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3Breaking the Workforce Copy Machine: Switching Off the Past, Switching on the Future

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.”

—Historian Ronald Wright, quoting a graffiti slogan

Sigmund Freud famously wrote that left to our own devices, human beings will repeat the past—especially the traumatic past—over and over.

As we discussed in the last chapter, organizations have a bit of the same problem—a “Workforce Copy Machine” that quietly, impersonally fights attempts to change and keeps those companies stuck in the same behaviors…over and over and over.

With full credit to our CEO, Martine Ferland, who always challenges us to “break the machine” and get Mercer to work better, this chapter takes on the challenge of breaking the Workforce Copy Machine. How do we—at organization and team level—disrupt the forces that unintentionally keep us stuck? How can we create alternate pathways to a future that actually looks different—one that's truly discontinuous from the bad patterns of the past?

In this chapter, we'll first examine how we got into this rut—the strangely dark history of managing people within organizations. We'll then examine a pathway to intentional work, addressing the four trouble spots we talked about in the prior chapter (conflation of jobs and pay, talent acquisition set up to produce “clones,” imbalance of complexity in people versus organizational systems, and leadership being rewarded for sameness). Much as better leadership as individuals often ...