Disclaimer: This series is inspired, among other things, by the findings of the “Loneliness at Work” study prepared by Symetria. All interpretations and conclusions are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of the report’s authors or of any organization. The article does not refer to any specific company or professional situation. It describes systemic mechanisms typical of complex organizations.
Today’s guest is Katarzyna Kalwak. She consults on digital solutions at the junction of three worlds - the user, the business, and IT. She builds her experience from different vantage points - from a creative agency, through a software house, to the client side in organizations of XS and XXL size. She is finishing a book about the twilight of the millennial world, and in the background: corporate carpet, KPIs, small-large dramas, events that seem insignificant, magic and absurdities that become everyday life.
At a certain point you stop knowing whether the decision you are supposed to make even concerns the same company you were still working in a year ago. Formally everything checks out: the name is the same, the people (mostly) the same, the slides similar. And yet something has come apart enough that every next conversation requires guessing which version of reality we are actually talking about.
Everyday work starts to resemble moving through a place that is formally known, but has changed its layout. What used to be obvious now needs to be spelled out. What used to make sense starts coming apart in conversations. More and more often you can get the impression that everyone is functioning in a slightly different version of the same organization.
What matters: nothing spectacularly breaks. It is rather a string of small shifts that over time change the way people understand their work, their responsibility, and their place in the whole.
When meaning stops adding up
There are no conflicts, there is no lack of competence (in those situations the causes are simple to diagnose and relatively easy to take care of). What changes is the pace and the number of overlays.
You get new duties, new initiatives arrive, another tool appears in the company, the handling of which is expected - and the rhythm of those expectations changes. Old things are not closed, they are only covered by new ones.
There is more and more information, but it is harder and harder to establish which of it really puts anything in order. Different sources of truth function in parallel. The same words start meaning different things depending on context, area, and level of responsibility - the basic definitions that were once understood the length and breadth of the whole organization come apart. Strategy, priority, impact, value - everything still exists in the company’s language, but more and more rarely in one meaning.
If there is no place where meaning is jointly put in order - it starts to diverge. Meaning does not update itself: everyone assembles it locally from what they happen to see and what they are responsible for. Give this phenomenon a few quarters, and the local versions stop adding up to a whole.
It is worth noting that from a research perspective this is nothing extraordinary, because the meaning of work does not live in one head. It lives between people, their relationships (professional and less formal), tools, and procedures. The meaning of work “loses its seal” when we do not take care of governance and synchronization - even if every fragment of this system still works correctly on its own, it - precisely - works correctly only on its own.
Narrowing as a normal reaction
The whole becomes too heavy to hold. The global picture requires constant translating, aligning, updating, statusing - every company certainly invents a few wise names for that. And that is a symptom that really costs employees energy, which in everyday work simply starts to run out. The effect? Narrowing.
Work becomes more local. More and more attention goes into what can actually be handled: one’s own area, one’s own tasks, one’s own decisions, one’s own indicators, for which one is accountable. Conversations about “what for” fade, and there are more of those about “how to deliver it” - and that is not cynicism at all, but a way of surviving in an environment that has stopped giving stable frames of meaning for the work itself. A little like that joke about running around with empty wheelbarrows.
It is easy then to say that this is a lack of systems thinking or (the fashionable word) siloing, but we are seeing effects, not causes. Looking from the inside, more and more often this is the only way to keep acting without a constant sense of overload.
Loneliness without dramatizing
At this stage an experience appears that is rarely named outright - everyone is running around with their own, different wheelbarrows. Work becomes harder and harder to tell to other people - even those who are formally close. And even when one finds the strength for a willingness to have such a conversation, the meaning of that work no longer fits a short form.
How do you tell someone “what you are working on now” without shortcuts, simplifications, and tossing out slogans that are “universally known,” such as the name of a project, the next collection, a new feature, the nearest campaign? More and more things remain unspoken, because explaining them would require a long introduction, for which there is usually no space.
Work loses its witnesses. You can notice a slow moving away from a shared language. Decisions land in silence, responsibility sits with the individual - the one who cannot naturally bounce a thought in conversation, because the cost of introducing someone into that conversation is too high.
As Kahn writes, under such conditions people gradually limit their presence at work to what is necessary - leaving initiative, risk, and reflection aside. Engagement in the work and a sense of its meaning naturally fade - and a sense of isolation rises.
A long-term side effect
What happens when this state lasts long enough (and, let’s not kid ourselves, it rather deepens)? The way employees think about work changes. Ambitions shift from development toward stabilization. Less “what can be improved,” and more “what will not cause extra complications.” Decisions are made with growing reserve and caution, they are more and more calm - which from the outside can even look like the organization’s maturity.
Such a company enters a drift, and employees affected by this state have a sense of being stuck in a “as long as it works” and “we’ve always done it this way” mode. The quality of decisions falls and - what is critical in the present times - the organization’s capacity for real change (not even mentioning its necessary pace, or building the maneuverability of the whole organization).
And finally: through the lack of a shared picture of the work that one could refer to, professional relationships become shallower, cursory. The phenomenon of such auto-loneliness obtains a feedback effect and consolidates itself inside the organization.
Why companies do not notice this
- Formally everything works. Projects move. KPIs add up. Nothing signals the problem outright.
