How Can It Be Fun Again?

How could we build organizations in such a way that people love working with us, enjoy buying our products and services, enjoy collaborating with us, like talking about us, and celebrate our success?

Thinking about how to design ways of working and organizations is intellectually demanding and interesting. And yet, over the past few decades, the topic has developed a slightly unpleasant aftertaste in tech, and some people — including me — have become a little annoyed by it. Why is that? And how could it become fun again?

These are the criteria that, for me personally, need to be met for the whole thing to be fun.

1. Banal life lessons or calendar slogans must not become the program. It is truly unbearable. Nobody wants to hear them anymore, and they simplify reality in the wrong places. They are immature, childish, far removed from technological complexity, far removed from market reality, far removed from how people behave within systems, and they do not help anyone.

2. For me personally, it is an absolute requirement that only people who understand technology have a say. I believe technology has long since become part of general knowledge. Bragging about not being a techie is now something I even find embarrassing, because it amounts to saying that you have not understood how the world works for decades. Platforms shape both our private and professional lives. When people understand how technology works and how it is built, they can develop ways of working and organizational forms that engineers genuinely value.

3. The same applies in the other direction. It is much more enjoyable when engineers understand the business, market reality, and customers, because they then work much better with their business colleagues. They also find much more meaning in their work.

4. Every industry, company size, market reality, workflow, and process must be considered individually. There can be no single blueprint for everything; that simplifies matters in the wrong places. It ignores complexity where it exists and creates complexity where none is needed. That is why it is important to look closely. What is this actually about? Which way of working fits this situation? Then comes the decision: how do we orchestrate it across the entire company so that people can still understand one another?

5. It only becomes truly enjoyable when people understand their craft; otherwise, they are merely muddling through. You need to know a repertoire of methods and to have applied them. For me personally, it is completely unacceptable to show up with only one or two half-baked ideas. The way people collaborate is itself a kind of technology. To work professionally, you need to have encountered, applied, tested, and reflected on many different methods throughout your career. That brings me to the next requirement for fun.

6. In my view, anyone who has never applied anything like this in their career cannot have a meaningful say in how ways of working and the organization should be designed. This means that leaders who moved straight from university into senior leadership positions and have never worked as part of a team should either stay out of the details or find a way to gain that experience. The divides that sometimes exist between engineers and senior management are absolute fun killers.

7. The same applies in the other direction. In my view, all engineers who do not seek or have not sought a leadership or management role must be willing to take on more responsibility. If the leader alone is responsible for everything while an engineer settles comfortably into their own corner without considering or sharing responsibility for the bigger picture, we will not make progress and the divides will remain.

Imagine a group of people

• who understand technology and how it is built,
• who understand their own business, market, and customers,
• who know what real teamwork means,
• who are prepared to take on more responsibility than usual,
• who have a broad repertoire of methods from which to choose,
• who select the appropriate way of working and organizational form for each situation,
• and who do so without using banal calendar slogans.

Would you like to be part of that?

I would!