MacOS and nearly hyperventilated whenever he showed off the beautiful, minimalist industrial design of Apple’s latest gadget in the early 2000s. See, doing it again. I think nobody comes close to Immanuel Kant’s mind-blowing thought constructs and getting through these mazes always filled me with joy. Tolkien is king, because he wrote the best book on the planet: The Lord of the Rings. And Neil Gaiman’s stories always feel excitingly eerie and comfortably warm, like a fireplace in a haunted house. 

But let’s face it, Steve was just a great businessman who had always assembled great but less visible people around him. He was a visionary because — by combining the arts and technology — he created his own reality, a wonderful theater production — first colorful, then white, finally metallic silver — nevertheless it was a production. Kant was a genius thinker but a shitty writer, and he is to blame that I still think it is ok to form sentences that span entire book pages. Tolkien wrote a masterpiece but could have taken an introduction to modern dramaturgy course because 10 pages of walking is not interesting and don’t create one of the best character in literature – Tom, of course – just to abandon him after a chapter. And Neil, well, Neil is genuinely awesome, but he used to write  comic books. That’s why he is so cool. 

But all of this is triggering something more personal somehow. Hard to explain. Let me try. I wrote a short story once about a guy struggling not to become like Don Quixote, not fighting windmills and losing the connection to reality. I understand now why I was struggling with writing it. Same reason I am troubled with this here.

Why is this a topic I’m bothering you with? Why is there a problem with Drucker and Deming being called upon whenever we talk about management? Why is it an issue that they were just normal people who studied their stuff extensively, experienced a ton of companies, refined their ideas and what came out is quite neat? Yes, they are only humans. The problem is that we turn them into something easier to carry. A name, a quote, an image. That is the sin.

In tons of speeches I heard Deming quoted: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. I’ve seen it on LinkedIn and Instagram — underneath an elderly gentleman in shades of grey and always with black background. Charming. The real issue is not even that the quote is wrongly attributed to Deming. What is really problematic is that it is absolutely wrong and the exact opposite of what Deming said: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” The argument was about how damaging management by numbers is. While data is important it is certainly not the only thing and has to be used very carefully in analyzing problems, not in managing organizations. Two separate things, please always remember that, and I also say that to myself, because I did commit that sin, too, in lectures, in trainings with that exact quote. And there are more examples of this – and it happens in other fields, too. Friends confirmed this to me. My wife told me it even happens in pedagogy. Misquoting Montessori. How can they?! Wait, who is… 

Why am I so shocked about this? Well, I studied Literature first and there, something like this – alongside plagiarism – is like the worst crime you could commit. Now, in other examples it is a little more subtle. Sometimes it’s just making a quote a bit punchier. OK, neither Drucker nor Edgar Schein ever said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But Schein said that “… culture determines and limits strategy …” and that was in a paragraph about conflicts in merging companies. But ok, that’s not that bad. The meaning is still there, somehow, somewhere.

The somehow is the issue. Time for Daniel J. Boorstin’s “The Image”. Written in 1962, Boorstin was describing how journalism shifted from reporting on events to helping create them. The emerging mass media of the time had created a huge demand for the stuff they wanted to sell: News. But it does not come in a regular constant stream, like for example oil, oh, wait… Well think of something else. So news is created — by the media, by governments, by companies staging events the media can then report on. Think that is terrible, immoral, totally utterly false. Actually, a press conference, a product presentation, the safety message you receive in your inbox on Monday morning, would fit the bill perfectly. These pseudo-events as Boorstin calls them, a relatively fresh concept in the middle of the last century, are the norm nowadays. 

From events he goes to people. Individuals known purely for being known are basically the human equivalent of pseudo-events. Oh, wait I know that… Ah, celebrities. Yes, Boorstin makes a separation between heroes or anybody known for their achievements or courage or moral actions and the people who are just visible. I have to steady myself a bit here. This is all too familiar. And I don’t mean the instagram celebrities and YouTubers. The real impact lies in the more subtle forms of this phenomenon, where it is more a shift: the politician who is more a media personality, the CEO who seems to be more on stage and social media. I spare you Boorstin’s whole riff that no-one is a traveler anymore and we have all become tourists. And by the way pseudo-events are not untrue by definition, neither are celebrities nor tourism.

Then what is the problem with that pseudo-thing. OK, we don’t like some of these staged events or these used-to-be-the-real-deal-celebrities, but they don’t hurt anybody, right. The problem is not with anybody or anything in particular. It’s what happened to the relationship between the two. The ideal — what the event, the hero or the travel actually means — has been separated from the image – the fabricated event, the celebrity, the well organized packaged trip to Asia for just 999.-, airport and tourism taxes not included. And the ideal is something demanding. It judges reality. It costs effort, discipline and change. 

Think of improvement actions in companies for example. The time it takes to keep at it, hours of boring data analysis, process analysis, trying never to skip a step, endless concentrated discussions working with the needs and wants of stakeholders to get buy-in and then another dozen rounds to get them to pay the costs. 

