A Human Revolution in the Business World
The business world is on the cusp of revolution. We can feel it…something isn't quite right and while we don't know exactly what it is...we have known for a while that something needs to change.
The Covid Pandemic has made this reality more intense with many of us directing this feeling of a ‘need for change’ towards our working patterns - but it’s not that simple. As humans, we instinctively go for what appears to be the most obvious answer - in this case reinventing our work/life balance. However, our push to develop a new perspective on work/home balance doesn’t give us the full picture. Economists and social scientists would argue that our feeling of dissatisfaction has been brewing since the 2008 Great Recession, while others would track it back further to the DotCom Bubble and even earlier. While these, and the various economic crises since WWII, have unquestionably made their impact, they don’t fully account for the feeling of a need for change. So, what’s really going on?
The short answer is that we are dissatisfied. The intensity of this feeling varies from person to person, but most of us share a feeling of ‘things can and should be better.’ In the broadest possible context, we find ourselves frustrated with big issues that seem to hit us on a daily basis, from global politics and climate change, to social inequality and now health pandemics.
I am not a pessimist. All available scientific and research-based data points to the fact that humanity is the healthiest, happiest, safest and richest it has ever been. But as any student of history would point out, despite overall improvement, progress is sometimes stalled by old practices and beliefs. Do any of these sound familiar?
One job, many roles - we have been asked to take on more for a temporary basis, only to find our job description has permanently increased.
Do More with Less – to remain profitable, costs have been cut leaving us with even less resources with which to deliver against ever increasing performance demands.
Productivity over Performance – we find ourselves in more meetings or engaged in tasks that give the illusion of productivity at the cost of doing ‘real’ work.
Most working people can identify with at least one of these realities. Regardless, the causes largely come from the same source – organisations – and while many of us may find it easy to blame organisations, we need to take a step back and consider the environment in which they operate. Organisations are faced with a range of challenges and market forces that have been impacting us for years. Recent PwC research reveal how these forces intersect into five key megatrends (see 10 Years to Midnight by Blair Sheppard):
Every sector and industry is impacted by these in different ways and, as a result, businesses have been scrambling to respond, which has created confusion, and their collective impact has led to people feeling dissatisfied. In short, the business world has taken a well trodden, but perhaps now less effective, approach to dealing with these challenges by using the techniques that they are most familiar with - whether it be cost-cutting, downsizing, streamlining, efficiency-boosting, or whatever other tool they’ve traditionally had in their arsenal. But it hasn’t worked…
So, what is the problem? Simply put, organisations have long been designed with the primary purpose of maximising stakeholder profit. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this - without the prospect of gaining profit, stakeholders would not have invested and these organisations, along with their benefits for society would not have existed. But humanity’s expectation of the world’s organisations is now greater than this single measure. Furthermore, businesses continue to be organised on the principles that first took root in the Industrial Revolution - that bureaucracy is needed to organise people and create efficient productivity. Herein lies the problem - driving efficiency for the sake of maximising productivity and its subsequent creation of profit is no longer the best way to achieve top performance, to say nothing of human value.
The age of bureaucracy and its relentless goal of efficiency has become the Achilles Heel of the business world. As highlighted by the megatrends mentioned above, we are no longer in a simple Industrial Age of manufacturing and products. We are now in an intellectual, informational, and service-based economy that is characterised by disruption, innovation, and the betterment of humankind.
To thrive in this environment, the business world is faced with a paradigm shift - a new way of operating that shakes off the shackles of centuries-old business practices and re-imagines the relationship between business and people. If the Great Recession and the Covid Pandemic has taught us anything, it is that businesses need to go back to the drawing board - they need to re-invent themselves as organic, dynamic, and self-disruptive environments where their continuing success will come not from their structure and ability to control, but from the way they engage their people and their ecosystems.
The revolution is here - it is calling for the business world and its organisations to become truly human-centred…
Stay tuned for the next blog in this series where we’ll explore what the human-centred transformation of organisations looks like.