How management let systems do the thinking for them

For years, leaders believed that technology would help them manage their businesses more effectively. It was seen as a lever for efficiency, rigor, and rationalization, and unfortunately, many still see it that way. But in seeking to better manage organizations, we have allowed their nature to change. Technology did not impose itself by force, far from it, but it slipped into the spaces left vacant by a management team more concerned with management and control than with understanding how their business really worked and how the various resources needed to achieve its ambition, objectives, mission, and strategy were mobilized and organized. Besides, your tools have no use for your strategy, your values, or your culture, but that’s another subject… although… (Too much strategy kills strategy).

But, once again, it is not technology that has taken power in businesses, it is us who have ceased to exercise ours by losing interest and letting it, and those who manage it, take over.

In short:

• Technology has become established in businesses not through domination, but because managers have abandoned their design role in favor of steering and operational management.
• By structuring processes and integrating standardized logic, digital tools have gradually redefined how organizations operate without their implicit impact being really questioned.
• It is not technology that is at fault, but rather management’s failure to intentionally define operating methods, which has led to a dependence on systems and a loss of discernment.
• Artificial intelligence will not solve structural problems; it will amplify existing dysfunctions if leaders do not redefine the respective roles of humans and machines in decision-making and work organization.
• Regaining control means putting enterprise design that is the conscious design of operating methods and resource mobilization back at the heart of management, ahead of technological choices.

From management to configuration

It all started with the best of intentions, and I say this all the more readily because at the time I was one of those who truly believed in it.

Digitizing processes, structuring data, securing decisions… it all seemed as rational as it was logical and inevitable. But with each step forward, we removed a little bit of humanity, a little bit of discernment, and sometimes a little bit of common sense from the way we operated.

By delegating to systems the implicit responsibility of organizing work, sequencing tasks, guiding and even making decisions, the business ended up thinking like its tools.

But with hindsight, it was only logical: as Nicholas Carr wrote 20 years ago in “Does IT Matter?” when you implement, like all your competitors, the same technologies designed by others that carry their own vision of how the business should operate, and you have them deployed by the same consulting firms that will set up the same configurations and workflows as elsewhere, not only do you end up being like everyone else and losing a source of competitive advantage, but, perhaps worse, you end up no longer being yourself.

But businesses have ended up following the rules of their tools without questioning their logic too much.

In fact, an ERP does not just manage flows: it imposes a way of articulating functions and coordinating services. A CRM does not just track customers: it defines a way of thinking about the relationship. An HR tool does not just administer: it transforms what used to be a matter of human judgment into procedures.

Each solution therefore embodies an implicit vision of work, and by stacking them up, businesses have accumulated models that are not their own, no longer belong to them, and, worse still, are no longer under their control. Little by little, technology has ceased to be a support and has become the backbone of management and, in a broader sense, of the management and mobilization of resources, whether technical, material, or even human.

Systems have taken the place we wanted to give them

It would be easy here to launch a broadside attack on technology, but that would be a serious mistake and a misreading of history. We have some truly fantastic tools at our disposal, and as always in this area, the issue is not what they do but what we do with them. And, in the case that concerns us here, what we allow them to do.

The problem is therefore not technical at all, but managerial.

The tools were designed to provide a form of efficiency and ensure internal consistency, and they do this very well, but not to express a vision. They ensure that everything works (and even then…), but not that everything makes sense. But because they are based on logic of accuracy and compliance, they have replaced discernment and judgment with rules, flexibility with procedures, and understanding with settings.

Meanwhile, management continued to talk about strategy, engagement, innovation, and the importance of corporate identity and culture in its operations, even though the organization, mentally, already belonged to its systems.

This happened slowly, project after project, through a series of local decisions perceived as purely logical and operational. Each time, a little managerial leeway was removed, while becoming increasingly dependent on the tools and logic they import.

It cannot even be said that managers lost control; they simply stopped realizing that they had implicitly given it up. Each decision depends on a workflow that constrains it and limits the options; indicators become, if not a bible, then at least a compass; performance is limited to what the system can count; and in the end, management no longer decides but validates.

We no longer interpret but execute, and the business’s management ends up merging with the software infrastructure whose rules it follows.

The mirror of artificial intelligence

I read here and there that artificial intelligence will solve all our problems because it understands everything and has the answer to everything, but despite its undeniably great potential, we must avoid falling once again into technological solutionism (To solve anything, click here).

But it is important to understand that when we talk about putting what is unique about humans, or even what makes a business exist, what it is and why, at the center of its way of doing things, AI is more about continuity than disruption. We will have more of what we had before, including the malfunctions, but in no way will it be different or better, unless we decide to take back control.

It will not change the nature of management and administration as they are currently practiced, but will rather tend to expose their limitations and weaknesses. As it automates what has been formalized, it exposes everything that still relies on implicit adjustments, behind-the-scenes activities, and a form of tinkering with processes and tools (Work about work: when the reality of work consists of making things that don’t work work).

But in doing so, it will show how many businesses had stopped thinking about their own model, and the wake-up call is likely to be painful. It will force managers to redefine what falls under human decision-making, what is delegated to machines, and, overall, to rethink the overall design of work. 

It will bring the business into a world where everything must be explicitly defined in order to be automated, and where anything that is not intentionally designed and thought out will end up being decided by default by our tools and, more often than not, executed in the worst possible way

. And if managers do not take back this responsibility, others—integrators, publishers, algorithms will continue to design in their place the way their business thinks, learns, and acts. But with AI, there is a risk of changing the scale of dysfunction and the gap between what would have been put in place if we had taken the time to think about it and what will ultimately have been implemented with the greatest indifference.

Taking back control: the role of design

Technology has never been intended to govern businesses; it has simply filled the void left by other factors.

At this stage, it is important to realize that what determines a business’s performance is not its ambition or the quality of the men and women who make it up, but the quality and consistency of its systems, which are the limiting factor (You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. (James Clear)).

“A bad system always wins over a good person“, Deming rightly said, and we cannot outsource all or part of it to tools and the underlying principles they bring to the business without first asking ourselves what we want to do and how, and only then what technology will enable us to do it.

Similarly, it is not technology that determines the engagement or retention of your employees, but work design (Right fit, wrong fit).

So it is not a change of tools that companies need, but above all a change of attitude towards technology, work design, and enterprise design. It is not a question of opposing systems, but of regaining responsibility for design, i.e., how a business designs its operating methods and mobilizes its resources in line with what it wants to offer its customers and employees, while respecting its identity and DNA.

Management should no longer consist of controlling what tools do, but rather (re)defining what we do, how we do it, with whom, how we mobilize all of this, and to what extent it serves the business’s project (To manage is to design).

Technology should not replace management but redefine it, and the best way to maintain control of the business is to:

1°) Stop confusing business architecture, a subject that today is solely a matter for technology (saying this reveals how deep the problem runs), and enterprise design, which must precede it, and find ways to overcome organizational silos. This will be the subject of a future article.

2) Find an approach to thinking transversally about enterprise design, which is transversal by nature, because it is the “vertical” thinking of silos that contributes to enslaving managerial thinking and, more broadly, the functioning of businesses to the application logic that has preempted the functioning of this verticality (EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations).

Bottom Line

Modern businesses are not (yet) driven by technology, but by decisions that we have stopped making, and we are reaching a tipping point where it may be too late to regain control. But as long as leaders confuse management with design, tools will continue to shape work and operations in the broadest sense in their place.

Today, what technology brings us is merely a reflection of the quality of our managerial thinking, and it is up to us to ensure that this changes.

To answer your questions…

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