If you have ever worked
in an office, you’ll know: It's often hard to concentrate, and then there are
the endless meetings. Did somebody mention
paperless office? And if you want a decision, you will
have to wait for a bigger meeting. To raise your spirits,
you'll go to town halls, and hear from
motivational speakers. And you might remember a
time when you had one boss, but now you have two... Three... well, many. Sound familiar? Well, all of these examples
are taken from this: It’s a Second World
War sabotage manual distributed to resistance
fighters in occupied Europe, to cripple the
enemy war machine. Somehow, we've taken known
methods of sabotage and disruption... and turned them into an
ordinary day at the office. How did this happen? If we start with Keynes... Okay. And the 15-hour work week. Okay. Can you tell us a little bit
about what Keynes predicted and about what
the hell went wrong? Yes, well, Keynes wrote
this thing in the 1930s and he was trying to
write something optimistic and imagine what
the world would be like. For the most part, when people back then imagined
what the world would be like, everyone thought, well,
industrialization, it's miserable, but it's going to
lead us in a direction where the technology's
going to advance so far that we're all going to
be living lives of leisure. We'll have robot
servants taking care of us. Automation will eliminate the
drudgery of farm work, factory work, eventually service work as well. And that was, in a way, the
point of all of this onerous work that people were
doing in factories — it was to eventually get to the point
where you don't have to do it anymore. Globally, we're getting to the point where we could be
working 15 hour weeks. The question then
is: why aren't we? So what's really happened is that we've created these
administrative office jobs. And these have gone from
something like 25% of employment, which they were in Keynes' time, to something like 75%. We created supervisory jobs,
managerial jobs, clerical jobs... And millions and millions and
millions of them around the world. And one of things
that really struck me in a lot of the testimonies that
people sent to me about their jobs, was just how unhappy they were, and just how confused they were,
over the fact that they were unhappy. There's always this shame about
expressing how you feel at work. The constant charade
you're putting on and that you can
never really be honest. Of course, you
want, we all want, to be honest about our
manager or about our director, but he's in that same charade. So you only see half of him. So we're in this
surreality, this play. The play is based on the
original sabotage manual. But we have not just
stuck to the script, we’ve added many
new scenes of our own. And like any play, this too
has a cast of characters. The star of the show is
a Chief Executive Officer, who has a star's
salary to match. The CEO's main role is
to give the big monologue. We can accelerate
our current momentum and gain a stronger financial backing
with which to be more successful. This speech is often
rooted in fantasy, and has very little to do
with how the play will turn out. We are now delivering the best
products we have ever delivered. But paying them more doesn't
seem to make them any better. As, all too often, they are
the stars of spectacular failure. It continues to be an exciting time
for our devices and services business. We remain here to win.
Thank you very much. But the one cost that
is never calculated is the human cost
of all these failures. Of the disruptive reorganizations and
the unhappiness that goes unspoken. I had finished my PhD in
Experimental Social Psychology, so I had been trained
to do research in the lab and I got my job at the
University of California, Berkeley. And I was thinking
maybe what I'll do is, I'll develop some new
ideas about emotions, which I had done
laboratory research on, and how people
understand their feelings, how they cope with really
strong, emotional arousal, or threatening,
challenging kind of things. And I thought, well, why
don't I go out and talk to people who encounter this
sometimes in their life. And I started interviewing them. And they got
emotional doing this. Some of them would get angry
as they talked about things. Some of them would cry, some of
them would, I mean, this was like... And I'm thinking: Hmm,
maybe there's a story here. Maybe there's more
of a phenomenon. So I would ask people at the
end of the interview, things like, so when you talk about
this with other people, do you have kind
of a name for this? I mean, is there a
way you share this? Usually it was: ‘I never talk about this with anybody.
I don't want anybody to know.’ So I started looking at literature
and trying to come up with concepts that seemed like they would capture or
describe what people were telling me. There was ‘dehumanization
in self-defense’. Oh, no, no, no, no. You know,
it's like too much baggage there. The dehumanization. No,
you know, you know... Okay. What about ‘detached concern’? Well, you know, it was
kind of like, but it's oil, water. You can't, it doesn't, you
know, didn't really do it. So I was still trying to figure
out how to talk to people or about what they
were telling me. And so I would ask the next
interviews at the end, you know, ‘dehumanization in self-defense’!?
