Blaire Palmer (00:00.00)

So ingrained in us are some rules that developed over the last 250 years about work that we take not for granted to such an extent that we think that they're normal. If you think about what was happening at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people worked in a really different way. I don't want to glamorize it. It was a very hard life and there's no part of me that is suggesting, let's go back to some sort of mythical golden age before the Industrial Age where people worked from home and they were more flexible. But the reality was that people worked from home and they were more flexible. And all the data suggests that working hours were less. 

Then we get into the industrial age and the machine is king. And so the bosses and the kind of intelligent thought leaders of the time decided why can't we work people like they are machines, because it's all about productivity and efficiency and predictability. And if people work like machines, then we will have our profitability, our efficiency, and our predictability. And so we started doing things like clocking in and clocking out and measuring people's working hours and rewarding people per hour of work that they did. Even things like time and motion studies. We have hierarchical structures so that we can keep control of people. All of these ideas were developed in the industrial range. And I really don't believe that in the vast majority of jobs that human beings are doing today, it leads to their best work. Not at all. In fact, it's a barrier to them doing their best work.

Siân Harrington (00:101.47)

Hey everyone, welcome to Work’s Not Working, a show about forward thinking people leaders, innovators and academics, and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable. Brought to you by The People Space. 

I'm Siân Harrington and on the show today, Blaire Palmer on the outdated Victorian beliefs and practices still influencing modern workplaces. Despite the significant advancements in technology and society, many organizations remain entrenched in outdated paradigms. Blaire argues that we are clinging to antiquated Victorian beliefs about work that prevent us from truly evolving. These old paradigms influence everything from how we measure productivity to the hierarchical structures that control information flow within companies. 

Later on, we'll discuss why organisations are treating their people like second -rate machines and what we can do to change this. We'll explore how these outdated practices affect employee engagement and learn about the engagement G -spot. And Blaire will share insights on the concept of organisational citizenship versus autonomy and how leaders can foster a more trusting and human -centric work environment. 

But first, let me tell you a little bit about Blaire. Blaire Palmer is a former BBC journalist, turned organisational culture and leadership specialist and keynote speaker. She has worked on flagship Radio 4 programmes like Today and Woman's Hour. For the past 24 years, Blaire has helped organisations drive real change and create places where people can do their best work. She speaks internationally, urging senior leaders to rethink what leadership means in the modern era.

So let's dive into why it's crucial to rethink our inherited work practices and how we can create a more humane and effective work environment. start by asking Blaire about the fundamental reasons work isn't working today and how outdated Victorian beliefs are still shaping our workplaces. 

Siân Harrington (00:04: 04) 

Blaire I can't wait to have this conversation. And I want to start with getting right to the real sort of nub of the issue, which is that you argue that one fundamental reason work isn't working today is because we're clinging to outdated Victorian beliefs and practices. And you have in your book, you mentioned it's like putting lipstick on a Victorian pig, which I love that expression. And you're talking about how we basically look at people today quite a lot as if they're second rate machines. Can you tell me what you mean? Yes, people are second rate machines.

Blaire Palmer (04:37.688)

There are certain things that human beings will never be able to do properly or as well as machines can do because we're emotional, because we are unpredictable, because it's really difficult for human beings to do repetitive tasks to the same, exactly the same way every single time. That's what machines are for. And it has been necessary up until now to have human beings doing a lot of those tasks because we didn't have the machines with the capability. As soon as we did have machines with capability to do those things, we got machines to do them. 

The problem with that is that we then assume the more we can get machines to do what humans are doing, because humans are second rate at a lot of these activities, the less we'll need humans. But, and then of course, right now we've got the explosion of AI where this is really so much of what we thought only humans could do. It turns out that we have a machine that can do it and that can do it in a far superior way, in a way that our brains just can't really get their heads around. But what it means is that we have never really had an opportunity to think about what is it that human beings could do if they weren't doing things that they are second rate at. 