Images are comfort food. The whole point of them, their intention are to be consumed. They are made to be attractive, easy and useful. They do not challenge anything. “We are trying to become the best quality provider of smartphones and we are not there yet.” That is an organization speaking in ideals. An image company will just say we are the best. But we all have heard that, right. It’s like good advertising, actually. It is Apple’s creative and rebellious Think Different. It’s Nike’s Just Do It. Or one of my favorite Patagonia slogans, Don’t Buy This Jacket creating a flair of ethical anti-consumerism. What worries me is not so much that I or we – all of us poor consumers – would be fooled by these phrases. Because we are not, right. We know that Apple must be a tightly organized tech company and very few of its employees can actually be really creative and individualistic. Nike is just trying to motivate you, because “Just Do It” doesn’t even tell me anything about the product. It’s a message to me as a sports person. And Patagonia is literally trying to sell me a jacket by saying not to buy one. But all of this is just background noise, right? No, it is much more than that. 

The slogans are not false in the crude sense. They are even worse than false: frictionless. They remove the limits, the conflict, the actual work. And on top of that, they — the slogans, the images — work against the ideal.

See, at least according to Boorstin, organizations are increasingly replacing ideal with images. Less “what must we do?”. More “How should we be seen?”. The showing drains energy from the doing. Read him. The analysis is more than half a century old and more relevant today than when it was published. Because we see that today, right, we do that today, I do that today. No safety effort without a campaign. No customer presentation without meaningless slogans in front of a multicolored AI generated picture. No trip without an Instagram post.

And Boorstin is not alone, take Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959. Social interaction can be imagined like a play being performed. There is a frontstage and a backstage. They are separated on purpose. You cannot let the audience see what is happening in the back. There would be no play otherwise. You don’t see the kitchen in a restaurant. Customers don’t see what is happening inside an organization. Sometimes I like him better than Boorstin because although they describe more or less the same thing, Goffman is clinically analyzing, no judgement, that is just how social interactions work. Makes me feel a bit better whenever I step on a stage and perform the latest production of “Hail to PDCA and RCA” or “Waiting for WIIFM”.

We even created acronyms to create these acronyms. KISS, BLUF, SCQA, ELI5 and one that I actually use SUCCESs – no typo: the method is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories, so no second s. Aside from that acronym-crime, this approach by the Heath brothers is very good, it’s sound, doesn’t oversimplify, because even the Simple is more about getting to the core of an idea and not just dumbing it down to easy digestible slogans. Unexpected is a neat trick to get attention. Being Concrete is always important because it often makes your messages clearer. And who can argue about the importance of Credibility? I’m not so much a fan of Emotional and Stories, but I use them sometimes, although carefully, because I am very aware of the danger of it all. Simple can very rapidly lead to amputation of an idea. Concrete, Emotional and Stories often turn out to be anecdotal, manipulative ways to replace analysis rather than carrying it. 

What really worries me is the poster that shows a hungry little kid asking you to donate: I hate that. It’s not how I would do it. I would put together some information on the region facing famine, trying to make you understand why help is needed. I can tell you what the region looks like, who lives there, the historical and economical development, what is actually happening. If that doesn’t land I haven’t educated anyone, I have made no sustainable impact. I’ve lost to a better image. And this will always happen because the little kid will always get more donations. So I revert to SUCCESs.

But it puts me in difficult situations of making the right judgement call. That is always the danger with these pseudo-things. And these acronyms are just another pseudo-thing. 

And all these tools which are so useful and essentially important for an organization’s wellbeing become brands, a shiny and simple reflection of the method. But why, why do we do this pseudo-stuff. Take Root Cause Analysis – RCA, yes, again. It’s the shit everybody always says that is needed. Auditors expect it when people have to fill out these damn audit follow up reports. Quality people say it makes improvement sustainable, because not the tree is the real problem, the root is. Actually neither are the problem – trees and roots are solutions not problems. And that guy, yeah look at him, that auditor-quality-trainer-mismatch is me, exactly what I do. The thing is that we like the brand, what it tells us, the image. The truth is what we don’t want to see. Because the uncomfortable truth about root causes is they show us that we often have fundamental or systemic issues in organizations. Stuff that is really big, really costly, would require significant changes. So often, we do not like what we see when we dig deeper. We prefer to cover up the hole with a nice sticker RCA or Continuous Improvement Champion, rather than fixing it. 

If you cannot face the error, meet it eye to eye, and stare it down with improvement, you will fail. If you are not curious enough to go down that root cause hole you’re less capable for management than a little girl called Alice. Schönreden does not help anybody, not you, your organization, your customers or your market value. I am pointing at you but thinking of me. 

Don Quixote kept losing the connection back to reality. He couldn’t stop seeing giants where there were only windmills. The image consumed the reality. I am not sure I always avoid that myself.

Because right now, I’m sitting at my desk, feverishly hacking on my keyboard, hoping that all of you love me. In the end, I do this not for you but mainly for myself and that is probably the uncomfortable truth behind both Goffman and Boorstin. Not that we cover up something with images, not that we hide behind the curtain. We are afraid of the ideals behind them. 

Is your job just for show? Is the organization you work for just about shareholder value? Am I good enough for this world?

I try, I truly try, believe me. But how can I ensure that I am worthy of your trust? 

I guess there is more to explore. Worse: it includes myself.

Your thoughts: LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, 1962

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959

W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics, 1993

Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick, 2007

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

Hallucinogenic colors are all I can see. I almost hit a wall – no not the exhaustion kind during a long run. It’s an actual wall, a huge one in a shabby-looking warehouse. The washed out gray base color is almost completely covered by corporate posters – sorry no nudes here. This is the 2020s. And these posters are screaming at me with their messages in phrases – whatever happened to full sentences? Are they the new forgotten art in writing? And I’m an auditor today. Trying to make sense of it all.

