Business as usual is not usual

Business as usual hasn’t gone anywhere.

The targets still need hitting. Customers still need serving. Teams still need leading. Decisions still need making. The board paper still needs writing. The 'Can I just grab you for five minutes' never end.

Except now, for many people, all of that is happening alongside transformation.

New operating models. The ongoing ever evolving leadership in the age of AI. Restructures. Uncertainity. Cost pressure. Technology implementation. Changing customer expectations. New responsibilities appearing while somebody works out what the future structure is going to look like.

We talk a lot about the pace of change. It's a consistent theme in every conversation I sit in from facilitation to coaching conversations to the brilliant interviews I have been doing for the research of my Navigating Change in the Modern Workplace report. Recent conversations have been achored in what happens when all that change lands inside an existing role. Because as we all know the old work doesn’t disappear when the new work arrives; there's no clean slate and an opportunity to shift schedules and priorities.

Sometimes (almost always) it layers and that is where role overload becomes not simply a useful organisational lens but an intrinsic consideration in the modern world of work - the version that is constantly changing, always updating, consistently navigating another tsunami of uncertainty.

A transformation programme needs someone who genuinely understands how the business works, so an experienced leader joins the project alongside her day job.

Someone leaves and she holds part of their remit while recruitment or restructuring happens. A new process is introduced, except the old process still has to run for another six months. Her team is navigating uncertainty, so there is more communication, more reassurance, more sense-making and inevitably more of the conversations that never make it onto a project plan.

Then another strategically sensible piece of work arrives. None of these decisions have to be ridiculous. They layer.

Five individually sensible decisions can create one increasingly overloaded role and experienced people are often extremely good at making it work.

They carry organisational memory. They know the relationships and dependencies. They know who needs bringing into the conversation before a decision creates three problems somewhere else. They know which meeting can go, which issue actually matters and who will answer the phone when something needs sorting quickly.

That experience is hugely valuable during change. It can also make increasing load surprisingly difficult to see. The human compensates. The work keeps moving. Business as usual continues. Transformation continues. And because performance hasn’t fallen off a cliff, everyone carries on.

For many experienced women there can be another layer within this. Being dependable has often served them well. They’ve become the person who joins things up, sees what other people miss, knows the history, holds relationships together and steps into the gap when something needs sorting.

There is skill in that. There can be identity in it too.

So role overload isn’t a simple story about organisations piling work onto unsuspecting people. Humans actively participate in these patterns as well - although maybe not always consciously. The competence tax; the very behaviours and resources, that made somebody valuable can also become part of the mechanism exhausting them

We step in because we can help. We hold onto something because we can do it faster. We become the organisational shortcut because, over years, it has worked for us and for everyone around us. Until the load changes enough that the scaffolding supporting it no longer fits.

And that human scaffolding system is where we need the lens. That is where I think there is more to be done.

·       When we are planning what the organisation needs people to start doing, how much attention are we giving to what they can stop? How they can stop?

·       Where has temporary responsibility quietly become business as usual?

·       Where are experienced people carrying transformation work alongside roles that haven’t materially reduced?

·       Where has knowledge, decision-making or relationship capital become concentrated around a very small number of people?

·       Where are senior people spending large amounts of time doing work that no longer requires their level of judgement?

And are the resources around them changing as quickly as the demands upon them?

These questions matter for wellbeing, of course. They also matter for productivity, succession, leadership development and retention.

There is a pipeline question sitting in here too. We spend a lot of time asking how we encourage experienced women to progress into more senior roles.

It is worth looking at what those women can see. If senior leadership appears to mean carrying business as usual, transformation, team uncertainty and years of accumulated responsibility at the same time, deciding you don’t particularly fancy the next job may be an intelligent response to the environment in front of you.

That doesn’t mean organisations are getting everything wrong. The environment we are all working in has changed enormously.

Most businesses I know are navigating transformation while, of course, operating business as usual. To innovate while delivering. To reduce cost while increasing performance. To prepare for what comes next while dealing with what turned up this morning.

There may never be a lovely neat point where everybody finishes the change programme, exhales and returns to normal - those change curves of old do not resonate in the business of today.

This means we need different ways of looking at the humans navigating it. This is exactly where my work around Human Scaffolding sits.

If the environment changes, the scaffolding around the human needs to be inspected too.

Their resources. Their relationships. The behaviours that appear under pressure. The principles guiding their decisions. The identity wrapped around being capable and dependable. The work they are actually there to do and whether they still have enough space to do it well.

Load travels across all of it.

So when someone says, “I’ve got too much on my plate,” there may be more useful places to go than straight into another conversation about prioritisation or resilience. Or if they're not saying it, how can it be noticed?

We can get curious; perhaps noticing and observing are two of the most powerful techniques in business operations that we are skimming over; considering:

·       What are you carrying now?

·       What has accumulated through change?

·       What still genuinely needs to sit with you?

·       What could be delegated, redesigned, automated, stopped or supported differently?

·       What is the meaningful work and where are the guardrails?

And what scaffolding would help you do the work that matters most now?

As organisations keep navigating uncertainty and transformation, I suspect those questions are going to become increasingly important.

The challenge isn’t simply helping people keep up with change.

It is making sure the humans carrying both today’s business and tomorrow’s transformation have a structure around them that can carry the load too.

We have become very sophisticated at managing transformation programmes. We are considerably less sophisticated at tracking what repeated transformation is doing to the load carried by the humans delivering them.