12 March

In all my years of working I’ve noticed the same patterns. The more senior a person gets in an organisation, the more the focus of their work is ‘restructuring’ their area to offload their work to somebody else. Usually sold as a ‘strategic’ change, a clear red flag word for work-dumping. Also the more senior you get in most organisations, the further you get from actual hands-on work. You spend your days discussing the ‘big picture’, which is really just drawings and big words on bits of paper, these days with lots of fancy data added. Then you ‘drill down’ through all that mountain of baloney, to supposedly get back to where you started i.e. the hands-on work. I’ve never had or wanted a career. But I did make a decision to end my working life going in the exact opposite direction. To go back to hands-on work. The distinction between the specific and the general, the micro and the macro, is fake. You will never be closer to the universal truth of your organisation than when you’re solving everyday ‘operational’ problems.