Since the industrial revolution, our work life has been dominated by personal aspiration and power. Bureaucracy as organizational design has become so entrenched that few people see other options. We believe that autocratic command and control is necessary, even in industries like IT that rely heavily on perpetual design and collaboration skills.
The way we organize ourselves at work has far reaching consequences for our society. What happens at work cannot be contained behind the office doors, it influences our entire social field – work produce people. Understanding the social aspects of work can help us understand why some methods succeed and why others, despite our continued faith in them, just don't work.
In this talk, we will explore how maladaptive the industrial-era bureaucracy is for work today. We will see that a participative organisation, consisting of self-managing teams, is the only organisational structure proven to enable learning, collaboration, empowerment, trust and belonging. A jointly-optimised socio-technical system is true democracy of work.
