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Happy Thanksgiving week!
I’m so grateful you’re here. After a year of writing and all your support, I’ve started hosting Substack Lives because I love showcasing leaders with valuable insights (and I love to gab). You can find all past ones here.
SAVE THE DATE: Monday, December 1st at 11am ET I’ll be with Dan Van Tran, the CTO of Collectors. We’ll be talking about the Reality of Being a CTO in 2025. (Join here)
Now, let’s get into this week’s post:
Your Cheatsheet
Most workplace dysfunction isn’t a people problem—it’s a system problem.
In this conversation with Paul Sweeney, author of Sense Labs and Magnetic Nonsense, we explore why organizations keep using the same broken approaches (heroic leadership, rigid performance management, detailed transformation plans) and what leaders can actually do differently.
Spoiler: The answer involves more experimentation, less certainty theater, and a serious look at how power concentrations are literally killing productivity (and possibly employees).
The Kid Who Saw Dead Ideas Everywhere
Paul Sweeney has had what he calls “a very random career”—from lost baggage handler at an airline to Chief Strategy Officer at one of the UK’s largest companies, with consulting stops in between. But somewhere along the way, he became like the kid in The Sixth Sense, except instead of seeing dead people, he kept seeing the same dead ideas everywhere.
“I just kept seeing the same dead ideas everywhere. I became really curious about why every large company seemed to be the same and to do things that clearly at the macro level were not really working.”
His book, Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make It Go Away, dives into why we keep perpetuating practices that don’t work, and more importantly, what we might do instead.
I invited him to join me on a Substack Live because I loved how he was challenging norms that most leaders in business take for granted. It was a fun conversation filled with insights that leaders can put into practice now.
Why We Love Simple (and Wrong) Answers
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: we’re biologically wired for nonsense.
Paul explains that beyond the fight-or-flight response, we have three other evolutionary hangovers:
“a deep aversion to uncertainty,”
“a deep need for sense-making,” and
susceptibility to “simplistic versions of the truth that sound plausible.”
This is why frameworks like Simon Sinek’s three circles get 65 million views on TED. We desperately want to believe that three words can explain all business success, even when the evidence says otherwise.
The problem? Real business success is messy and nonlinear.
As advertising icon Rory Sutherland puts it:
“90% of success in business is messy.
It’s nonlinear. Some of it’s accidental.
But 90% of the effort in business is about pretending that’s not true.”
The Illusion of Control (or Why Your 18-Month Plan Is Fiction)
Let’s talk about transformation programs. You know the ones: detailed milestones, precise targets, Gantt charts that would make a project manager weep with joy.
Paul offers a better metaphor: “Hundreds of years ago, when sailing ships had no engines, captains departing from England never used to say ‘we’re going to arrive in New York.’ They used to say ‘we’re setting off in the direction of New York.’ Because they knew that along the way, all kinds of things could happen that they couldn’t control.”
The alternative? Emergent transformation:
A process of change that arises from the spontaneous, unplanned actions and interactions of a system’s components over time, rather than from a top-down, pre-planned strategy.
Complexity theory suggests that in complex situations, “you have no idea what the cause and effect of your interventions is going to be in advance.” Instead, “try multiple smaller interventions and actually see what works, dial up the stuff that’s working, dial down the stuff that isn’t working.”
Yes, this means you can’t pretend you’re certain about outcomes. But as Paul asks: wouldn’t that actually be liberating?
The Practical Challenge: Navigating Investors and Employees
Of course, two audiences struggle with this uncertainty: your board and your employees.
Paul’s advice is refreshingly direct—have the honest conversation: “Which version of this would you like? The false solution of certainty or the experimental approach, which I think will get us to where we’re going to go. But, you know, I can’t be overly precise on it.”
And here’s a provocative suggestion: “Be a bit more like a pirate. Just go a bit rogue. And then if it goes well, pop up and go, okay, this is what we’re doing. It’s going really well. We’re going to keep going now.”
Make the narrative smaller at the start. Save the big campaign for after you’ve got evidence it’s working.
The 40% Problem: Bullshit Jobs
Here’s a statistic that should terrify every CEO: In surveys of hundreds of thousands of management and white-collar workers asking “is your job entirely pointless and adds no value to the world?” 40% said yes.