So if you think about your typical working day, it is packed full. And even if you work in a service or knowledge type of job, your typical day is packed full of things that it turns out a machine or AI can do better. So simply, let's say project managing, let's say managing finances, managing your inbox, your diary, coordinating availability between people, doing research, writing reports. All of these things can be done better by AI. I was interviewing someone for my book about this and I said, he works in the AI field and I said, in five years’ time, he's a CEO, in five years’ time, what will you be able to do with this technology? And he said, I'll be able to come in the morning, a CEO of this business and say to my AI, tell me what I need to know. So he won't need to go dig around in various dashboards and then pull some data from here and pull some data from there and download some data from there and construct a record where he brings his insight to that and tries to make meaning of it. The AI will do that. It will say based on what's important for this business? This is what's going on right now in a human way as if a human was doing it but with the insight of AI. You take all of that out of our day. 

Now, what could humans do with that? Finally, human beings would be able to wrangle with ethical questions. They'd be able to connect deeply with themselves with each other and their colleagues, with their clients, with the world around them. They'd be able to think, to have time to think and to imagine and to create. And they'd have the opportunity to take all of the richness of that inner site that the AI has developed and do something with it. And we've never been able to ask people to do that before because we've been too busy just keeping on top of the day to day. 

Siân Harrington (00:08:11) 

Why do you think we haven't moved on just to go back to a bit of context, but why do we still treat or a lot of companies treat employees like machines? Do you think what's the problem there? Why aren't we embracing the new ways of working? Y

Blaire Palmer (00:08:26)

Yeah, in part, we've not had a chance to think about it. You know, that's what I mean. It's so much our truth that this is the way that the world works. And this is the way that it has to work. 

Some years ago, I took my daughter out of school. She was nine years old and school wasn't really working for her and in the UK it's a legal responsibility of parents to ensure that their children are educated, the equivalent of full -time education, but that doesn't necessarily mean school. And a lot of people had a lot of opinions about that. And one of the things that people said was, how will she learn if she's not at school, how will she learn to put up with difficult people, how will she learn to cope in the workplace? How will she learn to get up when she doesn't want to get up and go into work when she doesn't want to go into work and do a full day's work? And I thought to myself, why would she need to learn that? Why would she? Why is that what we're preparing our children for? 

Because if that's what you prepare your children for, then that is inevitably the world that you create, because that is the education you're given. Whereas if you give a child an education that is about tapping into their curiosity, that is about them discovering their passions and interests, that is about them taking ownership and responsibility for their own learning, that is about them crafting a way of life that works for them, then that's what they'll look for in their adult life. They will believe that that is possible. 

And I really saw not only it was a very personal decision for me, I'm not suggesting that it would work for everybody. The school system wasn't working for my child. That was the main motive. But I also saw that work is going to change. By the time she is into the throes of her career, it can't look like it looks. So it's certainly not going to look like it looked in the Victorian age, Whereas most people haven't even given it a thought. They're so caught up in that's the way it was for us, that's the way it was going to be, that they don't let go of it. They can't imagine anything else. 

But I think there's something else as well, which is inevitably, and my new book is directed towards Gen X leaders primarily, because we currently run the world. There's still a few boomers in quite senior positions, but we primarily run the world with the millennials snapping at our heels. And we are in pretty safe positions now because we've got 30 plus years of work experience under our belt. We've got less to prove. We could take more risks. We've got a lot in the bank account in terms of credibility and trust and experience and all that. We could take more risks, but we also have our egos tied up in things being the way they are, in being the boss, in being the one that makes the decisions, and being the one with the authority and power. And we also believe that the things we've done have got us here. So why would we change them now? And so there's also a lot, we're a bit trapped by our own success and by our own history. 

And to do anything differently, we'd have to say not that we've been wrong until now, but that we'd have to let go of a lot of that power and authority. We'd have to let go of a lot of that status. We'd have to admit that we don't have all the answers. And there's a lot of our identity caught up in that which makes it difficult to do. 

