Since the Industrial Revolution, our work life has been dominated by personal aspiration and power. Bureaucracy as organizational design has become so entrenched that few people see other options. We believe that autocratic command and control is necessary, even in industries like IT that rely heavily on perpetual design and collaboration skills.

The way we organize ourselves at work has far-reaching consequences for our society. What happens at work cannot be contained behind office doors, it influences our entire social field. Work has become such an essential part of our lives that it is part of what makes us. Work produces people.

In this talk, we will explore how maladaptive the industrial-era bureaucracy is for work today. We will see that a participative organisation, consisting of self-managing teams, is the only organisational structure proven to enable learning, collaboration, empowerment, trust, and belonging. A jointly-optimised socio-technical system is true democracy of work.

This talk will build on research done in the social sciences, especially as part of the development of the Open Systems Theory framework for organisational development. This will be contextualised for IT, focusing on collaborative design and explaining why some methods work while others don't.