It’s generally known that our intellectual and emotional equipment was made for the stone age, not for today’s complex world. Increasingly the same has to be said about many management methods, too, including the reflexes that are triggered in times of crisis, as reliably as when you hit against the patella tendon with a hammer. Unfortunately, it reads like a guide to organisational suicide:
The thing with the knee is a so-called monosynaptic reflex: it involves only one single synapse. Simple, coercive, reliable, and it doesn’t care about anything else, for example about the possibility that it might actually not make sense to bounce your leg right now...in a business context, this is fatal. Let me put it this way: monosynaptic management is not the tool of choice.
Delayed effects in complex fields can cause organizations with the wrong reflexes to build themselves up into a rollercoaster ride like a badly adjusted thermostat that keeps overshooting. Around companies that oscillate in such a manic-depressive manner, a whole range of specialised accompanying industries have formed: burnout clinics, outplacement companies, recruiting providers, communication agencies, internal counsellors, temporary employment agencies, etc.
They all have a perfect right to exist; it’s just that they could be used in a different way. Smarter. More preventative. More proactive.
Monosynaptic management will become extinct, voluntarily or involuntarily, and rather sooner than later. So, we need to move to more contemporary and far-sighted forms of corporate management.
My recommendation: Think about the upswing and invest in it. It'll pay off.