Feel free to be skeptical,” a man named Brian Robertson declares to an assembled group of about two dozen twenty-somethings and me. “Challenge me. Be skeptical, dig in, ask questions.”
I am sitting in a meeting room on the second floor of the Wah Ying social club on Clay Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a place with knotty pine walls, Chinese paintings, and an American flag. We are here for a half-day “taster workshop” to learn about something called Holacracy, a New Age management methodology that Robertson invented and which draws on philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, cybernetics, and God knows what else.
This is June 2017, a few days after my play date with the Lego lady at the coffee shop in Menlo Park. I’d left the meeting believing that Lego workshops must be the nuttiest things that businesspeople could ever do in the name of workplace transformation, but I was wrong. Holacracy is exponentially worse. It’s the closest thing to pure madness that I have ever experienced.
Change represents the third of my four factors. Everything about work seems to be changing, all at once, from where we work to how we work. The biggest changes involve new methodologies like Agile and Lean Startup. Holacracy is like a version of those things if they were put into a blender, mixed with LSD, and packaged by Charles Manson. Despite that, Robertson claims that more than a thousand companies have adopted Holacracy. Reader, I pray that yours is not one of them.
Robertson is thirty-eight years old. He wears a blue polo shirt and sports a shaved head and neatly trimmed goatee. He talks about governance, autonomy, and purpose. He believes in empowering people so they become self-directed members of emergent, self-organizing systems.
The word power comes up a lot. Robertson seems to be obsessed with power and how power gets distributed. He concedes that hierarchical power structures have served humankind for as long as humankind itself has existed and that it seems like a pretty good system.
Every government, every army, every university, and every corporation for as long as there have been corporations—they have all been hierarchical. Yet Robertson believes that when it comes to organizing a company, everyone since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has gotten it all wrong. He wants to fix that.
In 2009 he drafted a forty-six-page “Holacracy Constitution,” which has since evolved, through nine more versions, into the current thirty-nine-page document known as version 4.1.1. The constitution contains a preamble and appendices and Roman-numeraled articles that are broken into sections that in turn are broken lettered paragraphs that in turn have phrases marked with lowercase Roman numerals, producing things like “Section 3.3.6 paragraph (e) section (iii).”
The constitution describes rules, roles, and procedures; defines things like circles, domains, and accountabilities; and explains the “Integrative Election Process” (contained in Section 3.3.6) and “Integrative Decision-Making Process” (Section 3.3.5) that you now will all use from this day forward. On the final page is the “Constitution Adoption Declaration,” which apparently someone from your company is supposed to sign, and which actually says the following:
THE RATIFIER(S) SIGNED BELOW HEREBY ADOPT THE HOLACRACY CONSTITUTION, ATTACHED HERETO AND INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE (THE “CONSTITUTION”), AS THE GOVERNANCE AND OPERATING SYSTEM WITHIN _________________________________ (THE “ORGANIZATION”), AND THEREBY CEDE THEIR AUTHORITY INTO THE CONSTITUTION’S PROCESSES AND ENDOW THE DUE RESULTS THEREFROM WITH THE WEIGHT AND AUTHORITY OTHERWISE CARRIED BY THE RATIFIER(S), AS FURTHER DETAILED IN SECTION 5.1 THEREOF.
Whenceforth I had inspected Robertson’s website and found this document and all parts thereof, including those attached thereto and incorporated thereby, I declared that I would herewith track down the author who had heretofore created this masterpiece wherefrom so much human misery and suffering might spring.
Seriously, what kind of madman writes things like this? Who sits down and writes a constitution?
But now I’m here and I’m sorry to report that in person Robertson is a bit underwhelming and not particularly charismatic. To be sure, he’s a decent enough speaker and seems to have had some coaching. He talks the way tech CEOs do at corporate events, where they get on stage and try to sound conversational but it all still seems practiced, as if, during rehearsal, some public speaking coach told them exactly when to use that gesture, and which words to emphasize. It’s the style Steve Jobs used, where he would pace around the stage a little bit, trying to seem relaxed and natural, adding in a pause here and there. But you could tell Jobs was just reciting memorized lines, and despite his best efforts he always seemed kind of stiff. That’s the tone Robertson is going for. He knows his talking points and can reel them off from memory. He has probably given this same talk a thousand times.