Siân Harrington (00:12:07)

I was only talking to somebody last week and saying that there's always been a lot of focus, especially when you talk about the generations in the workplace on the baby boomers and then on the sort of the millennials and at the moment, Gen Zed or Gen Z, if you want to call it that. And I've always felt as a Gen X myself, that we're not really discussed very often. So it's interesting that you're focusing on that. And a couple of other things you've just picked up on, I heard that I think are interesting. 

First the idea that school's preparing you to have these difficult conversations, to be able to get to work on time. And yet, if you talk to business leaders, they'll say school isn't really preparing you for that, which is interesting. And then on the other side, the idea of the curiosity, the creativity, those are the skills that we're talking about today that we are going to need in the future. So there's a lot of mismatches here throughout the whole system, I think.

Going back to this treating employees like machines, what does that mean for people's engagement for their overall wellbeing? You talk a bit about the engagement G-spot. I'm dying to find out a bit more about that. What exactly is that? 

Blaire Palmer (00:13:18)

Yeah, it was a bit risky for me to call it the engagement G -spot. But what I mean by that is I've been working in as a leadership coach and consultant for the last 25 years and organizations are still asking me to, what is, they don't put it this way, but they're basically looking for the magic key so that their people will be engaged and then they can just get on with the work. Can you tell us, is there a form of words, like what can we say to people? How can we explain this? What can we offer them? What inducements? What can we put in place so that they will be engaged and therefore they will be productive and efficient and predictable like a machine? And of course, that's not what engagement is. 

If you want people to be engaged, you have to engage with them. And that isn't something you do as a sort of programme of activity and then it's done. That is your life, that is the job is really engaging with the people in your organization so that they engage with you. So that's what it's really all about. When we talk about engagement, it is that sense of, actually, my heart's in this. This is more than just I turn up, I take my pay. I angle for a promotion or a pay rise or some recognition and then I go home. This is, I care about this and I care about it for my own reasons. I care about it because it provides for my family and it's an enabler of the life that is meaningful to me. Or I care about this because I love working with my colleagues. I care about this because I care about the customer or the client. I care about this because I get meaning from doing a job really well and learning and growing and developing. Or I care about this because the mission of the organization aligns with my calling in life. It can be that too. But the reason that it's this.

The G-spot or the reason that there is no G-spot is there is no one thing you can tickle in people, if we put it that way, that then turns them on and then they're turned on and then they say, do whatever you want to me to, I'll do anything for you, just stop tickling me. It isn't that. So that idea is a myth, but it isn't a myth that people can be engaged. 

And the problem is when you don't engage people, because they are human beings, they will look for ways to find something for themselves, some meaning for themselves, whether or not it's what you want them to find meaning in or not. 

For instance, if the only thing that people can influence is their career trajectory, then it'll be that. If the only thing people feel they can influence is more recognition for their team over and above another team in the organization then that's what they will do. They will go lowest common denominator. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that they will go to the lowest level of need, getting met, if that's all that's available. But if more is available, then they will elevate because they're human beings. If there is actually a sense of meaning available from the work, then they'll go for that.  And the salary and the status and all of those things, of course, they remain important. Those are human needs as well, safety and security, but they won't dominate because there's something more valuable available. 

Siân Harrington (00:17:23)

What's interesting there is this concept that you've picked up on, which is that organizations almost think they can do engagement to you. And you're talking about its autonomy of the employee really to decide, I engaged? Are you setting the environment up that makes me engaged? Am I listening, am I hearing, do I know everything that's going on, do I feel that I can give my best? So it's really looking at that individual, isn't it? 

Blaire Palmer (00:17:53)

Yeah. And actually, so I always thought of it as autonomy as well. One of the people that I interviewed for the book was a guy called Diederick Janse, who runs an organization, it's a flat organization, non -hierarchical, so he doesn't really run it. He was one of the founders of an organization called Energized. And the reason I spoke to him is because he started writing about organizational citizenship instead of autonomy. And he said that there was something about autonomy that never quite worked for him. He also was using the term, but that citizenship seemed more appropriate because there's something about citizenship that is about belonging, that is about taking some responsibility.