“ZERO DEFECTS”

“FIRST TIME RIGHT”

“PEOPLE FIRST”

“UNSAFE? SPEAK UP”

“WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER”

My first thought: please, stop shouting at me! Immediately my child brain tries to find connections between them, then to the different departments of the company: Which one was put up by Operations, which by Finance and which by Quality? But honestly I am not sure. Finally I realize these refer to the different change initiatives of the company. They should know better, but what can you do if some fancy consultant/PR/design mix-up firm assures you, that’s what you need first and foremost. Shouting at employees is an old trick.

The Board Room Version: Change management fails because it confuses culture with communication. Kahneman explains that when confronted with change people don’t hear what they can gain but what they lose. And Hannan & Freeman show us that organisations are systemically built to resist change. Schein shows that culture happens on three levels — artifacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. Posters and slogans only reach the first two. But what really needs to change are basic assumptions and they can only be experienced. Organizational Culture cannot be changed from the top. It needs to grow from within. But this requires leaders who first abandon their own basic assumptions.

I guess they read Kotter’s “Leading Change”. It’s a workable approach for small stuff, 8-steps, I use them myself whenever I do DMAIC initiatives. And it is widely known, relatively easy to use.

Create urgency, basically scream, the house is on fire – or just show endless PowerPoint slides with red numbers and scare them with negative trend lines. 

Build a guiding coalition — find the people open to change. Your followers, your early adopters, your sponsors.

Form your vision. Communicate it. That’s two steps, apparently. The idea of whatever you want to change and then — shout it out.

Now you are almost done. You just need to remove obstacles, generate short term wins, sustain acceleration (keep the foot on the gas) and institutionalize the change, meaning make it part of the culture of the organization. Easy, right. 

Well, if the change is something small and also very rationally sound, then it is. Changing how to submit ideas to senior management, yes. Having a new expense report system, sure. Wearing safety equipment, maybe also ok. If you go into more complex structures and processes you will hit a wall. Kotter himself had doubts about using it in complex situations. I would say most companies are very complex situations. The problem is that the model only scratches the surface of what organizations are at their core.

Edgar Schein was a Swiss-born American – we don’t hold that against him – business theorist and, more importantly, psychologist who studied change in organizations extensively. Schein argued that an organization doesn’t just have a culture — it is one. We will hear more of him and his work later. I could have also brought up Peter Drucker’s quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” but it would be wrong because he actually never wrote that. It just sounds cool and everybody reproduces it, but come on, Peter Drucker would never say something Gen X style like that, he is far too sophisticated. Not that I have anything against Gen X, of which I am a proud member.

So if we are talking about organizational culture, we are playing a different ball game and Kotter’s 8-step model cannot be applied. And the problem starts at step one — because for Kotter, creating urgency is purely a communication task. But it isn’t — it’s a psychological one. Remember Daniel Kahneman, the man who explained decision making to us. He brings in the concept of loss aversion. OK, we tell people to change and as a result all numbers and performance and quality and revenue will become pink and fluffy. But according to Kahneman what employees will hear is that you are taking away something, their old routines, their accumulated expertise, social or actual standing in a company. In that case, you just need to offer the same value to them in positive change to compensate the negative impact, right? Two problems with that. Firstly you would need to offer twice as much positive outcome to compensate for the negative impact. 

There is an easy and fun experiment to prove that. I tried it myself with numerous people because I didn’t believe it. I ask you to play a game of coin flipping with me. If you win you get 100 CHF from me, if I win I get 100 CHF from you. Do you want to play? On average you will say no. If I asked you to play the game and I give you 200 and you can only lose 100, then on average you will say yes. That’s what is called Loss Aversion. 

The second problem with bargaining for change is that we are operating on completely different levels. I propose a change that brings quality, performance, money — you are afraid of losing status and familiar routines. Two different accounting systems, business and emotion. Very hard to reach a good deal when two people do not speak the same language. 

Kahneman has one more observation worth noting. In uncertain situations, people systematically favor non-action. I’m not sure, I’m not going to do anything. That feels like the safest way. This might be heuristically reasonable in a lot of cases. But when organizations do this, it is often their end.

This is what the study of organizational inertia is about. Organizations that do nothing? Kind of, but more like in physics (Newton’s First law of Motion to be exact) when an object stays still unless you push it hard enough. Exactly that, applied to organizations. Oh, this has to be Sociology, only these people come up with nifty ideas about people stuff and can prove it with formulas. I will spare you the math but I have to take you for a quick mental rollercoaster ride for this one. Hold on to your synapses!  

The people who came up with that model are Michael Hannan and John Freeman, who looked at organizations as populations meaning companies are like all the humans on earth. Their model goes like this: So what drives change in organizations? It is selection – fit companies live, unfit ones die off. Darwin just on another level. Now in selection reliability and accountability are preferred – stakeholders reward consistent and good performance. Reliability and accountability require reproducibility – standardized, repeatable processes. Shout out to the ISO people! Reproducibility produces strong inertia – standardization makes change harder. So logical deduction is that selection favors strong inertia. Wait, I’m not finished: Reproducibility increases with age – older companies can and will standardize more. Size also increases inertia – more complex structure means more interdependency leads to harder change. Reorganization – or cultural change in companies increase their death rate because stakeholders depend on reliability. In a nutshell: the market builds organizations that cannot change, rewards them for not changing and occasionally kills them when conditions shift and the organization needs to change. Sounds strange, but Hannan & Freeman have the math to prove it, but you can also think of examples. All these big companies failures that were caused because of changing customer demand and different environments. Some tried to react and failed, others did not or not fast enough and failed. IBM is an almost case (change from transistor to microchip technology only worked with many losses), Blackberry (not getting the 2C market for smartphones), Kodak (had the technology but failed organizationally), Nokia, Blockbuster, Pan Am. All are change victims.