Part of me feels bad for the guy. He wants so badly to be a management guru, and he really seems to believe that he has made a huge and important discovery that goes beyond companies and delves into something profound about human nature itself. It occurs to me that Robertson maybe doesn’t just want to be a management guru; he might aspire to be a regular guru, a cult leader. He wants to be Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, with a fleet of Rolls-Royce limousines and a commune of hippie followers who dance around like idiots while wearing orange underpants. He wants to be Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, living in a jungle with an army of disciples who would kill or die for him.
He’s not going to win any recruits today, I fear. We workshop attendees sit at long folding tables, and everybody seems kind of bored. There’s a guy from Google and two women who are finishing doctorates in management science at Stanford and are planning to start a company. There’s a young couple who run a small brewing company in Washington and have brought along three of their employees. Coffee, bottled water, and peppermints have been provided. The whole thing feels a bit down-market, frankly.
A handful of cult members—employees of Robertson’s consulting firm, HolacracyOne—hover around at the periphery, while Robertson runs through his spiel, repeating word-for-word some of what I saw him say in a video on his website. It’s a good rap, and he’s got it down.
Robertson first came up with the ideas behind Holacracy and inflicted them on the employees of a software company he had started. Eventually he came to believe that the management methodology was more interesting than the software company, and he decided that instead of selling code he would make a living by teaching people a new way to run companies.
Robertson wrote the “Holacracy Constitution” and in 2015 published a book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. The name holacracy comes from holarchy, a term from a 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur Koestler, who was trying to figure out how the mind and body are related to each other and posited that humans are composed of things called holons. Each holon is autonomous but also part of a greater whole. As though he was preparing a stew of bad ideas, Robertson also drew on the work of Ken Wilber, a messianic fringe figure who created something called integral theory, which purports to be “an architecture of the Kosmos.” Robertson also borrowed ideas from Agile.
Holacracy purports to be not just an epic clusterfuck approach to running a company but also a pathway to personal transformation. The philosophy begins with a single central idea: there are no bosses. No one has power over anyone else, but everyone has power. People work in self-managed, self-organizing groups. The organization is flattened, with no top-to-bottom structure.
“Hierarchy is obsolete,” Robertson tells us. Hierarchical structures have the virtue of being stable and simple, but our culture has outgrown them and needs something new. The answer, Robertson says, is self-organization. “Think about the human body. The human body has hundreds of trillions of cells. But there is no boss cell,” he says.
This makes no sense, but anyway, we move on. Robertson tells us he began his quest to reinvent work because he was once a regular employee and found the traditional work culture to be stultifying. As he speaks he clicks on a remote, driving a PowerPoint presentation on a screen behind him.
“I like to talk about my purpose in life,” Robertson says. “My purpose is to show people a radical new way to organize power.” As he says this he waves his hand—and the remote flies out of his fingers and skids across the floor. Whoops. Colonel Kurtz would never make such a blunder.
Ignoring the flub, he picks up the remote and presses on, explaining that the biggest obstacle we might face as we try to implement Holacracy at our companies is that we may encounter people who don’t like it and push back against it. “Managers measure their value based on how many people report to them, and now they’ve lost that identity,” Robertson says. “It’s scary.”
More scary, to me, would be working in a company that adopts this insanity and knowing that in order to keep my job I have to go through the brainwashing and pretend to become one of the pod people.
Everywhere You Look: Change
To be sure, Holacracy exists at the fringes of the fringe and will probably remain there. Chances are you won’t ever get exposed to it, but it’s very likely that you will have to deal with Agile, or Lean Startup. That process—constant change, new directives, managers who latch on to flashy ideas and then discard them—takes a toll on people. The workplace has already changed in profound ways, and over the next ten years there will surely be more management fads that bring wholesale disruption to workplaces.
