If you follow me on LinkedIn you may have seen my recent musings as I slog my way through Heidegger’s Being and Time. It is going about as well as everyone warned me it would. But I’m stubborn, and if I’m going to wade through that much German philosophy, I intend to squeeze every last drop of usable insight out of it.
So far it has handed me two ideas, from two different corners of the book, that I can’t stop turning over in my head. I’m increasingly convinced they’re the same idea wearing two coats — and that together they describe most of what I actually do for a living.
The first idea centers around a hammer.
When you’re using a hammer well, it disappears. You don’t notice it; you’re absorbed in the building. Heidegger called this “ready-to-hand.” The tool recedes so your attention can land on the work.
The hammer only reappears as an object — something you notice, inspect, turn over in your mind — when it breaks. Now you’re staring at the tool instead of using it. Heidegger calls this “present-at-hand.”
Organizations work the same way. When a team’s structure, its meeting cadence, its way of making decisions are all working, they vanish. Nobody talks about them. Attention flows to the real work: the customer, the product, the problem worth solving.
You know an organization is in trouble when people can’t stop talking about the organization. When every conversation is about process, reporting lines, who owns what, why the meeting ran long again. The machinery has broken into view — and now it’s eating the attention that was supposed to go to the work.
Which leads somewhere slightly uncomfortable for an organizational change professional like myself: the best parts of your organization are the ones nobody is thinking about. It’s uncomfortable for me in particular because my job is often to treat these things as present-at-hand — to pick up the broken hammer and turn it over in the light. In my defense, it’s usually because they are broken, and we’re trying to get them working again as fast as we can. But it’s a good reminder not to go overboard. Not to talk about hammers — or operating rhythms — for the sheer pleasure of talking about them. There’s hammering to do. There’s real work waiting.
The second idea centers around “worlds.”
Heidegger says a world is not a collection of objects. Instead, it’s a web of references: this exists in-order-to enable that, which exists for-the-sake-of something someone cares about. The things matter only because of how they point to each other.
This helped me see why the traditional org chart is such an impoverished way of seeing an organization. The organization is not in the boxes. It’s in the lines — and mostly in the white space the lines can’t capture. The roles and teams and tools are real enough, but they’re not where the organization lives. It lives in the relationships between them: the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of that no chart has ever managed to draw.
I’ve started thinking about good work design as building that world — taking the invisible connective tissue and making it just visible enough to work with. Once it’s visible, we can point at it. Elevate it. Argue about it. Improve it. Get a little more deliberate and coherent about how all those references are actually pointing at each other. (This, incidentally, is what a good team charter is really for. Not a rulebook. A way of making a world legible enough to choose on purpose.)
And here’s where the two coats turn out to fit the same body. The hammer says: when the work is good, the structure is invisible. Let it recede. The world says: the organization is invisible, and the job is to make it visible enough to improve.
For a while those felt like they were pulling in opposite directions. Make things disappear or drag them into the light? But the contradiction dissolves once you notice that present-at-hand is a phase, not a destination.
You bring the invisible web of your organization into view on purpose. You make the broken hammer (or to collapse the metaphor further, the broken decision rights, the bad meetings, the non-sensical workflows etc.) conspicuous, name the references, draw the white space. Not because visibility is the goal but because you can’t improve what you can’t see, and you can’t act deliberately on a system you can’t perceive. Seeing the system you’re inside is the whole precondition for changing it.
And then — this is the part I’m most likely to forget as the complete and non-repentant organizational nerd that I am — you let it go again. You hand the structure back to ready-to-hand, better than it was, so it can disappear into the work. The entire point of making the machinery conspicuous is to get it working well enough that everyone can stop noticing it.
So good work design isn’t a state. It’s a rhythm: into view, and out again. You make the world visible so the people inside it can shape it, then you return it to them quiet enough that they can forget it’s there and get back to the building.
The best work design isn’t the kind you can see. It’s the kind you finally get to forget.