Autonomy is a little self -cantered. It's the best we have, right? You know, because I've used that word a lot too, and clients use it, and I very often will use it because that's where they are, so that's where I meet them. But the idea of citizenship, we are citizens of our community, for instance, citizens of our country. And by and large, most people don't need the threat of punishment, don't need a high level of in order to be good citizens. Most people will take their shopping trolley back to the place where the shopping trolleys go. Most people will, right? And yet somehow in our organizations, we're not trusted. We're thought to have some kind of agenda that we're only in it for ourselves, that people are fundamentally selfish. People are trying to get away with something. 

This is the other Victorian belief that I lean into in the book. Everyone's trying to get away with something. And so you've got to control them. But we don't in our lives outside, not really, we're good citizens. And so why wouldn't we be good citizens at work as well, given the opportunity? 

Siân Harrington (00:19:51)

Yes, you talk about, as you said, one, we're treated as sort of second rate machines. And secondly, people are just, people think people are trying to get away with something, as you said. There's therefore a real lack of trust there. And how do you see playing out in terms of leadership, what do we need to be doing to break down that barrier and to help this trust to be embedded a bit more in the organisation? Because then it goes both ways. If you're not trusted as an employee, you don't trust your own managers, you don't trust your own leaders. And so then we start beginning to get into quite toxic areas ultimately. 

Blaire Palmer (00:20:29)

Yes. Trust is a big theme in the book. Now, trust doesn't mean I trust you to do the right thing or I trust you to get it right every time. That's too high a level and it's conditional, right? Because as soon as you don't do something right, then I don't trust you or you have to prove yourself to me by doing the right thing. What trust really is about, and this came from, again, an interview that I did for the book with David Marquet, who wrote Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language, a former US nuclear submarine captain. 

His measure of trust is, I trust that you're telling me your truth? And do I trust that you believe you're doing things for the best, that you have good motives? That's all that it means. And that is a level of trust that I think most of us could get our heads around if we could let go of this idea that people are trying to get away with something. Because we don't think we're trying to get away with something. So why would we assume that other people won't? We always think that we have higher motives than other people. So why would it just be true for each of us? Why isn't it true for everybody?  

So I think it's a shift in mindset, but it's to assume that people are a bit like us and that they're trying to do the right thing and that they're telling us their truths. And their truths might be different to our truths, but that's okay. So that's where it starts. But there are so many ways that lack of trust, just reporting structure, the Monday morning meeting where everyone has to update their manager on what they're doing because the manager needs to know everything because people can't be trusted and the sort of slightly disguised command and control. Everyone knows you're not meant to do command and control anymore, but they do it in more subtle ways. They call it coaching, but it isn't really coaching. It's coaxing it. And so then what are you going to do? And then what are you going to do? It's trying to trick people into doing what you want them to do, but think it was their idea. There's a lot of that goes on, a lot of the reporting up the line, the withholding of information, people can't be trusted to handle this complexity of information. So we will distil it down into sort of big themes. We won't allow them to input or to influence. We won't allow them to make decisions themselves. Decisions have got to be passed up. 

There's a brilliant example of this. was working with an organization, parcel delivery organization. And the senior team were wandering around one of their warehouses and in the corner of the warehouse was a pile of packages sitting there. And they asked the person that was giving them a tour, what's that? And the person said, I don't know, it's just a pile of packages. There were things in there that would have been people's birthday presents and there would have been business stuff that people were waiting for in order to deliver for their clients or whatever. 

And so I was working with the board and the board were telling me this and they said, you know, what we need to do is we need to be even more rigorous in terms of process so that that can never happen. That there's no one was responsible for that pile. No one was asking, I wonder what that pile is and what should we do? Let's put more process. And I said, it seems to me that the more process you put in place, the less people think for themselves. How about less process? Because more process doesn't seem to be working, it's still a pile. 

