Have We Reached Peak Crazy at Work?
Every so often I wonder whether we are approaching Peak Crazy at Work.
Not because work has suddenly become ridiculous. Work has always had its peculiarities. Humans have been finding unnecessarily complicated ways to organise other humans for quite some time.
But there does seem to be a lot of it about.
More meetings. More platforms. More transformation. More frameworks. More reporting. More channels. More priorities. More urgency. More things designed to help us manage all the other things.
Surely, at some point, we reach the summit. Unfortunately, that's not quite how peaks work.
A peak isn't necessarily good news
When people talk about peak oil, the peak isn't the moment everyone throws a party because we've achieved Maximum Oil. It's a warning. It marks the point at which something that has kept increasing can no longer keep increasing. What matters isn't just reaching the peak. It's what happens on the other side.
Peak Crazy at Work is the point at which organisations can no longer keep adding work, speed, complexity, change and expectations without reducing their capacity to function.
And suddenly I'm less interested in planting a flag at the top.
How would we know we were getting close?
There would probably be signs.
We might spend more time coordinating work than doing it.
We might have meetings to prepare for meetings, followed by meetings to debrief the meeting.
People might start doing their actual work before work, after work, or on weekends because the workday itself has become too full of work-related activities to get anything done.
We might introduce tools designed to reduce workload and somehow end up with higher expectations and the need to do more work, faster.
We might tell people to focus while contacting them through six different channels.
We might launch wellbeing programs without addressing the conditions that make people unwell.
We might restructure to simplify things, discover the restructure has created new complexity, and establish a working group to simplify the simplification.
At some point, somebody will produce a framework. There will probably be circles.
The problem with the other side of the peak
The consequences don't necessarily arrive dramatically. There probably isn't a siren. Nobody announces:
ATTENTION ALL STAFF. ORGANISATIONAL CAPACITY HAS NOW BEEN EXCEEDED. PLEASE PROCEED CALMLY TO THE NEAREST EXIT.
It is much less convenient than that. People stop offering ideas because they don't have the bandwidth. Good people leave. Others stay, but stop giving quite so much. Decisions get hurried. Mistakes creep in. Everything takes longer because everyone is simultaneously busy. And change becomes harder because people have lost the capacity to absorb more change. Eventually, the organisation becomes less capable precisely because it has demanded more capability from everyone. That's the nasty bit on the other side of Peak Crazy.
And then we do it again
Perhaps Peak Crazy at Work isn't one great summit anyway. Perhaps it's cyclical.
Something changes. We add processes to manage the change. The processes become cumbersome. We add systems to manage the processes. Everyone becomes overwhelmed. Someone announces a simplification program. We remove three things and introduce seven governance mechanisms to ensure the three things remain removed. Eventually there is a restructure. The restructure creates new interfaces, reporting lines and working groups. More has changed, and off we go again.
The real danger is normalisation
That's what makes Peak Crazy at Work difficult to spot. Crazy rarely arrives wearing a hat saying CRAZY. It arrives one perfectly reasonable decision at a time. One extra meeting. One additional approval. One new system. One more strategic priority. One little request that will only take five minutes. One 7.30am meeting because somebody is in another time zone. One email answered while watching television. One wellbeing webinar called Managing Overwhelm scheduled over lunch.
None of these things, on their own, signal organisational collapse. That's precisely the problem. Eventually, the absurd becomes ordinary. And perhaps that's the warning sign worth paying attention to. Not when everyone finally runs screaming from the building. But when we look at something objectively ridiculous and say: “Yeah. That's just work.”
Peak Crazy at Work isn't somewhere we want to arrive.
The trick is noticing we're heading toward it and changing direction before someone has to point out the exits.