Every organisation has maintenance work. Systems need care, controls matter and routine has its place. The problem begins when maintenance becomes the centre of a capable person’s job.
Too many talented people spend their days moving information from one place to another, preparing updates that lead nowhere or working around tools that nobody has taken responsibility for improving. It creates a strange kind of fatigue: people are busy, but they are not building anything they can take pride in.
Purpose is not supplied by a poster on a wall. It grows when people can see the value of their work, practise a skill and make a meaningful contribution. That requires leaders to protect time for thinking, simplify the machinery around the work and treat craft as something worth developing.
Technology can help. A well-designed process, a useful data product or a sensible automation can remove a great deal of low-value coordination. But the purpose is not automation for its own sake. It is to make space for the human work that remains.
Good organisations make it possible for people to move from merely keeping things running to making things better.
Written by Kannan Palanisamy