Kooky management ideas are just part of the change roaring at us. We have a new compact with our employers, which involves jumping to a new job every two years and for many people means having to take charge of finding health benefits and figure out a way to save for retirement—things that our employers used to handle for us. We have a new work culture that celebrates overwork, exhaustion, and stress.
Many of us are relocating to new offices, as companies abandon suburban office parks and move into urban locations. People who used to work remotely from home now must report for duty at an office, like those thousands of workers at IBM who have started schlepping into the company’s new “Agile hubs.” Even the physical spaces in which we work have changed. Instead of working in quiet private offices, we get crammed like cattle into big open spaces, with no privacy and too much noise.
Countless studies show that these nightmarish hellholes called “open offices” destroy productivity and make people miserable. Yet companies keep inflicting them on us, coyly pretending that the goal is to “foster collaboration,” when really it is to squeeze pennies out of overhead by packing more people into fewer square feet of floor space. In an even more extreme approach, some companies no longer provide workers with a fixed workspace at all and instead relegate them to “nomad” status. You just show up with a laptop and roam around looking for an open spot where you can work. UBS, a Swiss bank, brags that this trick has enabled it to support one hundred workers in a space that previously housed only eighty.
“Fuck that, fuck you, fuck this, this is bullshit” is how a top Apple engineering executive reportedly responded when he was shown the floor plans of the company’s $5 billion ring-shaped “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, California, and realized his group would be put into open-office spaces. “Fuck this, my team isn’t working like this,” he said. Because his engineers are vital to the company—they design the chips that power the iPhone—Apple built a separate building for them, where they would not have to use the open-office plan, according to John Gruber, a blogger with tight connections at Apple.
The open-plan arrangement isn’t just unpleasant. Researchers say open offices can make people stressed out and physically sick. Open offices might even be harming our brains. A Cornell study found workers in noisy open offices had elevated levels of epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, after only three hours of exposure.
Things have become so bad that even some companies that pioneered the open-office plan have realized the errors of their ways. In July 2017 I traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to visit the headquarters of Steelcase, the world’s largest office furniture maker. Steelcase doesn’t just design chairs and desks. They also operate a research division that studies sociological aspects of work. A few years ago its researchers started noticing that the move to tear down cubicles and set workers free, which Steelcase had championed, had ended up causing harm.
“The pendulum has swung too far,” says Donna Flynn, who has a doctorate in anthropology and runs the WorkSpace Futures research group at Steelcase. “Right now there are a lot of unhappy people at work. We’re seeing the reemergence of people seeing the value of privacy.”
Flynn says the answer isn’t just to stick everyone back into private offices and cubicles. The office of the future, she says, will incorporate lots of different environments—open spaces for socializing and working in teams, but also individual retreats offering peace and quiet. Steelcase has partnered with Susan Cain, author of the bestseller Quiet, which celebrates the virtues of introverts, to create a line of products called Susan Cain Quiet Spaces. “We need to create new forms of privacy for people,” Flynn says.
Flynn, who previously worked at Microsoft, says companies (and workspace designers like Steelcase) also need to do a better job of adopting new technologies so that people don’t feel as overwhelmed as they do right now. Technology has started to evolve at such a rapid pace that people can’t keep up, which is creating a backlash. “There is a big tension emerging,” Flynn says. “We’re introducing sensors, big data, virtual reality, augmented reality, and there is so much opportunity for these technologies—but at the same time there is a force pushing for work to be more human, to have more authenticity, more social connection. It’s two opposing ideas. How are we going to resolve that?”
Technology should be a tool in the service of mankind, but sometimes it seems that humans are made subordinate to technology. And sometimes new technology that is supposed to make us more efficient or more productive instead slows us down and drives us nuts. Part of the problem is that we have entrusted tech companies to solve this for us, and while techies in Silicon Valley are wizards with chips and code, they can be clueless about humans.
