Dennis Deery

Thanks to the COVID outbreak of 2020, companies around the world accelerated the shift of allowing or encouraging office workers to do more of their work from home or other remote locations. While this has led some companies to adapt their cultures, I’ve been very surprised that one major cultural shift doesn’t seem to have taken root widely: the majority of companies still seem to have a meeting-first culture rather than a written-first culture.

Since the creation of the modern company, we have become used to identifying workers as individual contributors or as managers of people. Individual contributors needed only follow the orders of a leader, who would ensure that all workers contributed to the same, hopefully effective, goal. While factories tried to deconstruct work activities into simple, easily-repeatable tasks that left no room for individual variations and ideas. It’s fair to say that many managers have tried to accomplish the same breakdown in office work, asking individual contributors to simply do their tasks and not be overly involved in thinking about the overall goal.

Change is constant – we all deal with it, we all complain about it. We all do it. In a 2008 study titled “The Enterprise of the Future”, IBM surveyed over 1,000 CEOs around the world. 83% of those surveyed said they expect their organization to undergo substantial change. **But only 61% of those executives believe they have managed change successfully in the past. ** Why the disconnect? If change is so constant, why are we so bad at it?