No, no, no. ‘Detached concern’?
- No. ‘Burnout’? Yes. That's it! Burnout! Yeah, first the physical:
complete exhaustion. But this was like an exhaustion
which was totally new to me. But it was really intense, like so intense that I could
barely get out of bed physically. I live on the first floor. I could not walk up
the stairs, literally. I had to hold myself halfway
through or stop twice even and catch my breath. It was just, I felt like a 90
year-old in a very bad state. Well, I thought it was the flu. And at one point my GP, I went to my GP, and he
really put it in front of me. He said, this is not the flu. You have got all the symptoms
of a burnout and, yeah, period. I remember very well,
going back to work, after I think it was a good
five months of being absent. And I went back to work
and tried to walk to the office. I remember very well
thinking what happened to me. It was really like, I was confused.
Confused, angry, disoriented. Actually, what really popped
into my mind then was: where the hell
did I lose my exit. I mean, how come I continued
on this freaking highway to where I'm at now, but I
should have... I missed my exit. That's what came to my
mind. I missed the freaking exit. I wanted to become an engineer, because my grandfather
was an engineer. And I thought: I want to
be effective and efficient. So always having
the bar super high. Perfectionism in order to show
that you're successful, worth it. Mediocrity is just
not even an option. Your body is saying: time out.
I had a burnout, but then what? You really fall into this new
world. It's almost like a new reality. My whole self and my compass, which
I had been sailing on all my life, I realized that
compass is wrong. Because otherwise I
wouldn't have been here. You feel like a failure because
you're one of those people who fell through the gates
into the abyss of burnout, and that's all down to you. If you think it's only you, or very
few people, as opposed to more people, then the focus
automatically goes: so what's my problem?
Why am I not strong enough? Why am I not capable enough? And so what we saw
early on was a phenomenon that is known as
pluralistic ignorance. And what that means is that you're
feeling something is going wrong, not just that you're exhausted
and got too much to do, but you're
shortchanging the work. You're not doing a good
job, and you know it, and you're feeling
bad about yourself. Well, you're not going to go over
and chat with somebody at coffee about how you’re feeling. No, what you're going to do is, you're
going to put a smile on your face. ‘I'm fine. I can handle
this. I can do it. Okay.’ And just move along
and hope nobody notices. What you don't know is that there
are a lot of other people around you who are doing the
very same thing. So your social perception
is that everybody is smiling, happy, doing fine. I'm the only one
who's got a problem. When, in fact, the reality is behind
those masks, behind that smiley face, there are a lot of
other people thinking, oh, my God, I'm the only one. On top of the problem of not being
able to say what you really feel, half the time you don't
understand what anybody's saying. So if you think about your average
meeting, the social contract is this: You'll sit there and
speak nonsense and I'll sit there quietly
and not listen to you and check my emails while
you're speaking nonsense. How it can empower the
intelligent transformation? And accelerating adoption... Connect and enable
the new experiences... Make the move to enable the
application to truly gain knowledge. How to speak the
language of management. So, I blame a character
called Charles Krone. He was swept up in the
kind of new age mysticism, which was washing across the
West Coast during the 60s and 70s. Krone gets hired by Pacific
Bell and his job is to come in and engage in what they call a
transformational change project. Workshop participants
take part in an exercise designed to broaden perception
and increase sensory input. And Krone's role was really to
kind of reprogram the employees by introducing them to his
own personal philosophy, which was drawn from a Russian
mystic called George Gurdjieff. Devotees of Gurdjieff would
often engage in mystical dancing, reciting mystical
poetry, et cetera. And the board members of Pacific
Bell were particularly keen on this. And they thought that their employees
should get a bit of it as well. Now, if you look back
to that language now, it sounded scandalous
and strange at the time, but now it’s part of
everyday language. People need a justification
for what they're doing. They need a language which
makes these empty tasks, which people have in companies, to give them some substance
or apparent substance. So there's the
sense that “Kroning” provides a way of
covering up the gaping hole, which is corporate life, often. If you go back to the
cause the burnout, what would you say if you had to
narrow it down to only a few factors? What is it for you guys? What would you name as
the key drivers of your burnout? I think it had been coming out,
like mild symptoms, but mostly, when I felt it really strongly, was
I think back in March this year, where I kinda like felt myself