- Entropy does not make noise. It grows slowly and does not generate a single alarm moment.
- Local deliveries mask the whole. Every area can look efficient, even if shared meaning is falling apart.
- Cognitive cost is not counted. The fatigue of constantly aligning meanings does not appear in reports, and at most as “we’re in a heavier period now” in corridor conversations.
- Shortcut and distance are easy to take for professionalism, and silence is sometimes interpreted as calm.
From the perspective of social identity theory, when the shared “we” disappears, people retreat to smaller frames of identification that give them a sense of safety (Turner).
What can be done about it
Anyone who has “better communication” and “motivating people” in their head loses.
- It helps to clearly name one working version of the goal - even if it is not ideal.
- It helps to distinguish the signals that set direction from those that are only (and as much as) current context.
- It helps to close (or kill) old initiatives, instead of adding further ones (when a company has more projects than actual resources, it loses focus, one of the key traits that make an organization steerable).
- It helps to create a safe space for a conversation about how the work is understood, and not only “what was executed.” Building trust is one of the key competencies for early detection of signals.
In practice these problems usually surface only in deeper retrospectives, audits, or conversations conducted outside official processes (Maznevski, Chudoba).
When the topic is ignored
When the unsealing of meaning lasts longer, the organization starts functioning as a set of parallel companies under one sign. In that state, loneliness is the background of everyday work - and it is precisely then that another element begins to emerge in the structure, coming from the geometry of responsibility: the role of “tension absorber.”
These are people at the junction of processes, teams, expectations, who intercept ambiguity, pressure, and chaos onto themselves before they travel further. In such an arrangement someone has to take on the surplus of tension. Someone has to put together what does not fit anyone directly. Someone has to take on the weight of ambiguity so that the rest can keep working.
And I will talk about that in the last text of this series.
Comment from Katarzyna Kalwak
I have three and a half diopters,
But I cannot see myself here.
Because look,
He does not notice at all,
The configuration of the surroundings,
It popped up that it died,
The system sees,
And does not know that it sees.
Under the office building, A.D. 2025
Corporate magical realism
The Pulitzer Prize winner Rube Goldberg went down in history as the creator of a comic series about Professor Butts, published in Collier’s Weekly in 1929–1931. The author used his engineering education in it to draw absurdly complicated constructions that carried out relatively simple tasks.
Every next Monday in an organization driven by a Goldberg machine has something of stepping into the world of Bruno Schulz’s magical realism. The borders between dream and waking, between one’s own interpretation and objective truth, blur. Ordinary objects and events take on an extraordinary meaning. Familiar situations twist into caricature. Supposedly everything looks normal - there are team meetings, statuses, presentations, summaries, and reports. Recurring offsites. Santa arrives. Quarterly awards are handed out. Feedback is collected. But that is from the outside. Because the inside freezes in slow-mo. Every action starts costing more and more energy. Setting priorities, defining a project’s goal, or confirming the scope of responsibility on a team grows into a neck-breaking challenge. A quiet permission settles in for certain underspecifications at higher levels. What matters is to take care of one’s square, a dozen or so square centimeters of corporate carpet, defining my tasks to tick off before the deadline. And that, too, is sometimes conventional.
Beyond a fierce defense of the meaning of one’s own work comes an extraordinary fragmentation of initiatives. It is far easier to take up as a banner the mission of changing the copy on a button that customers do not click, or a visual lift of two or three screens, than to go back to the start of the board and think about the adequacy of the process or the value proposition of the solution. Something didn’t work out? Skip the dice roll and check whether you have a get-out-of-jail card. The first set of tasks implies a low risk of failure and a high clarity of how to execute. The second - the opposite. In an excessively complicated reality there is far too much fear. Loading onto one’s own shoulders another portion of uncertainty and a deliberate deferral of reward is met with an indulgent smile.
Sometimes so-called brave rebels appear in a Goldberg organization. With a belief in change, with a fresh look and a willingness to clear systemic growths, to simplify what is complicated. That energy can last for many, many corporate seasons. The two most common endings. In the first, the rebel fights out a small, tight, but their own space with a chosen group of people and they create a small company inside the company - with a separate system and style of work. Creating a separate ecosystem, an oasis arises, like a tropical park near Berlin. In the second ending the organization lets the rebel act in their own way inside loosened, old frames, but only up to the moment when the system’s status quo remains untouched. Without support from above, the rebel experiences a sense of losing the goal and of growing isolation.
Fortunately there is still one more, alternative ending, the director’s cut - the costs of an expanded system, in a clash with growing goals, create a compulsion for systemic change. If our rebel finds themselves exactly then and exactly there, they have the best opportunity to introduce effective changes at higher levels of the organization than before.
At the end, and out of care for the rebel, it is worth noting that there are more places at the helm of transformation. For a whole team, in which there cannot be missing a navigator of change, a connector, an instrument nurse, or a sponsor. Though the topic of the team is material for a separate article, I would not want to leave the rebel without a quick perspective on setting an out-of-office and going for a deserved rest. Rebel legend supposedly has it: When rebellion becomes one of the functions, and not a solitary space mission, magic happens - the system starts working for us, and not against us.