Thanks to technology, we work longer hours, tethered to mobile devices and ubiquitous Internet that enable us to be on call at all times, expected to return emails at night and on weekends and to work wherever we might be. Some companies now offer “unlimited” vacation policies, but paradoxically in such arrangements a lot of people end up taking less holiday time, not more. Some people never take a vacation at all.
Technology also makes it possible to push workers to physical extremes that people could not have imagined a generation ago. A friend of mine in Boston works as a McKinsey consultant and jets off each week to engagements in Asia and Europe. He often puts in over a hundred work hours a week, and logs 250,000 travel miles annually. Another consultant friend once spent months commuting from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro. He, too, logs a quarter million miles a year and spends more nights in hotels than at home.
On the one hand, it seems miraculous that people can “commute” from Boston to Shenzhen or from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro. On the other hand, I worry that human bodies are not equipped to handle this. Both my friends are in their forties. The guy in Boston says he loves this lifestyle, but admits he won’t be able to sustain the job for more than a few years. The guy in San Francisco has been a consultant for twelve years and says, “I’m spent. I want to get out.” He’s married and has two kids, and notes that at his firm, “Most partners are divorced.”
What’s Your Tension? What Do You Need?
Back in the Holacracy workshop, Robertson asks for volunteers who will participate in some role-play exercises so that we can see what a Holacracy meeting looks like.
Imagine a dashing hypnotist declaring, on stage before a live audience, that he’s about to put a group of subjects into a trance. He waves his hands, recites his magic words, and looks fiercely into his audience’s eyes—but it doesn’t work, and they don’t go under, but at the same time they feel bad for him, and they don’t want to ruin it for everyone else, so they play along and pretend to be hypnotized.
If you can imagine that, then you have an inkling of what happens next in this sad upstairs meeting room at the Wah Ying social club. As far as I can tell, Holacracy is bonkers. There are no managers, but there is a role called lead link, which is kind of like a manager, only it’s not a manager, except that it kind of is. People work in “circles” and talk about their “tensions,” while a facilitator (played by Robertson) decides how to resolve disputes.
“What do you need?” Robertson asks.
“I want marketing to qualify leads before sending them to me,” says the head of sales.
“Okay, and do you have the right to ask for that? Let’s see. No, you don’t. It’s not in his circle. So we’ll have to add an accountability. Okay, head of marketing, will it serve your purpose to provide the head of sales with more qualified leads?”
The head of marketing looks puzzled.
“Notice that the question I’m asking you is not, ‘Are you okay with this?’ I’m asking, ‘Does it serve your purpose?’ It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to take it on. If it serves your purpose, you have to do it.”
“Okay,” the head of marketing says.
“My job,” Robertson says, “as referee, is to ask will it serve your purpose, and do you have a right to expect something. If the answer is, ‘No, you don’t,’ then we say, ‘Okay, let’s figure out how we can get you what you need.’”
Next role-play: the head of sales wants to lower the price of the product so he can sell more stuff. The woman who runs finance wants to keep prices high, to protect margins. Someone else says let’s do market research and figure out what other companies charge.
“So she says ‘Do market research,’ and does that serve your purpose?” Robertson asks the head of sales. “It does, so that’s what we’ll do.”
On and on it goes. Pretty soon people in the role-play meeting start getting pissed off. I don’t blame them. Just watching them is making me want to jump out a window.
Robertson asks everyone how they’re feeling.
“I’m getting annoyed,” a muscle-bound guy says. “Does that happen in real life? Because I’m getting really annoyed with you right now.”
Robertson remains unflustered. No matter what objection someone raises, he always has an answer, and the answer is always that whatever problem you have, you can solve it with Holacracy.
I start thinking about whether this would work in the real world and imagining certain colleagues at some of my past jobs who would use this system to interfere with their co-workers—not for any good reason but just because they’re assholes, and no matter what rules the company makes, they’ll find ways to use those rules against other people. Robertson seems to begin with a belief that people are good and that everyone wants to get as much done as possible. Some do, but a lot of people spend their time trying to not get things done and trying to block attempts to load them up with more assignments.