not being able to do daily stuff, like running errands,
or talking to people. Or where I felt
overwhelmed by doing that. Wake myself up, brush
my teeth, sit at the table — that was the hardest
thing to do in the morning. That was like the
prominent symptom that lead me to recognize
that I have a problem. It's embarrassing to admit,
but I actually sometimes felt that it would be easier if I would
get hit by a car in the morning on my way to work. Because that would solve the
problem of not having to go there. That was just how deep
I was in my own misery. I felt so anxious, it sometimes
felt impossible even, to go to work, because I knew what was waiting. And I just felt like if somebody
or something outside of me would solve the problem, then
I wouldn't have to think about it. But these are things that
I've only realized afterwards. I totally refused the
idea that I was in burnout. I just felt like I'm invincible,
I cannot have a burnout. This cannot happen to me again. So it was kind of
hard for me to start to realize, admit,
accept, and process it. It was really a long
process for me. When they talk about
exhaustion, if that's all it is, then why change the name? Why not just call it what
it is, which is exhaustion? With burnout, we're
talking about more than that. The exhaustion response,
what we think of, that's stress. It is the stress response. Chronic, everyday stressors.
Burnout is a signal. It's a red flag. It's a warning. If you start seeing
problems with burnout, it's telling you not who is
burning out, it's telling you why. In the 19th century, we got this invention of a new
professional class of people who were managers. Those managers often came
from an engineering background. So they were quite good at
sort of tuning the machinery. They began then to
see the people as cogs that they could potentially tune
and make more efficient as well. In about the late 1970s,
a corporation, a company, was no longer treated as
an entity with people in it. The purpose of the corporation
is to maximize shareholder value. Companies began to say: how
much human capital have we got? And they began to
treat their employees like a kind of balance sheet, which they could measure,
manage, as if they have no history, as if they have no family, as if
they have no attachment to place. It's not even just a
cog in the machine. It's a flickering digital
line on a balance sheet somewhere that can be easily
deleted at the press of a key. Burnout is all in engineering. I mean, rocket
boosters burn out, you know,
ball-bearings burn out. So it's not a surprise that when
they started Silicon Valley startups, they called them burnout shops. They advertised
as burnout shops, because this is what
the life is going to be like. But it was intended
to be a limited time. It was intended to be a sprint
- two to four or five years, max. Now the model is for a marathon. This is the way we do
business all the time, for years. The human body cannot run
a marathon at a sprint pace. Most people come to work really
wanting to make a difference. And it starts with the most
basic, clear expectations. So when people come to work,
they need to know what their role is. And too often in organizations
now, people don't. One of the great challenges of
leadership is bringing teams together. Creating a common purpose. How that mission or purpose
comes to life is the manager. It's the manager that
helps that employee see how that work connects
to that bigger picture. Often times, we put people
in managerial positions for a couple reasons. We ask managers, how did you
get into your job? One reason, tenure. They've been around the
organization a long time. Two, I was really successful
as an individual contributor before I was a manager. Neither of those two things correlate
with being an effective manager. The motivation is: I
want to be a manager, because I'll probably
get paid more, I’ll feel like I've reached a
higher level in the organization. Those are two human
nature motivations that it's hard to
get people out of unless you have a path
where somebody can see they have a high
esteem position, maybe even paid
more than managers, for being an exceptional
individual contributor. They may not think about
people as individuals, may not even naturally care
about them as individuals that much. So they think almost
completely about the work itself, and not about how that
person can develop over time. So what it does is, it deteriorates
the culture of the team. But it also isn't good
for the manager. But that's the system,
or the right to passage, that's happened
inside organizations. And if you're gonna ask me
what a root cause of all this is? That would be one of them. Here's the financial logic: You make somebody a manager, just because they're good at doing a
certain job, and you pay them more, not to do that job anymore, and instead to do a job that
they're not qualified to do. With the result that the productivity of everybody else in
the team goes down, but you still have
to pay their salaries. Meanwhile, the new manager has to prove to his
boss that he's still getting results. So he hires a management
consultant to try and fix the problem. It produces a cool report, but
