Industrial Era vs Modern Era Work

To start the second year of Rebelling, I want to explore the reality we work in today, and the one we used to work in, but don't anymore. We'll look at the ideas we uphold and work by that just don't make sense anymore.

I was in a session with a client one day, and he was talking about being bad at managing his time. For years he'd tried all kinds of tricks, hacks, and methods, but no matter what he did he could never seem to do time "right". He couldn't exhaust his to do list. And he couldn't do his actual work, because when he wasn't in meetings, he spent a lot of time checking the endless supply of email, Slack, and Teams messages, wanting to make sure he didn't let anyone down or miss anything.

He was convinced he was the problem.

I wanted to understand why this capable, experienced, intelligent, hard working person was in the situation he was in. He spent so much time making sure he didn't make mistakes, controlling what other people saw and thought, and was not doing the actual work that was important for his job. Something didn't make sense. Then I realized: he's working in a different reality than the one he's actually working in! He sees work as linear and stable, but his reality is a networked, unstable system. And because his lens doesn't match his reality, he's often frustrated, so he just tries harder at the things that are the easiest to control. He's playing basketball on a baseball field and doesn't understand why it's not working.

He's using industrial era logic in a system that operates much differently now.

Industrial era logic says that the world is predictable and solvable, it believes that effort and control give you reliable results. If things aren't working, the way you fix it is by working harder. If things aren't working, you're to blame.

The assumptions that emerged during the Industrial Revolution still shape how we think about work, value, and life today. These systems needed people to be reliable, consistent, and predictable. Efficiency equaled success, and there was one "right" way to do things. This works in environments that are stable and controlled. Like a factory. It doesn't work in our current work environment.

Industrial era reality uses control as the backbone. It doesn't like uncertainty, and the more uncertain things are, the more control it needs. Things clinch, compress, and tighten. There isn't coherence, which creates pressure, so we do more and more work to get to control. We plan, we meet, we write emails and messages, make slide decks, all to reduce the sense of uncertainty. We try to get things under control in a system that's not currently operating on control. It's operating on complexity and ambiguity. It's relational.

Relational era reality uses sensing as a backbone. It doesn't use control or certainty, it is a responsive system. Relational era reality doesn't have easy metrics. Outcomes are shaped by interactions rather than linear cause and effect. These systems need people to be present, resilient, and discerning. It's not about doing things fast, it's about knowing how fast to move based on complexity, without having to get it "right" all the time.

We're used to working in a way that tells us there never is enough, so you can never do enough. Even if we start working in a more relational, less efficient way, when we aren't over-functioning and super busy we seek the comfort of control to make it all better.

My guess is that if we can stand the discomfort of limits and lack of control long enough, we can leave behind the industrial era logic and join the relational system we're already working in. I believe that we have to talk about it out loud to help ourselves understand the current system.

We spend a lot of our lives at work, and it feels like understanding the system we're in is important. Over the next several weeks we'll be exploring industrial era vs modern era work. We'll look at the expectations, standards, and norms that persist, and how we can start to update our ideas about what the reality of work is actually like.