And that is one of the ways that organizations demonstrate they don't trust. They put more and more process to just stop people thinking for themselves. But if people were able to think for themselves, they would look at that, someone would look at that pile and go, I know it's not my job but what is that? Like, anyone want to come over there and see what it is with me? Because everyone was thinking, it's not my job, I've got my process. So that is a perfect example of how lack of trust then leads to the desire for more process and more controls and therefore less trust and less thinking, less citizenship. 

Siân Harrington (00: 24:48)

So you're saying there that obviously process, hierarchy itself is getting in the way here. But we are talking, as you said, at the beginning about 250 years of this type of stuff. And I think quite a lot of people might understand this, can see that this makes a lot of sense, but they're really struggling to be able to actually get rid of what they've got. They're really struggling to take those practical steps. What practical steps have you come across that people can do to try and get a more trusting work environment? 

Blaire Palmer (00:25:26)

I think part of it is about pushing decision making down the organization. So up until now, the leader is the person that makes the decision and information is passed up to the leader so the leader can decide. One of the shifts that I would really love to see is that the leader is no longer the decision maker. That they might have decisions, but those are decisions that sit with them and there are other decisions that they push and that their job actually isn't to receive information and then make a decision, but to share information downward or outward so that others can decide. And then also how can the leader support them in getting better and better at making these sorts of decisions? That does mean the leader's job changes. So they don't become the answers person, they become the questions person, and they become the person who is trying to give away all their expertise all their years of experience to others so that they are empty at the end of that process. There's nothing that they held back. 

Siân Harrington (00:26:32)

Those of us who write about and commentate on work, we did think that thanks to the changes that were foisted upon companies and organizations during the pandemic, that new practices were coming in that leaders had to learn to be a bit more empowering, to be a bit more human centric. And it looked like things were going well and then lo and behold, people start reverting to type again. Are you finding there's some people in organizations that really get this, but it's a struggle to sell it in higher? Are people just still, they talk the talk, but they're just not really ready to deliver on it? What's your overall feeling about the state of play today?

Blaire Palmer (00:27.20)

It's not that I think people should work at home. It's just that I don't think that inevitably means people should work in the office. To me, where people sit isn't really the point. The point is, how do we support people in doing their best work for this organization? And how do we create an environment, and by that I mean a culture, where people can and want to do their best work where they're willing to give their all. And it is certainly not by demanding that people sit at their desks in the office so they can be supervised for three days a week. And then the other two days, it's okay if they're lazy and take their foot off the pedal and they're at home because at least for three days a week we can keep an eye on them. It is still driven by the same Victorian thinking that people can't be trusted. They're trying to get away with something. And so it's very disappointing that business leaders didn't realize, didn't recognize that people were working really hard from home. 

To be honest, they weren't even given the opportunity because people were called into meetings all the time. They were virtual meetings, but they were called into meetings all the time. And so they never really got a chance to demonstrate that they could organize themselves. They could make stuff happen. They could, if they needed to get together with colleagues, they would. If they needed to go and visit clients, they would. So that shift never really happened. And the fact that people were sitting at home doing the work, it just wasn't enough of a mental shift. 

If we go back to my example of home education, one of the things you're supposed to do when you start home educating is you're meant to do a thing called de -schooling, which is they say for every year that your child was at school, a month of no formal learning at all. I thought we could bypass that. Turned out we couldn't. But what ended up happening was firstly, she spent days and days, months in bed watching YouTube. And I was thinking, this is a disaster. Is she just completely not going to do anything? I've made a terrible mistake from really letting her down. But I thought, just trust the process. Trust what people have gone before and told me. 

Then I started to notice that firstly she said I finished YouTube. She got it out of her system, right? She was bored of it. And then she started doing a bit of her own research and she started watching movies about real events. And then I overheard her having a chat with an old school friend who had come to visit about what it must have been like to be an evacuee in the Second World War and she put all of that together and she was speaking really passionately and knowledgeably about being in a evacuee. I don't think that she would have had that same passion if it had been a module in a class at school. She was interested in it because she had put the pieces together and then she had gone and done some of her own research. She had tapped into our innate curiosity. For that to happen, I had to stand way, way back and let go of trying to control her education. 

