Remember the human

Forget the feminine and the masculine — and for the love of God, remember the Human

Today, the whole “Women ruined the workplace” debate presented itself to me. I nearly ran to grab my “fu*k patriarchy” T-shirt and went marching, but then I stopped. I decided to actually look into this debate — and what I found was disappointing.

In the age of outrage, everything from liberal feminism to wokeness got dragged into the picture, while everyone completely missed the point. And the point for me was the current state of our organizations.

Our organizational systems are upgrading. And at first glance, it might look like the workplace is becoming more feminine — but I would argue it’s becoming more human.

Remember the human?

If not, lucky you. Here I am to remind you.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

The Legacy System

Our current operating system is inherited. Our “modern” organizations are not modern at all.

They are rooted in the Industrial Revolution — the time of men high on the idea of the American Dream, infinite opportunity, expansion, domination of nature, and the promise of building a fortune even if you weren’t born into one. Limited as it was, it still promised equality.

Our decision to keep walking on the path set by patriarchy was never a conscious one, so we quietly kept its logic at the core: hierarchy, control, and linear growth.

And let me clarify — patriarchy was never a gender war. It was, and still is, a design logic. What we turned it into and what dire consequences it has is another question entirely.

And the bigger issue? The system was built for machines, not minds. It was engineered for mechanical efficiency, not for cognitive or emotional complexity.

People became replaceable parts in the production line, and “management” was invented to keep the parts moving toward ever-greater output.

And boy, was that system inhumane.

• We had to fight to make child labor illegal, because the system saw small hands, not small humans.

• We had to fight for something as basic as 8-8-8: eight hours of work, rest, and life — a radical idea at the time, because rest wasn’t seen as productive.

• We had to fight for the right to organize, to strike, to have a weekend, to be safe from machines that mangled bodies in the name of efficiency.

• Then we had to fight for women to even enter the workplace, and once there, to be paid, heard, and treated as more than borrowed labor.

  
  

For 200 years, humanity’s fight inside the system has been one long struggle to make the machine remember it runs not on capital but on humans.  The current debates may look like we’re still fighting the same battles — but somewhere along the way, we started aiming at the wrong target.

The Real Ruin

What ruined the workplace isn’t men or women.

(Though it would be ridiculously easy to argue that men ruined it when they established it, I’ll resist the temptation — they did the best they could with what they had.)

What ruined the workplace wasn’t greed, or power, or even patriarchy. Those were just symptoms. What truly broke it was the absence of reflection — two centuries of doing without asking why, of scaling without sensing, of mistaking movement for progress. I would misquote Socrates here and say loudly: The unexamined organization is not worth running!

Almost nobody questions the intent of the system anymore — so it keeps rewarding control, predictability, and speed — values that made sense when the goal was output, not adaptation.

The OCM Paradox

I’m an Organizational Change Management professional so of course I will drag it in here. Especially because it is a profession that, if we’re honest, shouldn’t even exist because well functioning systems auto-correct. But until we start to seriously reflect, it remains necessary.

Every corporate transformation still follows the same tired script:

Announce. Impose. Measure. Blame. Rinse. Repeat.

Meanwhile, the world no longer behaves linearly. People no longer exist in a limited, local reality. Change is not a one-time event — it’s exponential. People are not cogs in a machine; they are information nodes with emotional states that travel faster than policies.

A system as complex as the average corporation — with hundreds or thousands of humans and infinite variables — will not magically adapt while governed by industrial logic. Complex systems, like forests, bodies, or societies, adapt primarily through self-regulation — not through command and control.

We still say “the system is resistant to change.” But maybe what’s really happening is that the old code can’t compute uncertainty. We’re trying to run quantum software on a steam engine.

The Human Patch

What the legacy system calls “feminine” or “soft” is simply human. Empathy, intuition, reflection, trust — these aren’t nice-to-haves. They are the regulation mechanisms of complex adaptive systems.

OCM practitioners have spent decades reintroducing these traits under sanitized names: engagement, communication, culture, readiness, resilience. Wrong names, if you ask me.

Because what we’re really doing is trying to teach organizations to feel again.

And damn, does the system resist that.

The Science Is Clear

As Daniel Pink said, there’s a huge gap between what science knows and what business does.

Neuroscience confirms what we’ve observed for decades:

• Fear biases the prefrontal cortex — creativity and reasoning drop dramatically.

• Psychological safety enables learning and adaptability.

• Oxytocin and dopamine, the chemistry of trust and motivation, flow when humans feel seen, heard, and respected.

No amount of dashboards can substitute for emotional regulation. Just to bring in an easy example: research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard shows that psychological safety is the single biggest predictor of team learning. And what actual actions are we taking to establish psychological safety at work? Few and rarely. The lesson we can't seem to learn is simple:

When we feel threatened, we make shitty decisions.

When we feel safe, we make meaning.

Real transformation happens when humans stop defending and start relating.

The System Glitch

Every time empathy or vulnerability enters the boardroom, the system glitches.

Patriarchy panics and interprets humanity as weakness. Why? Because its power was built on separation. It was always binary: mind vs body, logic vs emotion, men vs women, leader vs worker. But this is not a binary world. It never was.

If we’re up against anything, it’s our own inherited bullshit. And we’d better start rewiring our systems before they self-destruct.

The outrage we hear today is the sound of the system debugging its outdated architecture. The discomfort we feel when human traits re-enter the room is not incompatibility — it’s evolution.

OCM as Systemic Therapy

OCM, in essence, is systemic therapy — not in the clinical sense, but in the way it surfaces patterns, integrates emotion and restores coherence. I wish that word weren’t so stigmatized. Therapy is necessary. Even for organizations. OCM isn’t the “soft side” of change — it’s the integration layer between human complexity and industrial logic. It’s the patch that allows organizations to evolve without crashing. And it’s not just the corporate world that needs this re-humanization.

It’s every system we’ve built.

The human disappeared because we didn’t know, nor cared about how to scale empathy. But now we do. We translate emotion into data, culture into behavior, fear into learning — and in doing so, we’re coding empathy back into the machine.

In evolutionary terms, we’re not managing change — we’re reintroducing relatedness as infrastructure.

The Human Revolution

This whole debate about who ruined what shouldn’t even be happening. We can’t afford to point fingers — we’ve got far bigger problems to solve. The Industrial Revolution optimized production. It served us well. Until it started to destroy us.

Now comes the Human Revolution. It must optimize connection and regulation.

So to everyone out there spending energy on outrage: Take that rage, that intellectual fire, and channel it into building human systems. We don’t need more activists. This isn’t activism.

It’s real-time evolution, and we’ve all got a part to play.

The goal isn’t to feminize business or government. It’s to humanize systems that forgot how to feel — and forgot that they’re supposed to serve us, not the other way around.

That’s not “ruin.”

That’s repair.