Do you ever find yourself at the end of a long workweek, lamenting that you’re nothing but a cog in a larger machine? You just feel like you’re a small, immensely replaceable piece in a larger corporate puzzle, and it’s unclear what your value is? It’s a bleak feeling.

And… well… that might be by design.

Most modern organizations are built on the premise that individual workers and teams are interchangeable and/or fully removable as the needs of the organization shift. The explicit intent is that workers function in the same way that parts in a car might function. Is a part malfunctioning? No worries! You can remove it and replace it. Do you need a new function that a certain part doesn’t enable? You can upgrade! And because roles are designed to be interchangeable, the organization typically has a wide array of options for replacements.

But how did we get here? And, importantly, is it working?

Treating workers as fungible parts within an organization isn’t exactly new. Adam Smith’s hypothetical pin factory follows this precise model, and The Wealth of Nations was published over 250 years ago. Many different thinkers have written on the topic, and any accurate history of this approach would necessarily be nuanced and dense.

In particular though, Frederick Winslow Taylor stands out as a uniquely powerful force in Western organizational design.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Taylor built his career identifying ways to reduce the costs associated with industrial labor, using an approach he called “Scientific Management” (you’ll hear it referred to today as Taylorism). In short, Taylor would dissect factory worker movements and actions down to the smallest measurable parts, time those movements, and then assess how those movements could be modified or reduced to shave seconds and minutes off of each activity.

A critical component to this process is treating the workers themselves as if they were part of the machinery. He adjusted worker activities in the same way you might adjust a timing belt on a finicky machine. He also ensured that all tasks required the absolute minimum skill such that workers could be moved around or replaced at will. Based on his analyses, he claimed huge improvements in efficiency and was quite the proselytizer for his methodology.

Soon after the publication of Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, consultants started popping up, promising to bring his insights to other industries, including corporate spaces (Fun Fact: The Gilbreth’s of Cheaper by the Dozen fame were perhaps two of the most well-known consultants in this field). These consultants argued that the “thought work” of office workers could be measured in the same way as the actions of factory workers, and in so doing, they could identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and other opportunities for reduced operational costs. Oh boy, is this all sounding familiar!

Over 50 years later, these ideas remain rather mainstream, as exhibited by the popularity of methods such as Lean Six Sigma. And practitioners claim that these methods can be wildly effective, driving down operational costs and improving net revenue.

Which is probably true. I’m sure the process improvement crowd has studies to back up their case. I’m willing to believe that these approaches really can drive down costs and improve revenue.

 But. Does this philosophy produce the most value for the organization? Is this actually a good way to build an organization? 

To be clear, when I say “good”, I’m not getting into the moral/ethical quandaries that Taylorism presents. Frankly, I find the philosophies involved dehumanizing at best, but other folks have written more cogently on the topic than I can (Jenny Odell’s book Saving Time is a great example — I used it as my main reference for this section).

Instead, I’m asking from the perspective of organizational goals and outcomes. Are our organizations truly more effective if we reduce individual roles and teams down to their most fungible parts?

Forget about productivity and efficiency for a moment.

Let’s take a step back.

Way back.

For our tiny size, humans have documented a truly impressive swath of our universe. We’ve explored the depths of our oceans, walked every continent on the planet, sent people to the moon, and even viewed objects billions of light years away from earth. We’ve built incredibly complicated and intricate machines, including tools that can mimic human language and reasoning. 

And yet, do you know what is likely the most complex thing we’ve ever discovered?

The human brain.

Likely the most complex system we have found in the entire universe sits within your skull. It’s right there. And not just your skull — the skull of every human alive today.

With that in mind, do you think it’s an efficient use of resources to take what is likely the most complex thing we will ever encounter and treat it as a cog?

Look, I’m just an ex-psychologist turned product manager, but that sounds incredibly wasteful to me.

Humans have remarkably flexible, dynamic neural systems that enable us to creatively problem solve, find and produce beauty, and collaborate across incredible barriers. If you want to build an organization that truly imparts value – delights customers, moves entire industries forward, leaves the world a better place – then you damn well better center these capabilities in your organizational design.

Why don’t we center human capabilities already? Why are so many of our organizational philosophies based on the idea that humans are interchangeable parts?

For most for-profit entities, the only KPI that really matters at the end of the day is net revenue: What cash are you bringing in? And when net revenue is your north star, you will always end up creating systems that maximize revenue to the neglect of value, no matter what you put in your mission statement. In such an ecosystem, Taylorist and adjacent perspectives will almost always flourish.

Ok, so say you want to build an organization that centers people and value over profit. How do you do it?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Taylorism and its associated philosophies are baked into the system at this point, and I suspect that any organization where net profit is the ultimate KPI will be biased to adopting Taylorist principles (even if they don’t know the word for it).

There isn’t going to be an easy answer that will fit into a silly newsletter. But I firmly believe that the organizations that do find sustainable ways to counteract these biases will have the greatest opportunities for real, meaningful impacts.

Often when I bring up these perspectives with business leaders, I’m greeted with a heavy sigh and an eyeroll. If they respond, I usually hear something along the lines of, “It’s cute that you care about people, but grow-up. Business is business. This is just how the world works.”

And I agree! It is the way the world works. But that’s because we choose to make it that way. This is not an unchanging law of physics. We made it this way on purpose.

If the above is true, that also means that we can choose to do it differently.