half the time changes nothing. But you still pay
the consultant. Well, I mean, I don't know how
many managers I had, but a lot and I think there
were only two, so maybe 10%, that you could really have a
personal conversation with. Which made a complete difference
in how I was actually doing my job. Can I ask a quick question? It's something that everybody
has touched upon here. You know, you talk about the
expectations from childhood about working life. Do you remember a
specific instance of that clash between expectations
and reality? I was thinking about this. As I mentioned earlier, I'm
the big sister in the family and I have a little sister. She is two years younger than
I am, and we are very different. She is the wild spirit and the one
who has been searching for herself her entire life, whereas I've been
more of the rational one, perhaps, and the one who gets good grades and just do what
society expects me to do. And that's why I said earlier that I
felt like there was this train for me. So I jump on the train. Then there is the school, you
get the good results, you do good, don't upset the teachers. Then, of course, I
will go to university. It's law school or medical
school or whatever. Be the good girl. Maybe the point is, I feel like I
was something, and then I was, shaped into, suffocated into being
like something else, something less, something smaller. And that's why I kind of developed
the sense that I'm not good enough, and I am... there is
something wrong with me. Like there is something
fundamentally, deeply wrong with
me as a human being. And perhaps that is something
that I've been trying to kind of then fix through these different
achievements in life, like go to university,
get those results, because I felt that
that is my responsibility, as Vanessa, as the person I am. Like I am the person who is
supposed to do these things. One of the things that has fascinated
me over the years is education. It's almost designed to destroy the
natural curiosity we have as children. Somehow when you're
in primary education, they're beating that out of you, they're destroying
that natural curiosity. Then when you go
to higher education, that kind of gets
halfway put back. You never quite get back to
where you were when you were five, but you know, maybe
you get a little of it, just enough that you can
function as an intellectual. Many of the rituals and
structures of primary education are designed to prepare
people for factory labor. That's why they have bells
ringing and you have to get up and you have to move
from room to room. And there's no particular
reason you should have to move from room to room. The interesting question for me
is, why are they still doing that? Because it's not like very
many kids going to school are going to be working
in factories anymore. My conclusion is that
they are preparing us for a life that isn't going
to make a lot of sense. They're teaching us not to
ask questions about things that any intelligent person who
hadn't been so trained would. Like: why are we
filling out this form if we don't get any
money either way anyway? Why are we writing this report,
if nobody's going to read it? All these things that anybody in a
bullshit job really should be asking, but knows as a condition of their
employment, that they shouldn't. If a guy shows up in a white coat
or acting like he's an authority... Faster than Nokia
has ever gone before. ...just play along. Children first figure out that they are separate
from the world around them when they realize they
can have predictable effects. Take the scenario where say a
child is moving his arms around and he moves a pencil,
there's a pencil there, and it rolls down the table,
and he figures out that happens. If he moves his hand again,
and it rolls a little further. This is great! Oh,
my God, you know? I am an entity that can
have effects on things. And that's the moment
you realize you are a person, and there is a world, and
they're not the same thing. And when you take that
away, people just collapse. It shatters their sense of self. Really, the very basis of what
makes us human, or feel human. It strikes me that we
need to reevaluate what we see as
valuable in labor. Because if we've got to a situation
where millions and millions of people around the world are
coming into work every day saying there is no social
value in what I do, it's pointless, there is a clash between
what the market dictates, what our economic system
identifies as valuable, and what people actually
feel in their hearts is valuable. There's a disjuncture. People feel there's
something terribly wrong. They have some kind
of notion that real work meets people's needs, desires... It's about furthering something
in humans that we wish to further. So when you enter a company, they make you feel like you
are blessed working for them, that they choose
you to work for them. And it's not you that applies for
the job, but they kind of pick up, pick you up from out of nowhere, and they choose you to be the
blessed one working for them. So then you kind of have to
feel your life is the company life. So you don't have an identity
anymore, but you are the company. So is this the lucky one?
