On machines and humans

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant metaphor when it came to talking about humans at work was the machine. We had production lines, efficiency, breaking jobs down to their constituent parts and having a machine (person) for each part. So long as the machine is well maintained, it can keep working in a predictable manner with predictable results.

Then it became the computer. We talked about networks, software, hardware, programming, debugging and optimising. Like machines, this metaphor still conceives of human working as a linear process. We sit down, plug in, work consistently, unplug.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the shift to “work from anywhere”, accelerated by our experience through COVID, has been – for many of us – a decoupling from this linear, mechanistic idea of work. Instead we are moving to something perhaps more organic. More like… humans.

We do not “run” at a consistent pace from 9.00 am to 5.30 pm, Monday to Friday, all year, year after year. We are becoming more aware of times of day, week and year when we are more suited to creating different kinds of work, or to resting.  We have seasons.  We always have, but it is becoming something that we can see more clearly when we are not blinded by the machine paradigm.

My hope is that our culture will shift to one that better accommodates our ebbs and flows, allowing us to produce at a high level some of the time, and to rest, recover, reflect and think some of the time.

Perhaps we can start allowing our fallow seasons to enrich the soil, ready for the next period of growth. Perhaps the next dominant metaphor may be more along those lines, a closer match to our lived reality.

Until next week,

Take care of yourself and others
Madeleine

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