And that is what leaders need to do. They need to give their people time to abuse the freedom first, which they will do because they've never been given it before. So first of all, they will comply because they'll think, I don't trust this freedom. So they'll work over and above, which is what happened during the pandemic. People almost killed themselves to prove that they were still working. Then they'll realize, hang on a minute, no one is monitoring me. No one, when they say I'm free to use my time as a horn, they lean it. So then they'll abuse it, a lot of them. They will sleep in, they will have long lunches with their mates, they will take their foot off the gas. And then they will start getting genuinely interested again in something, in the work, in serving clients, in something that's not with your company, frankly, that's something else. But they will tap into, because it's human nature, a real sense of wanting to make a contribution and wanting to make a difference and wanting to feel that they are, that they have value. Then you will start to see performance, if we want to use that word, like you've never seen it before. But it's a process and you have to be brave.

There's a company in Brazil, I can't remember their name, but I will think of it, tried this, and the CEO was the son of the former CEO. He took over and he decided to give his employees a lot of freedom. They had been frisked at the door in his dad's day. It was that much control in case they'd stolen equipment or whatever. He decided we're not doing that anymore, and it's embarrassing.

And somebody did steal something. And so he called this guy into his office and he said, what's going on? You don't need to see it. If you want it, take it home with you. When you finished with it, bring it back. And that's what started to happen. Cause when people know that they are genuinely trusted and have to steal stuff anymore, if they want to buy, borrow the company car, they want to use this wrench for something that they've got going on at home, they'll take it home and then they'll bring it back to someone else to use. If they think they can just borrow it again without question. That's what starts to happen, but you've got to be super brave. What brought you to this thinking then? 

Siân Harrington (00:35:15)

Was there anything in your own working life that led to you to think that we need to get rid of these outdated practices and take this more human centric approach?

Blaire Palmer (00:33:27)

Probably quite a few things. I saw that unfortunately a lot of the work that I was doing with clients, with client organizations around change and leadership development, wasn't really working. So they would revert back. As soon as we left they would revert back or they would leave the organization because the organization, they had become more in line but the organization happened. So that was very disappointing. So that's probably part of it.

The home education journey really taught me a lot, not just in terms of seeing it through my daughter's eyes, but the reading I was doing around it and how it was really confronting me with stuff that I did. Because I'm conventionally educated, know, so I really believe these things to be true. 

Probably a little bit of midlife crisis. A few years ago, 2008, had a little bit of a midlife crisis. I was approaching 50 and we sold our house and went traveling for about eight months, me and my daughter and I were two dogs around Europe in a camper. And I came face to face with some uncomfortable stuff about myself and about how I was living and what mattered to me and how I was making my own life more difficult than it needed to be. So probably a bit of a perfect storm .

And then COVID, right? So then that's the sort of COVID and AI, a bit of a perfect storm of, right, now things have got to change because the pandemic was an opportunity that was not really taken advantage of as it could have been. And then AI is going to change things and it could change things in some really bad ways if we don't understand people. And if we don't understand our responsibility towards the health of our society, human wellbeing, we could destroy, think combined with the climate crisis we really could destroy our world if we don't understand the opportunity that AI presents for people to have more meaningful lives as opposed to take this very industrialized idea, which is, a machine can replace people. It's cheaper, more efficient, more predictable. Let's just do that. Not our responsibility, the consequences of that whole community's end game. 

Siân Harrington (00: 35:49)

So to wrap up, in order to get this really radical shift that we need today, leaders need to become ‘punks in suits’. That's the name of your book. So, to end up, tell me what a punk in a suit is and what are the first three steps that leaders can take to become a punk in a suit? 

