Despite being experienced managers, what they learned was eye-opening. One explained that “it was like the sun rose for the first time. … I saw the bigger picture.” They had never seen the pieces — the jobs, technologies, tools, and routines — connected in one place, and they realized that their prior view was narrow and fractured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought of things in the context of my span of control.”

The maps of the organization generated by the project teams also showed that their organizations often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed. There may originally have been such a design, but as the organization grew, adapted to changing markets, brought on new leadership, added or subtracted divisions, and so on, this animating vision was lost. The original design had been eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans. A manager explained, “Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t engineered.”

“They see problems, and the general approach, the human approach, is to try and fix them. … Functions have tried to put band-aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds good, but when they are layered one on top of the other they start to choke the organization. But they don’t see that because they are only seeing their own thing.”

Ultimately, the managers realized that what they had previously attributed to the direction and control of centralized, bureaucratic forces was actually the aggregation of the distributed work and uncoordinated decisions of people dispersed throughout the organization. Everyone was working on the part of the organization they were familiar with, assuming that another set of people were attending to the larger picture, coordinating the larger system to achieve goals and keeping the organization operating. Except no one was actually looking at how people’s work was connecting across the organization day-to-day.

as they felt a sense of empowerment about changing the organization, they felt a sense of alienation about returning to their central roles. “You really start understanding all of the waste and all of the redundancy and all of the people who are employed as what I call intervention resources,” one person told us.

In the end, a slight majority of the employees returned to their role to continue their career (25 cases). They either were promoted (7 cases), moved laterally (8 cases), or returned to their jobs (10 cases). However, 23 chose organizational change roles.

This study suggests that when companies undertake organizational change efforts, they should consider not only the implications for the organization, but also for the people tasked to do the work. Further, it highlights just how infrequently we recognize how poorly designed and managed many of our organizations really are. Not acknowledging the dysfunction of existing routines protects us from seeing how much of our work is not actually adding value, something that may lead simply to unsatisfying work, no less to larger questions about the nature of organizational design similar to those asked by the managers in my study. Knowledge of the systems we work in can be a source of power, yes. But when you realize you can’t affect the big changes your organization needs, it can also be a source of alienation.

The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.

The problem is that the main incentive for pursuing corporate sustainability work is its ability to create more marketable products. Outside of sustainability efforts that are pursued based on compliance or regulation, much of this work is built around the idea of pandering to consumers' understanding of sustainability, something that’s notoriously variable.

in Instagram apologies, even when someone ostensibly confronts their ugliness, it’s hard to read the gesture as anything but an effort to publicly reclaim their image. But at least the Notes App Apology permitted us a semblance of sincerity, and suggested there might be a human being who typed the message—even if that human was an intern or assistant. There’s nothing sincere about a trickle-down excuse crafted to look pretty for Instagram grids, and the processed nature of Photoshopped Apologies implies the absence of the one thing all genuine apologies must possess: accountability straight from the person who committed the transgression.