You're going to get married? In Italy, we say when you have
the prosecco bottle and you open it, the one who catches
the cork will get married. Something like
that. Yeah. It is crazy. In three years, I have been
assisting at three reorganization where people have been losing their
jobs, where people have been crying, where they were working
since 20 years or more. So in the back of my head,
I always had the thought: you are giving the best of yourself to
this company, but remember one day, they will call you and say, you
have to pack your stuff in a week. I had a relationship for a few
years, we were living together, and, of course, we decided
to start a family together. And then we could not buy a
house together due to our incomes, because it was just too low. I was the one who had a better
contract. I had a better income. So I felt like if I fail in this
job, we will not buy a house. So we will not build up a
family. It will all be my fault. So I was really
stressed at home. I was doing extra work at home, so I was not really there as part
of a couple, for living together. At that point what happened
to me is that I worked too much? to the point that I kind of
destroyed my private life. I was really frustrated, because I thought I’ve worked
hard for more than 10 years. I want to settle down.
I want to have kids. I want to do those kind
of things, and I cannot. Corporations are a grand example
of the 'emperor has no clothes'. It's all about promise. It's all about
what we're going to do in the future. They're constantly undergoing
these change processes, reorganization, restructuring,
downsizing, rightsizing. You fire people, you hire people, you shift around the
signs, but very little, at the end of the
day, actually changes. We know lots of people
lose from all of this. There are any people
who lose their job, and it often becomes extremely
stressful for the people who stay. Often those things are done, not
necessarily because they need to be, they're done because the CEO has
to show that something's happening. Who it does impress
is financial analysts, who set the price or
make a recommendation of what they think the
price of a share should be. Nothing actually changes on
how well the company does, but the share price goes up, because they've said the right
thing to the financial markets. But that also means, because the CEO
is often rewarded on the basis of stock options
or share price, their pay goes up. One of the most pernicious things
about our current economic system is that the more your
work benefits others in an obvious and immediate sense, the more your work has a clear
and undeniable beneficial effect on other human beings, the less
you are likely to get paid for it. If you look at the graphs, wages
basically stay completely flat, whereas productivity
continues to rise precipitously. So the big question is, what's
happened to that extra profit? Again, the story we tell ourselves, and this time it's
not entirely untrue, is that it all got
pumped into finance. Basically, the profits went to
the richest 1% of the population, and they basically
are gambling with it. I was running all my life to
study and get a job in a company so I could have a good life: I'm going to buy an amazing
house, you know, for myself, and then I want to be single
and travel for a long time, and then I want to have
kids, and settle down — it's just a big dream. It's just an illusion. So for me to give up so
much of my private life and not achieve the results that I
expected to, it was just mind blowing. My brain stopped
working, I can tell you, like, this is the feeling
that I have now, like something
broke inside my brain and I could not picture
how that happened. It was unbelievable. The original sabotage manual was written for a world
where most people who worked operated a machine. But we've been just as effective
at sabotaging work in our world, where most work
relies not on a machine, but on the brain
power of humans. The authors of the original
manual would have been amazed at how effective our
sabotage has been. Only 20% of the workforce
are engaged in their work. Those that manage them
are seldom qualified for the job. And that less of the benefits of
work goes to those who do the work. Why are we creating
— we, society — creating an environment in which
people are doing really good work, necessary work, beneficial work,
and making them do it in a way that it just sort of tears
them apart and, you know, out they go. So how to make that realization, that the setting and the
environment in which people function, really, as much as possible, how do we design it to make
people really grow and thrive? We've known for a long
time, all about ergonomics: that we have to design
furniture and tools that adapt to the human body. You may not like the way
the human body was designed, but that's the way it functions. I guess I'm talking more about
ergonomics in terms of the social, the psychological: what makes people tick? This is the weird thing for me, and this is the conundrum
for me personally, because I love my job
that I do at the moment, and I'm actually, for
the first time in 20 years, doing something
I really care about. I feel like I'm
making a difference. I'm working in a
meaningful industry, but yet I'm still experiencing
symptoms of a burnout. So how have I still got to this
stage? What is it that's gone wrong? You know, what is it that
I've done wrong, maybe? Or why am I having panic
attacks? Is it because of... You and I could
have the same job, and there's something about it
that drives you crazy and I'm okay. What has been discovered in a
lot of research, by a lot of people, is at least six areas where that kind
of job-person balance or imbalance, the fit or the misfit occurs, that
can be predictive, if it's a good fit, of greater engagement
with the work. If it's a bad fit, the risk of burnout
becomes more of a problem. The workload is always huge
and there's no long-term projects. It's always like for yesterday
that you need to deliver. So, the one that everybody
thinks about is workload, and that is the one that is
probably most clearly tied to problems with exhaustion. And, basically, the
imbalance there, or the misfit, is that the
demands are really high, and the resources to handle
those demands are low. You don't have enough time.