“What happens if someone says they want something from a colleague, and the constitution says they have the right to ask for it, and it serves their purpose, but nevertheless the colleague just says no?” I ask. “What happens then? If the other person is supposed to do it but they just refuse? Can you role-play a situation like that?”
They act out the scenario. In the role-play, Robertson, playing the role of referee, resolves the dispute by telling the naysayer that she has no choice and has to add the assignment to her workload, and that settles that. Two thoughts: I’m not sure how this is any different than what happens in a regular company, where your boss tells you to do something and you have to do it. Second, I’d like to believe, as Robertson seems to, that once the referee has made a decision, everyone will live with that decision and follow the orders. But based on people I’ve worked with, I doubt that would be the end of it. What really happens, I imagine, is that the woman who gets stuck with a new “accountability” leaves the meeting pissed off, then spends a few weeks conspiring with her allies, and they all come to the next meeting loaded up with demands to inflict on the asshat who won the last round.
A woman points out that Holacracy seems like it might make sense in a really small company, but if you tried to scale the system up to work across a big company there would be too many complications.
“So does that make you feel tension?” Robertson asks. “Well then that tension is something you can bring up in a meeting. You can make things smaller, or consolidate roles. You see how I do this? When people show up with a complaint, you present them with a disarming question. You say, ‘What do you need?’”
I do see how he does this. Whatever objection you raise, he just turns it back into a question for you. You simply cannot get a straight answer out of him. A boss who did this would drive you nuts.
In another role-play, we learn about governance meetings, where people “tell their tensions” and the team tries to solve them. In Holacracy, teams have tactical meetings once a week and governance meetings once a month. Each employee might be on as many as six teams, which means you could end up going to twenty-four tactical meetings and four governance meetings every month.
“Okay, so this is going to feel slow and clunky at first,” Robertson says. “That’s what happens when you’re adopting Holacracy. People are going to complain that it’s too slow, that everything takes longer. They’ll want to go back to the old way of doing things.” But you mustn’t do that, Robertson says. “The process gets faster,” he assures us. “Once you get used to Holacracy, you’ll all get faster at it. It’s hard. It’s like when you’re first doing yoga. It takes daily practice.”
I’ve heard Agile experts say the same thing, that when organizations first adopt Agile they often find that everything is taking longer. Work feels gummed up. People get frustrated. It’s all part of the process, the Agile gurus say.
This governance meeting follows a set process. First, someone who has a “tension” makes a proposal. Then people present objections. The referee, played by Robertson, decides if the objections are constitutional. In my notes from this point of the meeting I write: This is fucking nuts.
In our role-play the proposal is that someone wants to let front-line sales reps set prices and change prices whenever they want. Right away, one guy has an objection.
“Do you see any reason that it does us harm, or moves us backward?” Robertson, playing referee, asks. “Yes or no. And I’m not asking do you like it.”
The guy says yes, the proposal will harm the company.
“Okay, do you know that it will cause harm, or do you infer that?” Robertson asks the objector, in a game-show host voice. “And if the proposal would cause harm, would the damage be small enough that it could be fixed quickly?”
The guy says yes, they probably could change back if they needed to.
“Okay, so you just told me that this is not a valid objection,” Robertson says.
Another woman presents different objection, but Robertson says that objection involves something that can’t be decided in a governance meeting; that objection has to be resolved in a tactical meeting.
The whole meeting gets logged in a piece of software, using pull-down menus and boxes that need to be filled out. The proposer, the person who has a “tension,” has to write out the proposal and must start with a verb in the present participle form: Changing, allowing, removing. Each objection must be presented as a statement.
A woman (I’ll call her Lucy) says that her objection to the proposal is that the change they’re considering might solve the “tension” for the proposer, but it will create a new “tension” for Lucy—in other words, fixing one problem will cause a new problem.
Robertson says that’s not a valid objection. “You have to sit on your tension and wait for the result,” he says. “If solving her tension is going to cause a new issue for you, then let’s fix that. But you have to wait your turn.”
