Recently I have been reading yet again about an esoteric subject-this time about how boxers deal with pain.

I was driven to this subject by my grandson who is very, very good at judo. Recently, he had to get his mouth stitched. Faced with my questioning and worry, he told me that his training includes coping with pain, and to an extent, even enjoying it because “judo is also about enduring pain, and even reaching a stage where it does not bother you all that much”.

I went on to read quite a bit about the brutal Thrilla in Manilla, as well as as what it feels like taking punches from the hardest of hitters (Tyson, Foreman, Marciano). I also read what it feels like during the month after you have been knocked out.

These were great reads, because of both the pride and “working through” that boxers experience as they absorb the punishment that they take with such grace and acceptance.

Of course, enduring pain should not become an ideology. I suffer from chronic back pain (my height and genetics) and I do not like it when told that I need to embrace pain instead of taking a Aleve.

While enduring pain is not an ideology, it sure is a necessity especially in organizations; unfortunately, OD does not give pain appropriate focus.

There are imho several reasons for our professions’ misguided attempts to mitigate pain:

• There are built in conflicts between individual and the organizational needs that cannot be resolved. We are often hired to make that inevitable pain disappear.
• Mutual dependencies in organizations are often unfulfilled, and are unfulfilled by design. (build fast and build cheap). We are often hired to pretend that teamwork is a cure for unfullfilled dependencies.
• Technology enables people to communicate far faster than they can act, causing massive overload and burn out. OD has a whole tool kit to “apparently” improve communication, which often does not address the source of the pain-we cannot deal with so much information coming our way so fast.

And that is just the beginning of the list.

Attempts to mitigate the pain, also called wellness, engagement or some other fancy fad, try to plaster over the pain, deny it, and can worsen it. As a result, some OD interventions (stress management) are seen as bullshit, or a derivative thereof.

Pain has a function. Feel it, roll with the punches, and don’t make it go away.

It’s there for a reason. Look the reason with honesty and see what can be done. Don’t try to fool people with snake oil.

Working from home is waning quickly  & the “future of work” prognosis about the office-less organization are dissipating.

Attesting to this, grotesque traffic jams have returned. One of my commutes takes me 2-3 hours each direction for a 70 km commute twice a week! And that is the easier commute.

Why have people returned to work? I will attempt to provide my understanding of this nasty development in this short post.

Every organization has what I call a “purely political dimension”, that is a limited domain in which power is unequally distributed. Some people have positions of power and tell others what do. Other people do what they are told. Power has visible manifestations and symbols. These symbols of power and position create a clear pecking order, even if subtle. For example office size, parking slots, who has a conference room, brand of laptop. These symbols of power are emphasized by various titles, charts, work flow and ceremonies.

The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman discusses the term “status degradation ceremony” in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The status degradation ceremony  transforms  the identity or status of an individual into an identity/status lower down an organization’s hierarchy. In other words, it is a political (power related) tool that stratifies an organization. The status degredation ceremony is best played out “in situ”, on site, and not on Zoom or Teams because the degredation ceremony has many visual components.

Let me digress a moment and discuss the almost religious hype created around remote work-which made it into an ideology instead of a tragedy.

Media and especially social media create illusions that sometimes exist in parallel to reality (every country needs to do its part in climate control*; soon we will all be driving electric cars) and sometimes create a false reality (Zalensky is a hero, and not an idiot**).

Working for home became a serious topic of academic research on one hand. Unfortunately, it also became a hot topic on social media, which created the illusion that working from home is the future of work-peace in our time. Social media tends to ignore unpleasant truths. We all have bad breath in the morning;we all fart from time to time and politics is far more dominant in determining the future of work than Rob or Rachel from Twitter think.

So yes, social media created a positive hype about working from home, making it into the “new tomorrow”. Nonsense.  A false prophet. A Zalensky, if you were, hailed by social media as his country goes to shit.

Management may not have  lost control during the pandemic, but they certainly did lose the feeling of control, and lost some of the little “status degredation ceremonies” at their disposal. This loss of power was unbearable, as most people do not give away power easily.

And thus, as the pandemic crawls to an end for the time being, people are forced back to work where they will sit opposite their computers, attend a few meetings, and be at the beck and call of management who will assert their superiority from time to time via various degredation ceremonies. 

*Some countries need to do a lot about climate control; others’ contributions are meaningless.

**If you live next to a bear, don’t poke him in the ribs.