The Messy Middle

A long quote from the essay Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? by Aaron Horwath:

Employees overwhelmingly choose to remain or leave their roles because of their colleagues and/or bosses, and the quality of the experience of the messy middle a workplace offers. Those are the elements that make work fun—and valuable.

But not everyone feels that way. In my experience, there are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome.

The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.

Research suggests this group needs that environment to do their best work. Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile spent decades studying what produces genuinely creative, high-quality output. Her Intrinsic Motivation Principle determines that people do their most creative and innovative work when motivated by the work itself — the interest, the challenge, the enjoyment — not by outcomes or metrics. The environments that kill creativity are political, risk-averse and relentlessly outcome-focused. The environments that stimulate it are collaborative, idea-driven and free. The messy middle, in other words, isn’t inefficient. It’s the condition under which genuinely valuable work gets produced.

It’s important to note that the impact of removing the messy middle from the work experience of these two groups is asymmetrical: For outcome-first people, it is a victory. For experience-first people, it undermines the foundation of work.

I'm definitely in the group of people who thrives in the messy middle.

Another interesting quote from the same essay:

We’ve been through waves of hiring and firing a thousand times before. But this time might be different. In the past, there was always a fresh cohort of workers waiting to be brought in. But what if talent stops coming back? What if the AI transformation gone wrong makes top talent — particularly those who are experience-first by nature — lose faith in Workism en masse? What if, when companies go to replenish headcounts, talent freed from the Workism spectacle has turned to different versions of their lives? What if their side projects suddenly became profitable? The talent pool increasingly doesn’t own homes and doesn’t plan on having kids, so it has perhaps never been easier to make a career pivot toward something that is genuinely satisfying in ways corporate life isn’t.