There’s also an “integration” step, where the tensions and the objections get reconciled. The meeting is “time-boxed” to either ninety minutes or two hours, Robertson says. And everyone has to get through their tensions, and all of their objections.
I cannot imagine sitting through two hours of this. Fifteen minutes has already started eating my brain. At this point in my notes I find the following, written in all caps: I WANT TO FUCKING SHOOT MYSELF NOW. IF I WERE IN THIS MEETING FOR REAL I WOULD START SMASHING FURNITURE.
Robertson claims Holacracy cultivates “a kind of mindfulness” and becomes more than just a way to get work done. “Sometimes it’s a stealth tool for personal development for people, which I think is cool,” he says. “It has helped people with their personal lives and relationships with their spouses.” In fact Robertson says he uses Holacracy at home with his wife. “If my wife brings up a tension, then it’s her turn to process her tension, and I help her resolve a tension. Then I say, ‘Okay, now can we address one of my tensions.’”
Robertson’s company, HolacracyOne, has twenty employees. Robertson has certified fifty Holacracy trainers who work independently. More than one thousand companies have adopted Holacracy. Small pilot programs are running at Dannon, the yogurt company; Ernst & Young, the consultancy; and Starwood, the hotel chain.
Robertson admits that the transition to Holacracy can be painful. When Zappos, the online shoe retailer, insisted in 2015 that employees commit to using Holacracy or leave the company, nearly 30 percent walked out. The ones who remained were so unhappy that Zappos fell off the Fortune magazine “Best Places to Work” list, where for years it had been a top company. “Employees were shocked and frustrated by the numerous mandates, the endless meetings and the confusion about who did what,” Fortune reported in 2016. The quarterly all-hands company meeting became “a quirky mix of circus, therapy session, and revival meeting.” People were “confused, demoralized, and whipsawed by the constant pace of change.”
On Glassdoor, one Zappos employee declared that “leadership is insane and completely disregards employees and reality in decision making, but parties are fun.”
For all its hippy-dippy hoo-ha about empowerment and freedom, Holacracy turns out to be doctrinaire and authoritarian. Everyone must follow the rules, and there are lots of rules. Instead of reducing internal politics and eliminating favoritism, Zappos got more of both. People resented being put into a social experiment and treated like human lab rats. They hated that the system itself was more important than the people working inside it. “Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software” is how Aimee Groth, a writer at Quartz, put it.
Instead of admitting failure, Zappos CEO and founder Tony Hsieh doubled down on Holacracy and added a new concept called Teal, which was created by Frederic Laloux, a Belgian business guru and former McKinsey consultant. Teal isn’t just a management concept. Its proponents bill Teal as—drum roll—“the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness.”
Zappos employees get “points” and “badges,” which sounds more like going back to kindergarten than leaping forward into the next stage of human consciousness. To survive, you must join enough “circles” to create the equivalent of a full-time job. If you bounce out of a circle you might end up talking to “why coaches” in the “Hero’s Journey” team, or you could go to “Transition Support,” to join a new circle, and if that doesn’t work, you’re fired.
Is this madness really what work is going to become? Robertson says the old traditional hierarchical structures won’t work in the digital age. “In the 1950s the way we organized a company was fine for then,” he says. “But the world has changed radically, even in just the past twenty years. It’s breaking the way we work. It’s straining it. That sends people looking for a new approach to running organizations. Most CEOs have an intuitive sense that there has to be a better way to run a company. They see Holacracy, and they feel drawn to a new paradigm. It’s more dynamic, more lean, more agile.”
It sounds great to be lean and agile. But I suspect that most of these ideas are not going to make any company perform any better. Recently I spoke to a CEO whose predecessor had adopted Holacracy. The first thing the new guy did was throw it all out. “Holacracy,” he says, “is the illusion that the natural state of things is reverse entropy. If you just leave things and people alone, they will become more ordered and efficient. There is some cosmological evidence to the contrary.”