So I can do something and the probability of failure is high and I can do nothing and the probability is high?! But it gets even worse. You know who the stakeholders in this model are. It is usually big companies and organizations – like banks, regulators, large customers – that are also suffering from high inertia. So the whole double death loop is even self-reinforcing. 

There is the startup counter argument. Startups get financed by venture capital which is geared towards taking a risk and going for agile companies. And it is true, as long as the companies are startups. Once they become grown up companies they will need regular funding, operate under normal regulation and need more standards and accountability. Yes and then they are in the death trap, too.

Besides being absurdly and morbidly funny, this shows one more thing: Change is not just hard. Change is supposed to be hard. Resistance to change is not just an upsy, it is the system. A feature, not a bug.

I could just leave you here with all of that and turn off all the lights. But let’s dig a bit deeper into change and culture in organizations to understand what exactly is so hard to change. The best analysis comes from Schein in his book “Organizational Culture and Leadership”. When management tries to change something they mostly use Kotter’s 8-Step and do a lot of communication of urgency and vision and then you just need to remove some obstacles. That would work if organizations were a straight road with obstacles to remove. They are not.

Now Schein actually found that organizations have three different levels where culture happens. First, the Artifacts — the stuff we can easily see: Offices, dress code, meetings, language. Although easy to see, it is hard to interpret correctly. If I see silk ties and Oxford shirts, does that mean that this is a conservative company or are they into fashion and luxury? The second level helps here — it’s what the organization says it believes. The Espoused Values. The visions, the mission statement, the strategy. “We are a Robin Hood anti-capitalist record company. We steal from the rich. Therefore we stole all the ties and shirts from the bankers around the corner.” Ah, very cool idea. But is that really true? Because culture is always true (for good or bad). That’s where the third level comes into play: The Basic assumptions. This is the operating system, what is never said out loud but practiced on a daily basis. Often unconscious, it can only be surfaced through careful analysis — yet everyone inside the organization experiences it daily.

This can be in line with artifacts and espoused values. When the head of the record company steals a Porsche each week and hands it to one of their staff. Then everything is really groovy. But what if the head rewards the best financial results from their direct reports each month and fires the worst performer. Then we have a dangerous contradiction between edgy anti-capitalism communicated values – that they may absolutely believe – and the real basic assumptions. Basic assumptions are foundational — that is the level on which culture actually forms. Schein describes it as a shared experience of solving problems together. If you constantly do anarchistic, cool stuff to solve your problems, that will become your basic assumption. If you solve every hurdle with firing people, that will also become your basic assumption and the foundation of your organization’s culture. So culture is not given by somebody, it is learned. 

Therefore change initiatives which work with communication – speeches, posters and social media posts – don’t work because they are purely on the artifacts and espoused value level. What employees do experience is the important part. That is what the management does. Schein actually has a list of what leaders do that actually shapes culture – what they pay attention to, what they control, how they react in certain situations, how they allocate resources, how they allocate status, how they recruit.

Since we are on the topic of posters and slogans, I have to mention my favorite management thinker W. Edwards Deming. He had these 14 action points for good management and number 10 was: Eliminate slogans – and exhortations and targets. Slogans, he says, tell people they are doing something wrong, that they don’t work hard enough. That creates resentment because people know that real problems in companies are systemic in nature and they cannot change them. The slogan is the espoused value and the systemic failure is the basic assumption. The gap is a killer for trust in management. 

(One caveat – basic assumptions are not necessarily the truth, the “my precious” of an organization. They are what people learned from experience, and Deming said we can learn wrongly. Learning without a theoretical frame leads to conclusions from misunderstood data or experience, a distortion. But distorted culture is still culture, just one that makes it even harder to change.)

Let’s follow Schein down the rabbit hole a bit further. It is actually quite brutal. He describes two competing forces: Survival anxiety – we need to change to survive and Learning anxiety – change is uncomfortable and unsafe. You can make the learning more comfortable, make it a safe experience with lots of training, involvement and honest conversation. But in my experience that is too much work and time and cost for most companies. Or you can change an organization by making the status quo so painful that it is greater than the expected pain of change. So management basically needs to threaten people in the organization. One way of doing this would be to threaten to fire people who don’t want to change. That works in the short term but will not change the basic assumptions unless it is done over a very long time period. Elimination is another way culture change can happen. Management picks the employees they see as carriers of culture and removes them. Those can be long-time employees or very prominent, outspoken employees. The problem there is that while it might remove some basic assumptions, management would have to build new basic assumptions with success at the same time. Try doing that in a period of restructuring, good luck. 

With this model of coercion which is used more often than you think, you cannot create real cultural change easily. You will also create a culture of resentment in an organization. Employees have experienced that management has achieved what they want with coercion. That becomes the new basic assumption. This IS the new culture. What a wonderful place to work at?! 

So all dark and gloomy? Are all the posters and slogans and management efforts really for nothing? Is there no way to lead change? Certainly not with posters. But if leaders are willing to take a more uncomfortable road there is one. We said that company culture forms by shared learning of employees. They are the agents of the system we call a company. So change can only happen from the agents within that system. Change cannot be installed into people. It has to grow from within them, through new shared experiences that teach new assumptions. Not with them, not through them, not via — but from them. 