You don't have the right information. You don't have the
tools, you don't, you know, there's no way that that
can be done, given that. What’s the point. It's a never-ending process. It’s never ending, it
just goes and goes. You finish one task, and
tomorrow you have plenty more, because they need to
expand to other countries. The second one is control. And that's really the extent to
which you have some choice, some discretion, some autonomy, some way of deciding how best to do
the job, given what it is like today. As opposed to, you have
no discretion, no choice, you must do this. And what we find is, it's
not so much workload, but if you have high workload and
you have high control, no problem. It's when you have high
workload and no control. It's like Sisyphus pushing up
the rock and all of a sudden, at the end of
the day, it's back. When there is
insufficient reward, that means that no matter what
you do, how successful you are, how great you are
meeting the deadlines and getting things done or something, no good feedback comes. The reward is not just about
the salary or the benefits — I mean, I don't want to
throw that out, but, I mean, that's not usually the biggies. The biggies are the social
recognition, the appreciation, that somebody noticed you
really, you know, oh my gosh, you really got us out of a bind
there by the thing that you did and, oh, thanks so much. And you know, we couldn't
have done it without you. Little things like that. God, I'm going to have
the logo in my eyes soon and I'll just be walking
around like a zombie. Because it was like, you know, and you
have to live and breathe our values, and you need to
be a change agent, and you need to do this,
and you need to do that. Community is really
the social environment, the people you come in
contact with on a regular basis. Okay. We have a flexible time. We have a flexible working
time, but every day at 10:00 AM you have a meeting. So, I mean, how can this be flexible?
Can I work from 12 to 9 PM? No. When it works well, when there is
social support, mutual social support —you know, we sort of help each
other out, if somebody is unclear, we kind of clarify — when there is trust, when there is
kind of respect for each other and, you know, a notion
of reciprocity — when all of that is working well, quite honestly, it is
like money in the bank. Even though I gave
them the message, Listen guys, this
is too much for me. And I got a burnout, because
of this, they don't care. They just hide the problem and they keep on doing
whatever they have to do. When people feel they are
working in a place that is unfair, that treats people unfairly, this will raise the level
of that cynicism sky-high. And if there is a value
conflict, it's even worse. We need to take into account
what human beings are like and how they function. What makes them motivated?
What makes them do great things? What do they need to recharge
and reboot and, you know, have a life? For generations, people thought
they were working really hard to someday create a world where
people don't have to work so much, where robots will do
the unpleasant drudgery, repetitive, stupid labor that
nobody really wants to do. Now, we're living
under a system, a capitalist market system,
which is supposed to be efficient. It can allocate
resources in a way that will guarantee the maximum
production and profitability. Maybe it makes people unhappy, but ultimately it
creates greater good by being the most efficient
system anybody could ever imagine. I mean, any efficient
system, you’d think, should be able to reallocate resources
in such a way that we work less and everybody still
has enough to eat. If we can't do that, there's
something terribly wrong. I mean, we have an insanely,
ridiculously inefficient system. I think we should change the
way we think of the economy. Let's not talk about production
and consumption anymore. Most work isn't
actually making stuff. It's not changing
it even, you know, transforming it to make
it into something else, it's trying to keep it the same. You know, you’ve got to take care
of things or else they fall apart. Then they tell us,
well, you know, we're going to create robots
that will get rid of all our jobs. This is a big problem. Well, you can't have people
have too much leisure time. They'll be depressed. They'll just
sit around and watch TV all day. They won't, they won't
be able to figure out what to do with themselves. People do want to contribute to
the world and make the world better for the people around them. And left to their own devices they're more likely to do
something useful then if they're not. Well, how do we know we're
not going to have a world full of annoying street mimes
or bad poets, awful musicians? Or crank scientists with
hollow earth theories, or who trying to create
perpetual motion devices? All we need is one of
those bad musicians to be Miles Davis
or John Lennon, or one of those crank
scientists to be Einstein, and you've pretty much
made back your investment.