The poor bastards who worked at the company had spent months learning how to work in Holacracy, and now had to unlearn everything they’d learned and go back to the old way, which they had previously unlearned. We’re perilously close to entering a dystopian future where one nutty work guru leads us down one path, then another nutty guru leads us back up and down another, and where the only thing that all of the nutty gurus agree upon is that all of this change is good for us.
Change as Psychological Mayhem
In the early 1990s, Roger Stuart, an associate professor at the Ulster Business School, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, conducted a study to find out how workers were affected during periods of “radical organizational change.” Stuart and four researchers interviewed sixty-three managers from two large industrial companies in the UK that were going through big reorganizations and downsizing. They didn’t interview workers who had been let go, but rather the managers who were carrying out the downsizing orders.
They were stunned by what they found. Though in their outward appearance the managers seemed fine, when they were alone with an interviewer, in two-hour conversations, these stiff-upper-lip Brits broke down and began to pour their hearts out. They revealed they were suffering tremendous psychological pain. The anguished interviews turned into therapy sessions. Some managers asked if they could come back again to talk more. Stuart and his team tried to accommodate them.
“For more than a sizeable minority, their stress, worry, angst and grief were revealing not just of the ‘emotional hiccups’ characteristic of transition but of the trauma more usually associated with disasters or catastrophes or even abuse,” Stuart wrote in a research paper titled “The Trauma of Organizational Change.”
While it might seem overwrought to compare a corporate layoff or reorganization to “having one’s home damaged, one’s possessions lost and members of one’s family injured in an earthquake,” Stuart believed it was a fair comparison. “In fact, in terms of individuals’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours, both phenomena can be experienced in much the same way,” he wrote.
Stuart’s account of the study offers an extraordinary and terrifying look at human suffering in a corporate setting. He depicts a world where CEOs, under pressure from management consultants, business gurus, and academics, push employees beyond their limits. Tellingly, his citations don’t mention the usual business pundits like Drucker, but instead include Sigmund Freud and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, as well as Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist known for his studies of trauma related to war and violence, and Robert S. Laufer, a sociologist who studied PTSD in Vietnam combat veterans.
The interviews with managers make for harrowing reading. Stuart finds it significant that many use metaphors from war. One describes “the grenade approach to downsizing. They throw a grenade into a room and blow 20 percent of the people out.” Another recalls the pain of having to circle names of workers in red or blue, to determine which ones would be let go and which would be kept. Says the manager: “It was a nightmare. We called it gas chamber management. It will stick in my memory.”
Stuart argues that workers got stressed out because in addition to learning new things they also had to unlearn old things. The goal of this “unlearning and relearning” was to make “a quantum leap ‘out of the old’ and ‘into the new.’” Does that sound familiar?
Moreover, companies were careful to put in place safeguards against accidents and physical injury but were not paying any attention to the psychological harm they were inflicting on workers. Stuart recommends companies perform “psychological debriefings” and engage in what he calls “grief leadership.” To make his argument more persuasive to bottom-line-focused CEOs, he says companies should do these things not out of kindness but because it will help their business. Unless companies look after the psychological well-being of workers, whatever benefits might come from restructuring will be outweighed by the cost of achieving them.
Of course no one listened. Twenty years later, in 2011, Gary Rees and Sally Rumbles, management professors at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, became aware of a new workplace phenomenon. Stuart had studied what happened to workers during periods of change, like a reorganization or downsizing. But those were temporary phenomena. The reorg starts, takes place for six months or year, and then it’s done. Rees and Rumbles saw that companies now were engaged in ongoing “change initiatives” that overlapped and blended into one another, such that “for employees the context of work is continually stressful and uncertain.” Metaphorically speaking, Stuart had interviewed hurricane victims right after the winds stopped howling, but Rees and Rumbles were asking a different question: what happens if you live inside a hurricane that never ends?
They surveyed HR directors at one hundred local companies that were going through “change initiatives” and found that living with constant change was taking a tremendous toll on workers. More than half of the HR people surveyed said their workers were stressed out and burned out. The companies were suffering, too. They were not getting any net benefit from doing all this changing. Rees and Rumbles published their results in a paper titled “Continuous Change and Organizational Burnout.”
