What I want to give

Last week, I hosted a small gathering for System Work. Eight people came. Three already knew what I do. Five did not.

Merwyn, a friend, was among the five. He asked two questions. What follows here is, in essence, what I told him that evening. The first: “What do you actually want to give the people who show up?” He said this with genuine curiosity, but also with the awareness that it was a Friday evening and everyone in the room had chosen this over dinner with someone they loved, or a drink somewhere. The second: “How do you sell this?” He put it more bluntly than that. Something closer to, “I can’t believe you manage to sell something this niche.”

My answer for the first question is to share that there is an alternative to approach dealing or working with people in organizations (or, human systems, in System Work lingo).

It helps to notice that most jobs, when you look at them honestly, contain three distinct kinds of work. We might call them content, task, and maintenance.

Content is the thing you were ostensibly hired to do. For a designer, it is the design itself, the craft of making something look and function as it should. For a salesperson, it is the product, the pitch, the numbers on a quarterly report.

Task is the scaffolding around the content: the coordination, the delegation, the scheduling. When a designer manages her own project timeline, or when you assign one deliverable to a colleague and another to someone else, that is task. Most of us have a reasonable vocabulary for both of these. We learned them in school, refined them in our first jobs, and built entire careers around getting better at them.

And then there is maintenance. This is the part we rarely name but spend a surprisingly large portion of our days doing. It is the human part. Sitting with a colleague who is quietly furious that her recommendation was overruled. Summoning patience for someone whose competence you privately doubt. Spending an hour with a direct report who has just lost his father, not because it appears on any task list, but because something in you understands it must be done. Persuading someone outside your project that your decision will not damage them. Or, perhaps most overlooked of all, talking yourself out of quitting on a week when everything feels pointless. We might call this last one self-maintenance, which is its own discipline entirely.

None of this appears in a job description. It is not measured, not trained for, and rarely acknowledged in performance reviews. And yet, if we are honest, it is often the reason people get promoted. We have all watched someone who was not particularly brilliant at the technical work rise steadily through an organization, and wondered how. The answer, almost always, is that they were unusually good at maintenance.

And yet maintenance is also, we might note quietly, the reason many people leave. The resignation letter almost never tells the truth. It speaks of new opportunities, of wanting something different, when the sentence that goes unwritten reads something closer to: I could not bear the people anymore. Not the work itself. The content was fine. The tasks were manageable. But the human dimension had become too costly, and nothing in the organisation had offered anything useful to help carry it. There was no language for what was happening, no one trained to notice it, no structure designed to help. So they left. And the organisation, receiving their polished letter, thanked them warmly and began searching for a replacement.

If this does not sound like an important part of your working life, then what follows in this writing will hold little interest. But if you have ever suspected that the human dimension of your job is both the most demanding and the least supported, it may be worth reading on.

What I wanted to give the people in that room, and what I want to give anyone who encounters this work, is a way of seeing the maintenance dimension with real clarity. Not a set of instructions, but a way of understanding what is actually happening between people. Too often, when something goes wrong in the human dimension, we reach for content or task solutions. A project stalls because person A is avoiding person B. The response from above is to revisit the project plan, as though the problem were insufficient detail. Or to send both of them to a project management workshop, as though the problem were insufficient process. I exaggerate slightly, but I have seen versions of this more than once. The actual issue, of course, is something in the human dimension — trust, or resentment, or simply the accumulated weight of a relationship that has never been honestly addressed. And that is maintenance.

We do not approach this by offering prescriptions. There is no shortage of articles promising “ten strategies to avoid being undermined” or “five phrases that build trust.” These are the fast food of professional development: briefly satisfying, never nourishing. Our invitation is quieter and, I think, more honest. We ask people to begin by understanding what is going on in their system, psychologically and humanely, grounded in what the sciences actually tell us about how groups behave. With this understanding, something shifts. You begin to see that nearly everything that happens in an office is psychological. Without that awareness, nearly everything feels personal. The difference between those two sentences is, in a sense, the entire course.

So my answer to Merwyn’s first question is simpler than it sounds. I want to give people an awareness they did not have before. Not information. Awareness. The kind that, once given, cannot quite be returned.

As for his second question, how we sell this, the short version is this: most organizations find us after they have nearly given up. They have spent real money trying to improve how people work together, and none of it has held. By the time they reach us, they are not hopeful so much as exhausted. This explains something I have noticed about our business. The first engagement with a new client almost never pays well. But once they see what this kind of awareness makes possible, they find the budget. They always find the budget. And we always find the energy and time to work with them, however brittle the system they bring us.