Paul calls these “bullshit jobs,” borrowing from the late David Graeber’s work. And last week, Gallup reported that 45% of people feel no sense of purpose at work. Gallup blamed it on employee engagement, but Paul thinks “that’s all backwards. I think that’s because they had pointless jobs. Of course, they’re not going to feel a sense of purpose at work if you realize your job is useless.”
The Industries of Nonsense
Some of the biggest culprits? The very functions designed to help:
Wellbeing interventions: Research from Oxford University’s wellbeing centre shows that “things like mindfulness training, mental first aiders, duvet days” are “a complete waste of money.”
Values: Complete waste of time (often just words at best, confusion at worst)
Culture change initiatives: No evidence they make any difference to company performance
Employee engagement: The causation is backwards—successful companies are more engaging, not the other way around
There will be “$100 billion spent on” pointless wellbeing interventions “this year. And nobody’s looking at the research.”
The Power Problem (Or: How Good People Become A**holes)
Now we get to the really uncomfortable part.
Paul warns he’s about to use a “rude word,” but it’s necessary: “If you give people a lot of power, like the CEO of a big organization, what the research shows is that even if you were pretty well adjusted earlier in your career, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll become a bit of an asshole, even though you didn’t want to.”
It’s not their fault—it’s the system.
CEOs become increasingly detached from reality. They spend 70-80% of their time in meetings, less than 10% with customers and actual workers.
Over time, they start thinking they’re smarter than everyone else, make decisions that favor themselves, and are more likely to condone unethical behavior.
The Bottom and Middle of the Hierarchy Are No Better
At the bottom: If you take power away from people and subject them to job insecurity, “it’s very detrimental to creativity, to innovation. But also, there’s some research that suggests if you subject them to prolonged periods of low autonomy and high insecurity, it’s more predictive of early deaths than smoking.”
Let that sink in. Your organizational design might be killing people.
As Paul notes, “this stuff never appears on the corporate risk register. The fact that you’re killing your employees, potentially.”
In the middle layers? People “spend most of their time self-promoting and playing politics, and then taking out the fact that they don’t have that much power, taking it out on the people below them.”
It’s The Office in real life.
A Different Model: Buurtzorg
The most fascinating example Paul shared is Buurtzorg, the Dutch nursing organization. The founder was fed up with efficiency consultants giving him a handheld device that said: “Go to this [senior’s] house. You have two minutes to change her bandage, and then you have to get back in your car and go to your next appointment.”
His insight? “What we need to do with that [senior] is maybe I need to call her children to come visit her. Maybe I need to get the neighbors to take her shopping. Maybe I need to make sure she gets to go to her bingo club on a Wednesday night. It’s much more than changing a bandage.”
So he created something radical:
1,000 self-organizing teams of nurses
No middle management in an organization of 10,000 people
35 people in the head office doing finance and legal
20 coaches who help teams resolve conflict but don’t manage people
One strategy: “I don’t have a strategy. My strategy is to give the best care we can to the patients. That’s all I care about.”
Could this work everywhere? Probably not. Paul notes that “a lot of people in that nursing community, they just want to be nurses. They don’t want to climb a career ladder and go into management and leadership.”
But there are lessons here about trusting practitioners to practice, rather than managing them into oblivion.
The Performance Management Problem (Spoiler: It Doesn’t Work)
Here’s something that should make every HR professional uncomfortable: performance management “doesn’t improve performance,” but “there’s a lot of evidence that it annoys people.”
Paul spent three years as Chief Strategy Officer and never had a performance review. He and the CEO “just used to catch up every Friday and chat about the week. The idea of doing a performance review would have been really odd.”
A Better Model: Peer-Based Performance
Organizations like Buurtzorg use a radically different approach.
Teams ask themselves two questions periodically:
On a scale of one to five, how good have I been at keeping my commitments to the team?
How good have I been at taking the purpose of the team forward?
You rate yourself, the team rates you, then you compare.
This approach “fixes the tendency of women to underrate their own performance because they get a boost when the team often rates them higher. And the other way around for men who tend to overinflate their performance.”