The best management can do is to show what the organization needs to do to be successful. If employees believe the goal, management can help them learn how to achieve it. Management cannot do the learning. The people have to do it. But that requires very humble leaders who are willing to examine and give up their own basic assumptions first. These are leaders willing to give up what got them to where they are. The hardest culture change is not getting employees to let go of old assumptions. It is getting leaders to let go of the assumptions that made them successful. So they have to overcome their own sources of resistance – organizational inertia, loss aversion, and status protection. This is all they themselves have been taught by experience, therefore going against what they are, what history has made them. And that is almost impossible.

Back in the warehouse I keep staring at the last poster in this death row of absurd phrases. I kind of like the sound of that one, though. Something still looks wrong. Better: “MANAGE SMARTER, NOT LOUDER”. But that would be just another poster, right? I guess there is more to explore.

How many of those posters are on your walls? Share and discuss — LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

John P. Kotter, Leading Change, 1996

Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985

Michael T. Hannan & John Freeman, Structural Inertia and Organizational Change, American Sociological Review, 1984

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 1937

I see this guy — sorry, still more guys than gals — a mid-30s man, hunched over his laptop nervously scratching his head with one hand, while the other is trying to tame the mouse, simultaneously giving short answers into a headset just as his boss is entering his glass-walled office. When he briefly looks up at me, I see a brave burnout-smile before he proceeds to the next emergency. This feels like an old cliché if it wasn’t so painfully playing out in front of my eyes.

The Board Room Version: The problem of middle management is in its name, literally: in the middle. Between seeing problems but unable to solve them. Analysis of data verifies this. Most important issues in a company are due to common causes, which can only be solved by changing the system, the processes, the organizational structures. Senior management is responsible for the system but KPIs and bonuses are rewarding the wrong things. In addition we have developed a fetishism for the wrong kind of leaders. The managers of chaos that has been caused by themselves. We don’t need Performance Managers as leaders but System Thinkers.

Being overburdened is not exclusive to middle managers — but add responsibility and subtract the authority to change the situation, and it becomes a formula for burnout in the case of the individual and a systemic issue for the company. But it’s just one person in a big company. What can it matter? Because it’s not just one person in a big company. It’s a symptom, not a weak link. 

The issue of middle management is literally in its name. In the middle. Between senior managers and working staff, they take direction from the top but at the same time see the reality of the shop floor. Most of the time there is a disconnect between the two — and they are supposed to somehow bridge it. They will try. They all do. They improvise, patch, buffer. But the system will eventually make them fail. Because no matter how many small — operational — problems they solve, systemic and structural problems always remain. 

I train people in solving operational issues for a living. It’s not that hard, no rocket science. Root Cause Analysis, CAPA, some simple data analysis techniques and you can fix most issues at that level. And these middle managers are good people, most of them, motivated, eager to learn. Yet it seems like there is always something big and troubling, a haunting shadow that constantly produces friction in organizations that they cannot do anything about. It’s the conflicting scorecards and slogans — more for the customer, zero defects, less waste – more value. It’s the constant redrawing of org charts ending up looking like an Escher staircase, logical from the outside, maddening from within. 

This is when I think of W. Edwards Deming. Yes, the PDCA cycle guy. He was — beside being my personal hero if there is something like that in management theory — one of the first systems thinkers. One of those people who tried to understand organizations as a system of interacting components. Plus he was a data person. Already in the 1950s he proposed that businesses need to measure and analyze their processes to identify the source of variation – or stuff going wrong. In his experience only a few issues were created from special causes – special or uncommon issues that could be individually solved. Most issues in organizations – if you’re not in a totally chaotic startup – come from what is known as common causes – a steady but less apparent flow of dysfunction built into the system itself. But people who are close enough, see it in their daily work.

Deming wrote that with the front-liners in mind. In my experience this applies to middle management too. And it’s this constant stuff that keeps middle managers overburdened. Simply because they cannot solve it. It’s not their pay grade. Common causes are systemic issues. The structure is wrong, how processes interact, the organizational setup. Middle management cannot change that. They often see it — at least in their corner of the organization — but lack either the mandate to act or the political capital to name it upwards. As a group they hold the most accurate picture of their organization, yet have the least capacity to act on it. They are by design in a knowledge trap. 

According to Deming it’s also not their job — and more importantly, he was clear about whose job it actually is. Senior management is responsible for the system, and the system produces most of the dysfunction. He argued this throughout The New Economics. Quality, he wrote, is the responsibility of management and cannot be delegated. Only they can change the system that produces these issues. 

How? What you need is knowledge was his answer. Deming called it the system of “Profound Knowledge” – heavy name, straightforward concept. Four components, inseparable from each other. To run an organization well you need to understand it as a system, understand variation in that system, understand how knowledge is actually built and understand the psychology of the people inside it. Four lenses. One picture.

To act on this kind of knowledge you need to be at the top of the organization, you need to be senior management. Leadership has both the power and the vantage point to see the whole organization, the system and its components. The problem is that senior leadership often does not really see what it is looking at — not because people are stupid, but because the system buries them in dashboards, escalations, business cases and polished narratives. All the wrong stuff that is just surface. Seeing would require exactly what Deming describes — an understanding of systems, variation, how knowledge is actually built and how people function. In short, they would have to think like theorists. And that, apparently, is asking too much.

