Understanding Society
Workers Have Ideas
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Jos de Blok distrusts the assumption that managers think while employees merely execute. Working from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug presents the Buurtzorg founder’s alternative: treat workers as intrinsically motivated experts whose ideas deserve to be heard. De Blok’s sharpest claim is also his simplest — remove management, and the work may continue not merely as before, but better.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Jos de Blok says, “There’s this notion that doers can’t think strategically, that they lack vision. But the people out doing the work are brimming with ideas. They come up with a thousand things, but don’t get heard, because managers think they have to go on some corporate retreat to dream up plans to present to worker bees.”
De Blok has a different take on things. He sees his employees as intrinsically motivated professionals and experts on how their jobs ought to be done. ‘In my experience, managers tend to have very few ideas. They get their jobs because the fit into a system, because they follow orders. Not because they are big visionaries. They take some ‘high performance leadership’ courses, and suddenly they think they’re a game changer, an innovator.’
When I point out to de Blok that ‘healthcare manager’ was the fastest growing occupational group in the Netherlands in the years 1996-2014, he heaves a sigh.
‘What you get with all these MBA programmers people who’ve learned a convenient way to order the world.You have HR, Finance, IT.
Eventually, you start believing that a lot of what your organization is accomplishing is down to you. You see it with loads of managers. But subtract management and the work continues as before—even better.’
As statements like this testify, de Blok tends to swim against the tide.
He’s a manager who prefers not to manage. A CEO with hands on experience. An anarchist at the top of the ladder. So as care became a product and patients became customers, de Blok decided to give up his management job and start something new. He dreamed of an oasis in this vast bureaucratic wasteland, a place fueled not by market forces and growth, but by small teams and trust.
Buurtzorg started out with one team of four nurses in Enschede, a Dutch city of 150,000 on the country’s eastern fringes. Today it numbers more than eight hundred teams active nationwide. However, it’s not what the organization is, but what it is not, that sets Buurtzoog apart. It has no managers, no call centre and no planners. There are no targets or bonuses. Overheads are negligible and so is time spent in meetings. Buurtzorg does not have a flashy HQ in the capital, but occupies an uninspiring block in an outlying business park in outlying Almelo.
Each team of twelve has maximum autonomy. Teams plan their own schedules and employ their own co-workers. The organization has an intranet site where colleagues can pool their knowledge and experience. Each team has its own training budget, and each group of fifty teams has a coach and they can call in if they are stuck. Finally, there’s the main office which takes care of the financial side of things.