Blaire Palmer (00:36:10)

Punks in suits is a quote from the film Kick Ass. There's no room for punks in suits, just real heroes who can really kick ass. Of course, what we don't need is a bunch of heroes really kicking ass. We need some punks in suits. 

By which I mean, we are a generation that would have been alive at the time of punk or just about. We wouldn't probably have been punks ourselves, a little bit young, but we might have been influenced by that. We would have been rebels in our teens. We would have been Goths or we'd have been into New Wave or something. And we need to tap back into that. It doesn't mean that we need to turn up at work with a Mohican. But we can be a punk on the inside, right, underneath our metaphorical suit. 

And that is really about being original, being ourselves, being a little counterculture, questioning things, social justice being important to us, all these things were important to punks. And the thing is that's interesting about punk, it's about individuality, but it's also about belonging. So individuality is recognized and therefore you are welcome to belong. I really, that's more of the citizenship idea, I think. That's a punk in a suit. 

And in terms of things to do, the first thing is, I ask the readers or listeners to the audio group to get their minds ahead to the day they hand in their laptop from last time. And to ask themselves if you come face to face with yourself in that moment, how do you feel? And I think that's important because I think if most of us, if we carry on in that trajectory that we're on at the moment, myself included, we'll think we could have been braver. That's one of the reasons that I wrote the book is I was thinking, I think some things, but I don't say them. need to, the person I come face to face with when I retire is going to wish that I had said these things. So, okay, I'm going to say them. So firstly, what will you wish you had been and what will you wish you had said and what will you wish you that stood for. It's a philosophical exercise, but it should result in some actions. 

The second thing to do is to go towards tensions in your organization. So rather than working around problems, actually see if you can get to the heart of them. Not one of the presenting issues like people don't want to come into the office, we have to force them to, presenting issues like we're finding it really hard to recruit, we need to throw more money at people to get them to come here or to stay. We're not presenting issues. Let's try to get to the root of the tension. And if we don't understand what's going on there, let's engage other people in saying, what do you think's going on? So that's the second thing. 

And I think the third thing is this pushing the decision -making away. Anytime you feel like the decision is yours, or even coming up with the ideas to solve a problem is yours, resist. Even when someone is saying, can you just tell me what to do? You don't. You say, yes, I'm able to tell you what I would do, but I'm not going to. You're the one that has to live with a decision. And so you refuse every single day to make decisions or to try to generate the solutions to yourself based on information passed up to you. Instead, you are going to push you another order again. You are never going to make a decision again. You're going to push those decisions down and push the information down so that people can make their decisions themselves. And you're going to sit with the discomfort and you're going to sit with their discomfort when they say, I don't know how to make this decision. Can't you just tell me? No. Because if I tell you, you'll never know how to make this decision. So you might as well learn now. 

Siân Harrington (00:40:10)

That’s a great piece of advice that it's so tempting, particularly when you're under pressure to just go, I'll just do it. it's really hard to not do that, isn't it? So to constantly have that at the forefront and say, no, I can't do it. I think particularly if you're a Gen X, female Gen X, you probably have had that dichotomy in your life of, as you said, growing up quite rebellious, but also thinking that as a woman, your role is to show women can be leaders and to be quite corporate. So I think the punk in a suit idea, I love that because it really resonates with me personally. So I'm sure lots of our listeners will be going, yep, yep. I really can recommend the book for that reason. 

That was Blaire Palmer on the impact of outdated Victorian beliefs on modern work practices. By the way, Blaire and I also discussed how if we truly embraced AI's potential we could free ourselves from mundane tasks and finally focus on ethical questions, deep connections and creative thinking. It's a vision of a more human -centric future that we should all strive towards. If you want to find out more, check out our website www.thepeoplespace .com. And if you're looking to drive real change in your organisation, I recommend Blaire’s Punks in Suits. Details are in the show notes. 

In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on LinkedIn at Sian Harrington, The People Space. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard and you've been listening to Work’s Not Working… Let's fix it. Goodbye.