Ok, now all the Luhmann fanboys and girls will go, but Luhmann said that systems can only reproduce their own logic, they are fixed, no change, why bother? True, but he was talking about society level systems – Law, Economics, Politics, not companies. Companies run on decisions, are built by them and can therefore be changed from within. So the tragedy is a choice.

But how does systemic change happen in an organization? It is done by senior leadership — we discussed that. But how do leaders actually work? Most businesses are managed by numbers. Hail to the KPI. Seems logical, right? I just referred to Deming who was deeply invested in data analysis. An engineer, physicist, and mathematician by study; statistician and consultant by trade.  But he used numbers to understand the system, not to manage it. Management by numbers is fundamentally problematic because numbers are a tricky thing. They are one source, one lens to understand how an organization works – what it does well, what not, what generates value and what doesn’t. But the moment they are used to steer a company, they become dangerous. The issue is not measurement. The issue is what the organization does to people once something is measured. I see this regularly when working through data with managers. If there is no personal stake in the numbers people are open, curious, willing to find problems. Yet when those same numbers go upstairs to senior management and can fall back on them, something shifts. Bad numbers get questioned. Good numbers get celebrated as proof of personal genius. This is entirely understandable — it is what the system of bonuses, merit ratings and rankings produces. Fear. Greed. Blindness to the real issues. Deming saw this clearly and said so. Data is a tool for those who want to understand. In the hands of those who want to manage, it becomes a weapon pointed inward.

A good leader should therefore be more like a scientist than a performance manager. So do we want eggheads at the top of companies? There are those who say that would exactly be the wrong move. Experts, they say, are too far away from the reality of business, and they simply do not bear the consequences of their decisions. That absence of consequence, the argument goes, is the root cause of bad decisions. Nassim Taleb illustrates this in much more detail in his book “Skin in the Game”. It is an interesting argument. But in my experience it is insufficient when applied to senior leadership of operational companies — it might very much be applicable in consulting or finance where decision-makers or influencers are structurally insulated from outcomes. Senior leaders in operational companies usually have considerable skin in the game — bonuses at risk, share options, loss of reputation or career. Taleb is useful here, but insufficient. 

The problem, as Deming would say, is these are the wrong consequences. Bonuses measure the wrong things, over the wrong timeframe. A medieval blacksmith got an immediate consequence if he made a bad sword. The knight would go medieval on him. By the time the brilliant multicolored five-year plan should bear fruit, the bonus has been paid, the slide deck has been archived, and the manager has moved on. So bonuses often don’t sharpen systemic thinking — they reward the appearance of performance. And appearances, as we have seen, can be managed — or simply faked.

So what we really want are system thinkers as leaders — people who see the whole and its components, understand how they interact, know their data and can use it as intended: as a tool to learn, not as a threat. Back to the eggheads, right? Not quite. We are constantly told that leaders need to be charismatic, passionate, inspiring — able to tell compelling stories and fill a room. I believed this too, because that is what we see celebrated in the media. As a longtime Mac user I am something of a Steve Jobs fanboy. And was there ever a more charismatic and passionate leader? Steve and his mock turtleneck sweater seemed to prove this theory.

What changed my mind was a TEDx talk of someone who works in my corner of the globe — at the Lucerne School of Business. In 2024 Martin Gutmann asked: are we celebrating the wrong leaders? Afterwards I immediately read his book “The Unseen Leader” — not least because he is a historian as well as a management professor, and I do love history. Gutmann developed this very interesting concept called “Action Fallacy”. We celebrate leaders for dramatic effect — their loudness and busyness, their ability to perform in a crisis. We systematically overlook the boring ones. The leaders who avoid crisis in the first place. He illustrates this with the two polar explorers Shackleton and Amundsen. Amundsen quietly achieved every polar goal without drama or loss of life. Shackleton became famous precisely because his expeditions failed spectacularly. He was exciting to talk about. The difference shows up even in the literature — 26 books celebrate Shackleton’s leadership qualities. Amundsen has four. My advice, at least watch Gutmann’s TEDx talk. It makes the case far better than I can summarize here and it paints a wonderful picture of what a disciplined, methodical leader can do. 

So perhaps not eggheads — but certainly leaders who are methodical, who have a genuine understanding of how their organization works as a system, and who use that understanding to act rather than just to report.

Which brings me back to that guy hunched over his laptop. I still see him everywhere. From Deming’s earliest writings to today is more than half a century of knowing what the problem is and where it originates. And yet the middle manager is still absorbing what the top is not resolving. There is something deeper than intellectual understanding at work here. Organizational behavior seems to resist exactly the changes that would be rational to make. Why is that? Is there a genuine way out? Headset on. Laptop open. Brave little burnout-smile. I guess there is more to explore.

How many middle managers do you know with that smile? Share and discuss — LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics, 1993

Martin Gutmann, The Unseen Leader, 2023

Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game, 2018

The scene is some forsaken and forgotten small town in the 1800s, a dirty main street. Two gunslingers face each other, but the dust in the air is so thick we only see one. Suddenly a decision over life and death. The gunslinger draws and shoots from the hip. 

From the dust to the smoke. This is some ugly office-warehouse-mix-up building. I stand at the smoking corner with some logistics or manufacturing managers. If it were tech, I guess, it would be the coffee corner and there would be lots of steam. The people are engulfed in a nicely informal cloud of jokes and opinions. Tons of ideas are exchanged, half of them drowned by the atmosphere. I feel like I’m in one of those cozy business books: informal networking, real talk, authentic leadership. Gladwell and Sinek would probably milk it for a keynote. 

