Falon Peters joins the pod to discuss how organizations not only wreak change but design it for flourishing. Our crew is open to her ideas but skeptical as well (and, ok, fatigued).
Here's a lead-up to the show:
When you jerk people around in a workplace—through layoffs and policy revisions, e.g.—you’re not just reshuffling columns on a spreadsheet. You’re intervening on a biota.
Think of a biota as a forest or a piece of farmland, sheltering and relying upon a complex network of interdependent elements. What gives vitality to a biota is the energy that flows from seemingly unimportant parts of the place (like the soil) to more conspicuous elements (like the crops and insects and birds) to the most obvious participants (like hunters and farmers).
In organizations, too, vitality fountains up from nonobvious to more obvious participants. But American workplaces tend to drive organizational change not by attuning to the complexity of their biotas but by the urgencies of monetary efficiency.
Think of Amazon’s plan to eliminate 14,000 middle managers, announced last week.
Heck, I wouldn’t want to be a middle manager at Amazon. Maybe it’s a good thing that machines do all that managerial work, drafting memos, tying down lists, assigning shifts, monitoring production reports. But Amazon’s decision will affect more than middle managers. It will affect the whole ecology of early-to-mid-career professionals, redirecting their career pathways and obstructing the energy flowing upwards that Amazon’s own biota relies on.
Years ago, Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a coming “Sixth Extinction” in the history of our planet. We can’t address such large-scale crises at the Mode/Switch roundtable. But here’s what our intergenerational crew—Emily, LaShone, Ken, and I—can do. We can help prevent the next workplace extinction by sharing the wisdom of people like our guest this week, Falon Peters of the Grand-Rapids-based Crowe X-Design Lab. She’s got ideas (and we have questions) about how organizations can do more than wreak change. They can also design it for everybody’s wellbeing.
You’ll want to stick around for our roundtable wrap-up. Things get dark for us in this conversation. But then, we’re trying to pay attention to death and resurrection in the American workplace.
-craig
P.S. Can you spot my dependence on Aldo Leopold’s work in what I wrote above? See his essay “The Land Ethic“ for more on the mutuality of biotas.
