Neoliberal org design and how to fight it
The other day I discovered a harrowing fact about the Magdalen laundries. The monuments to institutional cruelty that have scarred Ireland well into living memory. These same laundries have sat with me ever since reading Claire Keegan’s wonderful portrait of one in Small Things Like These.
At some point in the early formation of the laundries, someone made a decision. Perhaps an architect, a priest, a committee. Someone sat down and designed the laundry buildings with intent. They connected laundries to church prayer quarters by underground tunnels. Tunnels which meant that children, stolen from their mothers and confined away from them, would travel to mass directly beneath them. Two worlds, vertically separated. Mothers and children existing in the same building, close enough to sense each other's presence, but deliberately kept apart.
This wasn't accidental. This was designed. Someone drew those plans. Someone approved them. Someone built them. And an entire organisation – the church, the state, the society that surrounded it – supported this complicitly. Not through active cruelty alone, but through systems and processes and hierarchies that made such decisions possible. That made them normal.
How do we let decisions of this nature be made?
I thought about this whilst sat in an all-hands meeting recently. A few slides into a business update when a new organisational shift was unveiled. Streamlining the business. Leadership tiers “rationalised”. More "accountability." Not once mentioning the people we actually serve. Not once asking if we were creating real value, or for whom, or why. Just efficiency. Just optimisation. Just the grinding logic of doing more with less, forever and ever, amen. And everyone nodded along. Everyone always nods along.
Now, I'm not suggesting reorganisation, realignment and redundancy are anywhere near equivalent to the Magdalen laundries. That would be nuts. But I am saying this: organisations are designed. Decisions are made with intent. Systems are built that determine who has power and who doesn't, what counts as valuable and what doesn't, who matters and who can be discounted. And when we don't interrogate those designs, when we accept "that's just how things work”, we become complicit in whatever those systems produce.
As I outlined before, we know the Magdalen laundries didn't happen because a few people were evil. They happened because an entire system was designed to enable evil, and enough people looked away. Enough people said "it's not my decision." Enough people followed the process.
This is neoliberal organisation design. And whilst its cruelties are more banal, the logic is the same. Systems that treat people as resources to be optimised, rather than humans to be served. And we're all swimming in it.
The ghost in the machine
I’m arguing here neoliberalism isn't just economic policy dreamt up by Friedman and ruthlessly executed by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan. It's a philosophy that's seeped into the DNA of how we organise everything. It tells us that free markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources. That competition breeds excellence and innovation. That organisations should operate like businesses, and businesses should operate like machines.
The language gives it away. We talk about ‘human capital’ and ‘talent pipelines’ and ‘resource allocation’. People as interchangeable units. Optimisable. Scalable. Disposable.
We also know this ideology infiltrated management theory through McKinsey and pals and the MBA programmes that churn out a new generation of true believers every year. It's why every organisation now wants to be ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ and ‘disruptive’ – because these words speak to the neoliberal assumptions about what matters. Speed over depth. Efficiency over effectiveness. Shareholder value over literally everything else.
The symptoms
I see it everywhere in my work. Short term contracts breeding short term thinking. Consultancies as permanent fixtures because we've gutted internal capability in the name of ‘flexibility’. Governance meetings that exist to manage risk rather than enable accountability. Metrics that measure activity instead of impact. I see organisations restructure every eighteen months, erasing institutional memory in pursuit of the next best practice. I watch talented people reduced to billing targets. I see ‘outcomes over outputs’ weaponised to justify redundancies, whilst the outcomes themselves are defined so narrowly they might as well be outputs anyway. And the worst bit? Smart people reproduce these systems because they offer certainty in uncertain times. A framework. A methodology. A deck. We call it progress. We call it transformation. But mostly it's just rearranging the deck chairs, hoping no one notices the water rising.
What gets lost
When everything must be streamlined and scalable, we lose the things that actually make organisations work. The institutional memory that helps us avoid repeating mistakes. The craft and mastery that comes from doing something long enough to be truly good at it. To become a true ‘shokunin’. The care and relationship work that's invisible until it's gone. We lose the capacity for depth when we're optimised for distance. We lose the ability to build the lasting infrastructure of culture and capability, when we're incentivised to produce as quickly as possible and move on to the next contract. Most of all, we lose sight of what organisations are actually for. They're not machines. They're not assets to be optimised. They're collections of people trying to create value for other people. When we forget that, we've already lost.
How to fight it
Fighting this isn't easy, because the incentives all push the other way. But it starts with naming it. Calling it out when ‘streamlining’ means redundancies. Asking ‘valuable for who?’ when someone mentions value. Choosing depth over distance, even when it's commercially punished.
It means protecting continuity and memory. Building governance that enables rather than constrains. Measuring what actually matters, not just what's easy to measure. My good friend and longtime co-conspirator Scotty has written all about this at length from their time in Mexico. It means writing things down. Staying around long enough to see the consequences of our decisions. It means remembering that the rules are made up. That organisations don't have to be like this. That there are alternative models; cooperatives, purpose-driven organisations, and genuine partnerships that prove different ways are possible.
The stakes are too high to keep pretending this is fine. Because it's not about efficiency. It never was. It's about power. About who decides what counts as valuable work, and who benefits when organisations are designed to extract rather than create.
So like me, the next time you're in an all-hands and someone unveils the new org chart, remember to ask the question nobody wants to hear. What are we actually trying to do here? And for who?
You might not like the answer. But at least you'll know what you're fighting.
by KJ