Organizing Complexity: The Path to Ownership Through Worker Cooperatives

I’ve spent my career to-date building operations teams at early-stage companies, and have always been fascinated by the question: how do groups get things done? Organizing Complexity is a series of articles where I’ll be unpacking the structures and systems developed in various contexts, from software engineering to foraging ants, that enable groups of individuals to solve collective problems. The goal of this series is not to reach a forgone conclusion about what is the best system, but instead to shed some light on the process of work.

Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace report included a statistic that has fascinated and disturbed me ever since I learned of it: 15% of the global workforce is actively engaged in their work. That means the other 85% are either not engaged, defined as being generally apathetic and unattached, or actively disengaged, meaning resentful to the point of undermining company initiatives. So it turns out that the workplace, where the average person spends a third of their lives, is not just a place where we receive compensation in exchange for our labor — it’s where we receive compensation in exchange for sacrificed happiness and well-being.

There are many reasons for our collective dissatisfaction with the experience of work, such as bad managers, low wages…