In the summer of 2017 I tracked down Rees and Rumbles, speaking to them via Skype at their office in Portsmouth. I asked them if things had perhaps changed since they published their research. They said yes, things indeed had changed—the situation had become even worse. “There’s been an intensification of work,” Rumbles told me. “Companies are creating incredibly stressful environments.”
They said they saw the effects of the stress on their own students. Many of them work part-time while attending university. But the notion of “part-time” no longer exists. “They’re expected to be connected twenty-four-seven,” Rumbles said.
Rees added: “People have always been busy at work, but this is different. This is not business as usual. There is so much change, and at such a rapid pace, that it creates mayhem. Today a big organization might run twenty to thirty change initiatives at the same time. That’s the difference between now and thirty years ago.”
An even more distressing change is that HR people no longer even pretend to be concerned about workers. Most of the HR people whom Rees and Rumbles surveyed said they knew workers were suffering, but they did not intend to address this. Rees recalled: “They said, ‘Yes, we have problems with the amount of change, and yes, we have problems with burnout.’ We said, ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Their answer was, ‘Nothing.’” Twenty years ago HR people would have at least pretended to care, he said.
Rees and Rumbles urge companies to rethink the idea of constant change. For one thing, a lot of the change is pointless. A survey of 1,500 executives found that only 30 percent of “change initiatives” produce any lasting improvement, Rumbles said. “It’s just change for the sake of change,” she said. Companies would be better off if they changed less frequently, and at a more measured rate, and put more thought into it. They should also put rest periods between each change. A corporate change is “almost like a bereavement,” Rumbles said. New ideas are more likely to take hold if a period of change is followed by a period of stability.
Their biggest recommendation echoes one that Stuart proposed in 1995, which is that companies should simply bear in mind that their employees are human beings. That “human factor” should be weighed alongside things like productivity gains and financial results, and factored into decisions. “There is a need to convey respect,” Stuart writes. “We need to make efforts to contact our humanity and allow it a greater say in our interactions and relationships with others” (emphasis added).
Treating people humanely usually means slowing down. That is exactly what two European business professors, Heike Bruch and Jochen Menges, recommend in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article titled “The Acceleration Trap.” They argue that slowing down is not just a matter of being kind to employees, but also that when companies run too fast, they end up getting nowhere.
In a survey of ninety-two companies, Bruch and Menges found half were what they called “over-accelerated” and caught in “the acceleration trap,” meaning they were doing too much too fast. One thing Bruch and Menges included was the way companies are adopting “new management technologies or organizational systems,” things like Agile and Lean Startup. Bruch and Menges warned CEOs to avoid “the habit of constant change, or perpetual loading.” Do less, they said. Give workers time to rest. Alas, over email, Bruch tells me that in the years since her research was first published, “the share of companies affected by the acceleration trap seems to increase.”
I asked Rees and Rumbles if they saw any hopeful signs that work might get better. Their answer was depressing. “No, I can’t see how this is going to slow down. In fact, I think it’s going to accelerate. I think employers are going to get even more aggressive,” Rees said. Today almost any job can be shipped overseas, and companies recognize the leverage this gives them. “Employers don’t need to change. In fact, they can ramp it up even more,” Rees said.
For thirty years researchers have been warning businesspeople that the stress of workplace change can traumatize people as severely as serving in combat, surviving a natural disaster, or suffering the loss of a loved one.
As huge as the technological shifts of the past twenty years have been, even bigger transformations now hurtle toward us in the form of artificial intelligence and robotics. Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, says we are entering the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” when the rate of change will continue to accelerate.
The first quarter century of the Internet age has already pushed many people past their breaking point, making them “disillusioned and fearful,” with “a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and unfairness,” Schwab says. But the future, as he describes it, sounds absolutely overwhelming: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” There will be change of greater “scale, scope, and complexity” than our species has ever experienced.
How disillusioned and fearful might we be twenty years from now, in a world that today we cannot imagine? As miraculous as the future might be, our brains might not be wired for it.