And then the top dog makes a decision, an important one. And I have to swallow hard: There goes 2500 years of methodology. 

The Board Room Version: The gunslinger manager is quite common. He takes decisions without a method other than his gut. But from Hippocrates to Galileo to Shewart we have 2500 years of scientific reasoning which should give us a blueprint for decision making. Because intuition although a real thing, has its limits as Klein and Kahneman show us. Same as our own rationality which is bounded according to Simon. What we need is Deming’s Profound Knowledge: Having an understanding of our company as a system, the data and variations it’s producing, how knowledge is built and the psychology of our people.

Maybe the problem is branding. “Scientific reasoning” sounds rather dry. “Evidence-based leadership journey” would probably sell better. Actually it is a journey: From Hippocrates and Aristotle to Bacon and Galileo we learned what proper scientific reasoning consists of: first you need to observe carefully, then throw in some systematic and logical thinking, testing your conclusions might also be a good idea and then learning from what you find along the way, finally adjust. The statistician Walter A. Shewhart first put this into a business perspective: The PDSA-cycle which we know as PDCA. Plan, Do, Check – or Study – and Act. 

  In the 1960s, Peter Drucker turned decision making into a cornerstone of how managers should work. In The Effective Executive the chapters on it are probably the most thoughtfully elaborated – besides maybe the advice to managers that they should have their secretaries keep a time log of all their wasteful activities. Never a bad idea.

With Drucker, decision making in business becomes a framework: you need to define the problem correctly before going for solutions and you need to identify the boundary condition. So first you need to know the type of problem before you can solve it because it tells you about how to solve it. Is it some unique event, a volcano eruption bringing down air traffic on a whole continent or the steady overcrowding of airports causing a constant stream of delays. That will tell a lot already. Individual emergency planning or structural change. Every quality manager knows that. Secondly you need to know the boundaries, what does your solution need to achieve, what should it not touch. But of course it doesn’t stop with the solution, you need something after the fact: the feedback loop. Otherwise how should you know if your solution or decision worked as intended? This is really subtle but also really important, so listen up: What Drucker added to the system is the nature and the context of issues. That is as important as the thing itself, otherwise you would probably get 42 or some other meaningless answer at the end.

This makes decision making in management not a talent, it’s a process. Something that can be learned and applied. I know, people, that takes the magic out of the whole dazzle of business. But magic isn’t real anyway – you do know that, sorry, Hogwarts not a real thing. That’s especially true when we do look at the moments when decision making seems to be at its most mysterious: The intuition. 

There is a whole school of thought rather fond of that: Naturalistic Decision Making. One of the most learned proponents is the psychologist Gary Klein. He studied it extensively, interviewing hundreds of firefighters, nurses, military personnel, trying to find out how these people make decisions. They cannot follow a long complicated process, right? They don’t have the time. The house might by already a pile of ashes once you got to the Do-Phase. Needs to be shorter, absolutely, but they don’t use magic. 

Klein found something he called Recognition-Primed Decision model in the cases that people think they act on intuition or sixth sense. The trick is that these people use a shortcut. Experienced people don’t compare different options. They recognize patterns out of their experience. The sick babies always show a change in skin color first. And then the expert finds the first working option. So the nurse thinks, I have to give a specific treatment. Third step is that they mentally simulate this option, checking if it would do the job. If given that treatment, the baby usually showed no worse symptoms. 

That is of course a very fast and efficient method to arrive at a solution. This resonated immediately. Because just as I finished reading Klein’s chapter on pattern recognition I went on a walk with my dog, Max. I realized for the first time that I was always fishing for the poop bag before Max actually started doing his business. That’s it, a recognition-primed decision. I was right, because I have seen Max do his little pre-pooping dance hundreds of times before, I recognized it out of my experience. The decision in that case was easy, but nevertheless a decision, scooping up the poop. What do you know. There is even a theory for dog walking.

So it must also be ok if an experienced manager does the same – I mean the intuitive decision making – not the poop thing. Well, not quite, because there are several limitations to that method.

Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman – a long-time intellectual sparring partner of Klein – describes this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The two disagreed for years, but their exchange produced a useful conclusion: intuition can be real expertise — but only in the right environments. In order for the Recognition-Primed decision model to work you need to have learned from a high repetition of stable pattern that gave you a clear and rapid feedback. I must have observed a lot of pre-pooping dances – the pattern – and seen a lot of pooping – the feedback. If that’s not given, no learning, nothing to recognize, no simulation, no decision making that is any better than wild guessing. The smoking corner manager is not a nurse. They are not confronted with the exact same condition a hundred times. Their decisions do not produce immediate clear feedback. The outcome of their mostly somewhat strategic decisions produces results only months afterwards, most of the time filtered by politics and washed out by reporting structures and intervening events. (If any managers now goes, well I have a lot repetitive decisions with fast, reliable feedback, sorry, then you are micromanaging – taking care of stuff that is below your pay grade.) 

And actually Klein himself sees that too. He studied a worst case scenario when wrong pattern recognition led to the US Navy vessel Vincennes shooting down a passenger plane with 290 people. In the stress of the moment, with conflicting information available and a threat frame already in mind the crew built a selfconfirming story: Attacking fighter jet. An event turned into a terrible tragedy because of intuition. Kahneman says this happens because the associative machine – System 1 as he calls it – tries to form a coherent story even if only thin evidence is available. He calls that the WYSIATI effect – What You See Is All There Is. And I thought WIIFM was a stupid acronym! Joke aside, it is exactly what is happening. You do not take into account what you don’t see. How many times have we seen a team’s performance numbers drop and they immediately get a bad reputation. What we don’t see is that for half the month the IT system was down, or the supplier wasn’t paid on time and refused to deliver the parts needed. 

