Corporate Analgesia: How Your Org Chart is Actively Harming You

Contrary to fiction, numbness is not a superpower. Unless your org is checking for injury, it will only suffer more. I describe how aligning responsibility w/ authority allows injury to be felt & treated, & how faster feedback cycles & local decision making brings greater velocity and satisfaction.

Contrary to what our popular fiction will tell you, a lack of sensation is not a superpower. People afflicted with congenital analgesia have move carefully through their world, frequently checking themselves for injuries they don’t feel from becoming infected and festering.

By default, most organizations are structured around job role. This inherently isolates all pain to very specific nodes of it’s org chart, often inoculating itself from feeling the feedback by ignoring it. Unless your organization is specifically checking itself to make sure that injury and pain are known about and treated, it will never get better. Only more injury and infection will come.

In this talk, I demonstrate how this pathology manifests. Then, I will describe how aligning responsibility with authority allows injury to be felt, but treated while it is still shallow. Finally, I will show how faster feedback cycles and allowing decisions to be made locally allows for greater velocity and satisfaction.

Only requirements would be HDMI or USB-C connections for laptop needed, as well as confidence monitor.

Alternate Title: “Comfortably Numb: How Corporate Analgesia is Actively Harming You”