First draw two circles - Johnathan & Melissa

Photo by Jan van der Wolf.

All the people in our house are now over five feet tall. We know lots of folks make it well into adulthood without ever hitting this milestone. It’s not mandatory. But it tripped a visible line on the family growth chart where the kids are no longer kid kids. They aren’t even big kids. They’re officially into young-adult territory. And the parenting experience for this phase has been a bit of a head-spin.

Children who were once picky are now ravenous. Who once winced at black pepper (no joke), now ask us to pass the hot sauce. Who were once up at dawn, now snooze into lunch. Who once clutched our legs at drop-off, now ask us to please park down the street, lest anyone suspect that they have people who love and care for them.

One teen. One tween. And a shit-ton of stuff they need to learn before they go from young adults to actual adults. We’ve been goofing that it feels like covering two years of growing up in two months of time. Less linear. More spikey.

How you think it works

Our teen just got a summer job (insert minor amount of kvelling). And it’s been a great reminder of how many things you had to learn at some point but may have forgotten ever not knowing. How scheduling works. How first paychecks work. How taxes work. How uniforms work. How coworkers work. The difference between shift managers and supervisors and owners. So much of this navigation is less in the definition and more in the implementation. We’ve started drawing two circles in the air when covering basically any topic.

On the one hand, there’s how you think it works. We make a big circle with a right hand, high up in the air. They run payroll consistently. You’ll get paid on time. The amount of money that lands in your account will be correct for the hours you worked.

And on the other hand, there’s how it actually works. We draw a smaller circle with a left hand, lower to the ground. You need to make sure the number of hours worked lines up with the pay received. You need to know how often they run payroll so you can confirm everything lines up. People sometimes make mistakes. And also, not every employer is honest. And those dishonest employers count on teens not knowing any better.

This gap between how you think it works and how it actually works shows up well-outside of first summer jobs. We see very senior bosses in very big orgs walk right into a variation of this wall.

High right hand: I manage a team of incredibly brilliant people. Given access to the same information, we’ll all come to the same conclusion about how to resolve an issue facing our company. And that shared conclusion will be the best option because good ideas will rise to the top of that stack. And when we make the decision, it will be obvious to everyone that this is the correct path forward.

Low left hand: Your people bring a million micro-assumptions to their work that inform not only how they perceive the work underway but also how they spot issues and come up with creative solutions to resolve them. They also bring guilt and fear and shame and cultural nuance in how they respond to failure. Particularly collective failure. It’s extremely unlikely, outside of deeply homogenous environments, that all their baggage will be a matched set. And from that place, you should anticipate wildly different and sometimes relatively heated discussions about what happens next.

How it actually works

Humans are a delight. Genuinely. But we are not perfect rational actors. And we are not always ideologically consistent. Our flaws are part of what make us so charming. But also positively vexing for the top right-hand circle. This human variability means we are often overly confident about how we think a thing will go and find we have wildly misjudged how it will actually play out. Some recent examples…

Glasses that get you punched in the face because it turns out people don’t like perpetual surveillance. A metaverse with no pants. AI features you can’t disable because some PM is getting bonused on you adopting them. New glasses that are eerily similar to the face-punching ones. OK, hear me out, not glasses but what if it’s an orb that records and analyzes everything as you go about your day. Oh wait, let’s try spy glasses one more time.

None of these? Well, how about…

A workforce with no workers. Companionship in isolation. Intelligence without wisdom. A facsimile of humanity without humans.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal published a piece that rhymed with a recent newsletter of ours. The WSJ article included a quote from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and it’s a good one. It’s a tidy semantic encapsulation of overestimating the top right at the expense of the bottom left. Ready?

“We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.”

At least they’re consistent?

“Pretty wrong,” indeed!

What’s funny is that there was no need to be this wrong. This isn’t new. The market for innovations in not-having-to-manage-people has been around for a long time. Whether those innovations are business processes (remember holocracy?), psychometric woo (INTP much?), or technological change (“with agents, everyone is a manager, but also you can fire everyone”), the pitch has always been the same:

With the arrival of this transcendent new innovation, you’ll no longer have to deal with the messiness of having your business rely on human idiosyncrasies and relationships. This tool will solve many problems, but chief among them is that it will remove the need for you to engage with the complexity of management.

We’ve talked before about Puzzle Theory, and this is what it looks like when an industry decides to productize it. Once you can see that, so much of the AI hype of the last few years suddenly makes a different kind of sense. Why would Altman and Amodei and all their AI CEO buddies be out there publicly fretting, “We’re building tech that will eliminate a lot of jobs,” if not for the very obvious reason that that was their sales pitch? Like, we will put you out of work is not a good direct-to-consumer marketing message! But it clearly roped plenty of boards and CEOs as a B2B message, because that was the whole idea.

Their predictions were always going to be wrong, of course. That’s not hindsight talking, we’ve been saying so for years. And now they’re coming around to acknowledging it because they need to find a new message. Their customers are pulling back deployments, clamping down on token budgets, and rehiring staff because reality isn’t living up to the hype. We called that ball, too, by the way.

And as for the leaders who desperately wanted to believe. Who felt like, this time, there really would be a way to free themselves from having to manage their employees. Who maybe let the mask slip on just how happy they were to be rid of those people, how much they resented them. Well, let’s check in on Meta:

That last one is about how Google is pulling Meta’s access to Gemini. Because, see, it’s not just that morale is a PR or employer-brand issue. It’s that their tech efforts are so far behind as a direct result that they have to rely on a competitor’s stack. It isn’t going great. And yes, if you’re wondering, we wrote about Zuck’s eagerness for layoffs three years ago,

“…But whether your company needs the layoff or not. Whether it is executed it brilliantly, or brutally. The thing we are telling you — the thing you need to know — is that it’s not going to make you more efficient. Hits to morale, commitment, productivity, and trust are not good for efficiency.”

We know. It’s unbecoming to spend too long in we told you so. But receipts matter, too. When we tilt against CEOs with immense commercial success behind them, it’s tempting to assume that they know what they’re doing. Maybe on large language models, they do. Maybe on unsupervised learning, or which jurisdictions let you get away with IP theft, or how to build a massive consumer-surveillance apparatus without attracting too much scrutiny, they do. But on humans, they have a history of being pretty wrong. In ways that will get you punched in the face.

Where do we go from here

The cure for every organization whose leaders fall in love with an end-of-management story is the same: come back to the people. However impressive your balance sheet is today, every bit of IP you have, every annual contract, every customer-success bot you’ve trained on a million conversations, every moat you’ve built, will depreciate and decay over time. The people on your team are the only enduring source of new value you have as an organization.

That isn’t actually us saying that new technologies don’t matter. We’ve worked with organizations who have seen massive wins from thoughtful application of AI, who have bet their future on it and are seeing it pay off. But as a tool for their thriving, well-managed teams to use and build on. Not as a replacement for those teams. And definitely not as a way to avoid managing those teams well in the first place.

It’s the thing that keeps getting the puzzle-theory folks punched in the face. Most people don’t want their coworkers replaced with bots. They don’t want every keystroke and mouse click surveilled. They don’t want work re-imagined as a pantsless-VR-nightmare.

Most people want to do work that matters, with people they care about, in an organization they trust to value their work. That’s not too tall an order. That’s what has always made work in an organization worth doing. The art of building an organization that can offer people those things is difficult, and complicated, and deeply enmeshed with the complexities and contradictions of being human. That art is called management.

Take it from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

— Melissa & Johnathan