2026; A web of lies about work?
“Just to let you know, we’ll need the table back within two hours” says the receptionist at a very high end restaurant. An old-school boss is trying to book an annual Christmas lunch with ex-colleagues. The sort that starts with a martini, washed down with champagne, followed by a clamour for leather-bound wine list.
We all get the restaurant’s tricky position: too many guests want a crabmeat starter and petit fours to go with their fat jabs. They need a rational system to increase spend.
But he took his lunch elsewhere. The rational system alienated exactly the spenders they want.
That sums up the year at work and in politics: systems built to manage people that never account for how real people respond to those systems.
Take Hotdesking. Perfectly sensible use of office space. Except we’re territorial and creatures of habit. We like ‘our’ spaces. Desks, corners, near friends. We don’t want to come and in and sit with strangers.
Agile teams. An efficient resource model, but ignores how much we need allies. And how even pissy bosses are manageable if predictable.
Online training. A budgetary dream. No people needed to deliver it if we use the AI voice and clips. While everyone watches it on 1.75x speed, and only that slowly because they disabled double speed.
There are so many more. Chatbots instead of people. Productivity tracking. TLAs: three letter acronyms for every project and team. Until no one can remember what half of them mean.
The lie behind all of these things is simple: systems can never override what real people choose to do. We’re all driven by our needs for belonging, for being seen, for mattering, for having places we know and feel safe in, for status, for stories.
If you want to know why so many people are unhappy at work, look no further.
Which leads me to my wishes for 2026. Whatever it is you seek to do, start with how to make it matter to the people you need to do it. The robots and systems will get you some of the way. But your people will make or break you.
And it’s going to matter more than you think: this week I interviewed my old mate Keiran Pedley (also Research Director, Public Affairs UK of Ipsos UK) sharing that the UK population is now more economically pessimistic than it was after the deep recession of the early 80s, after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s AND after 2008.
If that sounds depressing, don’t panic yet. I’ve added in as many paths to joy ahead as I can.
Have a good one.
Christine
