A personal mission in my work is disrupting ineffective top-down hierarchical decision-making. This means targeting gratuitous power dynamics in organizations and actively working to undermine and reverse them. I'm sorry (not actually) for the pain this might cause.

I believe we significantly underutilize the intelligence, knowledge, and passion of our people and underestimate their potential. My goal is generally to create space for people at lower levels of organizations to influence and make more decisions about their work.

I think our problems come from a mechanistic perspective on how our organizations operate. In other words, we still see our organizations as machines to command with levers and buttons that control people as the gears that drive them.

The perspective of organizations as machines seems to me to be deeply embedded in our systems, processes, and beliefs (myths) about how work is/ought to be done. As a result, the work to disrupt this is probably generational and beyond my personal capability or responsibility.

Still, I feel strongly about this and so spend time doing this work, mostly "behind the scenes" and in ways that are very subtle. I'm learning about the strengths and shortcoming of my own beliefs. And I keep on.

Who else spends time thinking about this? Agree or disagree with these words?