Even worse Kahneman found that the less information you have, the more coherent the whole story gets in your mind. Simpler pictures are easier to understand, easier to fool you. It’s like when I come into the kitchen. The cookie jar is empty and Max – the dog – is licking his lips. I think, the dog ate the cookies. I inhale to scream at the little devil when my son comes in and says: “Can you buy more cookies? I ate them all.” Subjective confidence cannot tell you if you are right. This is the problem with fast thinking or System 1.

If there is System 1 there of course there has to be a System 2. Well that would be the slow, analytical thinking. The one you should use, if System 1 does not produce a well-built option. Sigh, but that is so slow and strenuous! Isn’t there another way?

Herbert Simon – ha, another economics Nobel Prize winner – forms the bridge with his model of bounded rationality: we are capable of rational decision making, but we only can do so within our limits. These are mainly time constraints, the amount of information we have and our cognitive capacity. So we satisfice — meaning we find a solution that is just good enough within our limits — with what we have. That is of course dangerous. The less time or information I have the less rationally sound my solution will be. Now ask any manager out there what they have least of and it will be exactly that: enough time and sound information. Plus cognitive capacity is reduced by what? Right, stress, at least that managers have enough of!

The firefighter, the nurse, the poop dance watcher, they live in a world where the conditions remain the same. A lot of repetition, immediate feedback, stable patterns. Move up the hierarchy and things change. The smoking corner manager is on a whole other level. They’re making strategic decisions in complex environments, but they are still using the tool that belongs to the operational level, the level of frontliners.

So it has to be System 2. But what would that exactly look like in organizations? When at a loss for ideas, look to Deming, he will have it. Of course not always, but W. Edwards Deming is an exceptional figure in management theory. Hardcore statistician – intellectual son of the aforementioned Shewhart, Japan post WW2 economic guru and one of the first system thinkers. He has that whole thing about what he calls Profound Knowledge. In this context it means that your experience needs framing. So Max’ pre-pooping dance… no, let’s not go there again. Let’s say a customer service teams receives bad customer satisfaction ratings. Don’t just say agents need to do better. First you have to understand the processes, tools, suppliers and customers they work with. Always develop an appreciation for the system. 

Then you need to analyze the data. Data without a context is just blah, numbers. Of course Deming is a bit more concrete – and sometimes a bit narrow too. Variations are his main thing for working with information in systems. Common causes, special causes, how you have to react to them – spoiler: never change a whole system because of something special happening – investigate, have a plan, should it ever recur. Yet they are rare – most organizations have to put most effort into getting control of the big pile of the common stuff. These require system-level changes. Maybe in the customer service one agent was replaced with a two headed alien from the vicinity of Betelgeuse who has no clue how to operate a human telephone. Don’t buy a betelgeuzian telephone system with four-eared headsets and a depressed AI assistant built in. You still have 99 human agents. 

So it would be wrong to redesign the whole system around such special events. You have to always understand the whole system first, by learning, then the data, then the people. 

Which brings us back to the PDCA cycle. Deming was always associated with PDCA, though he later preferred PDSA — ‘study’ captured the point better than ‘check’, he said. And he was right. Because it is not a management tool, it is really a learning cycle. A structured method for organizations to learn continuously about themselves. Plan – Do – Study – Adjust. 

In my view the whole variation thing is not the only aspect. You’ll need to understand all the different components of your system and how they interact. You need to understand the elements, the interconnections, the purpose, the stocks, the flows, the feedback loops and all that jazz. Like the modern system thinkers do – shout out to Donella Meadows. A real marksman doesn’t shoot from the hip. They account for their equipment, distance, wind, elevation, their own breathing. Engineering, Physics, Metrology, Biology (and then you realize that shooting is something stupid anyway). Every variable in the system matters. Same idea. Sound like a lot, yes, it is, maybe another tool might help.

Because PDCA is not the only help managers have. In my trainings I always say that you need to use at least two of these funny acronym tools. PDCA and RCA – Root Cause Analysis. The first is your overall working mode, the other is the reinforcement – don’t just scratch the surface, always dig deeper.

Yet after the gazillionth PDCA or RCA training I did in my career, I see that it doesn’t change a thing. I ask myself, am I a bad teacher. But I tested it. I asked people months later if they can remember them. They usually do. They just don’t use the stuff. They keep going back to that smoking corner and shoot from the hip.

I see a cultural problem here. We know the tools but we operate in a culture which keeps rewarding the wrong behavior. We have 2500 years of experience in sound decision making, at least 60 years in management thinking. The gunslinger has had so much time to be wrong, but eventually they still get promoted. I guess there is more to explore.

And yes I know that I conflated decision making and problem solving in this piece, but while there is a fine intellectual difference, for the sake of simplicity, just shut up.

If you were wondering: The gunslinger misses in the end and dies, because that’s the way management of that sort will eventually turn out. 

Recognize any gunslingers? Or are you one yourself? Share and discuss — LinkedIn-Post

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, 1967

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1998

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1947

W. Edwards Deming, The Essential Deming, edited by Joyce Orsini, 2012

Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

Essay “The Gunslinger’s Fallacy” will be published on 05.05.2026.