The kicker? “If there’s a huge difference between your view of yourself and the team’s view, often people leave at that point without being managed out because they realize that there’s kind of overwhelming evidence that it’s not going well.”
What About Bonuses and Compensation?
Paul worked at a consulting firm where the director made a brilliant move: “All of you are going to get, as your bonus, 2% of the company’s net profits. That’s it. Same for everybody in the team. And now let’s all work together to grow this company.”
They doubled the size of the company in three years.
Why did it work? The director “was smart enough to recognize that serendipity actually plays a big role. You might just be in the place at the right time. Someone you knew got a new job and called you in. I mean, it wasn’t really your fault.”
And critically, “if you don’t have to worry about the bonus stuff, you’re actually paying more attention to doing a good job, I think, than just getting on with it.”
The AI Threat You’re Not Thinking About
We’re all worried about AI taking our jobs. Paul has a different concern: “AI might not be coming for your job, but it is coming for your brain. And it is coming for your independence of thought.”
He has a friend who won’t send an email without asking ChatGPT what to write. And here’s the problem: “If you ask ChatGPT how to run an organization, it’ll just turn out the same stuff that we’ve been complaining about. It goes to the mean, which is the status quo.”
You won’t get critical thinking from a model based on regurgitating the past.
So What Do We Actually Do?
If you’re a leader reading this and thinking, “Okay, but what can I actually do?”, Paul has a starting point:
Start with “doing some critical thinking training for their team, their immediate team.” In Ireland, citizen panels now spend “two or three days teaching them to think critically and how to deal with conflict constructively. And it’s been massively transformational to the outcome of these panels.”
Then: “Get the team away from work for a day or two and do some really good critical thinking training and then challenge the team to pick one thing and try and test a different way to do it.”
For bigger organizations: “Why not take a really small part of this really big company and test something different? … It could be one store, one city, one building, one factory.”
And Paul’s broader challenge to CEOs: “Didn’t you ever get curious as to why the evolution of thinking about organizations seems to have stopped in somewhere around 1965? The way that we structure organizations, the way we think about leadership, the assumptions we make about how to run a company, they haven’t changed since the 60s.”
His pitch: “Now that you’re in this position of power, come on, do something interesting. You just want to be like a dull CEO like everybody else. Come on, let’s go and do something fun. It’s not going to cost much, and we might learn something.”
Your Turn
Here’s my challenge to you: Pick one idea from this conversation and do some research.
Maybe it’s:
Testing peer-based performance reviews with one team
Running an experiment with emergent vs. planned transformation
Examining your bonus structure for unintended consequences
Investing in critical thinking training instead of another wellbeing initiative
Canceling or cutting 50% of your meeting time
Have a discussion with your leadership team. See if you want to experiment. Because here’s the thing: as Paul says, “the dysfunction at work” is “generally not the people. It is the system. It’s the structures.”
The architecture goes back to religious and military organizations. It’s held in place by leadership education, governance, regulation, and investor expectations. But “the only way [to change] is for enough organizations to be brave enough to try something different, which is probably easier when you’re not a listed company with all the obligations that comes with that.”
You have more power to change this than you think. Especially if you act collectively.
Learn More from Paul
Want to go deeper into Paul’s work? You can find him at:
Substack: Sense Labs
Book: Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make It Go Away (Available on Amazon)
Website: senselabs.co
LinkedIn: Search for Paul Sweeney (where he’s “annoying lots of people” with his AI bullshit detector GPT that evaluates management consulting reports)
Join Me for another Substack Live
Download the Substack app to join me:
December 1st at 11am ET: “The Reality of Being a Tech Leader in 2025” with Dan Van Tran of Collectors. (Link to Join)
This is a live, interactive conversations where you can ask questions and engage in real-time. Hope to see you there!
Work With Me in 2026
I’m currently booked through the end of the year, but I’m opening up 5 coaching spots for the new year. If you’re a senior leader looking to up-level your leadership, career, and mindset—and you’re ready to challenge some of the nonsense we talked about today—schedule time with me to see if there’s a fit.
Let’s make 2025 the year we take the dysfunction out of work.
May you lead without limits,
