R061 - Work Ethics, with Maica Trinidad

For some people, “changing the world” is just a naive, even narcissistic expression of someone who believes they have the impossible ability to shape reality at will. For others, “changing the world” is the only honest option in the face of inequality. A path as uncomfortable, rocky, and exhausting as it is inevitable…

Perspectives, subjective views, that will probably converge if we zoom out wide enough, if we acquire an anthropological perspective of change. We keep hearing that we live in VUCA environments, or BANI, or whatever acronym becomes trendy to describe that, without having any idea where we are going, we do feel the clear breath on our necks of a system that is cruel too often.

In this first episode of the new season of Realworld, we talk about work ethics and Agile in the post-industrial era with Maica Trinidad, an agile anthropologist, organizational consultant specializing in corporate cultural change processes towards Agile and Lean approaches.

What is the real world for you?

For me, the real world does not exist. Within sociology and anthropology, I have always felt aligned with the current that says reality does not exist. And as I have already had many debates with many people about this. The short summary would be: if it exists, we cannot understand it, we cannot fully grasp it. Therefore, our vision will always be partial, we will never achieve objectivity. And on a social level, the objectivist approach does not interest me either. So, for me, the real world is something inaccessible and we only see very small parts.

The concept of intersubjectivity comes to enrich this vision and to say well, the more people contribute to that social analysis, the more complete the vision will be. But even so, reality is something that escapes us from a human plane or to what can be humanly understood. It is much smaller than what reality as a whole is.

Maica Trinidad, anthropologist and social worker by training, you worked in the social sector for 20 years from direct intervention with groups and communities at risk of exclusion to social research, dedicating a large part of these years to project and service management in the field of NGOs and public administration.
And when you already believed there was no hope for managing projects in a healthy way, Agile appeared on your path and you left everything to learn and help others apply these new approaches. That was more than ten years ago, in which you have dedicated yourself to accompanying companies of very diverse kinds in their application of agility. Maica Trinidad. Welcome aboard.

What is happening in the world of work?

The world of work, from my point of view, is evolving. We were hunter-gatherers for many centuries, then for many fewer centuries we were farmers. And from the industrial revolution, we started to be factory workers. It has been the last two or three centuries and in the mid to late 20th century, another new profession in humanity was born, which is the office. That concept did not exist until then. White-collar workers, a new culture that was actually knowledge work. And what we are learning is that the rules that govern the world of knowledge work are different from those that applied in the management of manufacturing work. We come with inherited models from that industrial era that when we go to manage talent in the world of knowledge, they do not work.

An important disclaimer of all this is we are talking about a European society, of social classes that have had access to education. That is, nothing we talk about here today is going to be generalizable to the entire population, anywhere in the world, or to all social classes. You need to have a series of opportunities to have access to a type of work. I believe that in this era of knowledge, the impact of technology has also come and the technology industry has also changed many things. From my point of view, there is a culture there with its myths. For example, I am very interested in the garage myth, how a myth has been constructed that captures that American dream of "anyone can" which was also a dream that came from the beginning of the knowledge era, which was the "self-made man." It was not a self-made woman. It had, of course, a gender discourse. But that self-made man has a lot to do with the garage guy.

There are companies that cannot hire the talent they need because that talent is not willing to marry them.

At its core, it is nothing more than a re-elaboration of that American dream myth that says if you work hard, you will succeed and earn a lot of money. We are in a new culture, with all the traps it can have in terms of perpetuating the social order, of course, but other needs and possibilities are also emerging in the world of work.

From my point of view, the way of work is changing, also pushed by a generational issue, because younger people, in certain social classes in certain parts of the planet, are not willing to marry the concept of work that their parents or grandparents had. So they start to value freedom, they start to value that work leaves you personal space to grow and that is already here. That is, we are already seeing that there are companies that cannot hire the talent they need because that talent is not willing to marry them.

Yes, I believe there is a seed of new things that had not happened until the 21st century.

Where does that passion for changing the world of work come from?

I have always had a strong social vocation, working in NGOs mainly, but there was a moment when I jumped into management very early. I got into directing a therapeutic community for drug addiction with more fear than shame. And there was a very interesting project, a European project with homeless people. We were four countries, six organizations trying to agree to carry this project forward and at the management level it was tremendous. My team was very good because I played a role that was basically holding all the pressure coming from above so that my team was very well and my team was great and we got along super well and we were super productive and we were doing very cool and innovative things.

There is no money in the world that pays for a life.

And one day I was diagnosed with a rather serious illness at 34 years old. And then everything stopped. I had surgery, I was on leave and I felt that it had been that exercise of containing stress, of holding everything so that it would not go down to my team and that we could do something that made sense. So I started looking, I knew I did not want to go back to that life of living outside of Madrid, going to Madrid every day, working under a lot of pressure, coming home at night, the next day the same... I knew that no. So I was looking and I remember passing by Castellana and seeing these large consultancies and without having any idea, I said I want to work in consulting and I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I want to work in consulting, in project management but in the private sector.

Until one day Agile crossed my path this is what I now want to dedicate my effort to, because I believe it is the change that makes sense, the change that allows people to have work on a human scale. We do not work on a human scale. When you work 10, 12 hours a day, they are deplorable conditions, with lifelong injuries, with people who literally kill themselves working, who die working by accident or exhaustion. I think that needs to change. We cannot end up in the hospital because of work.

There is no money in the world that pays for a life. So that is my cause, that is to say, there has to be another way of working and it has to be better for the system too. That is to say, it will also benefit you as an entrepreneur, it will also bring you more benefits than having me here with my tongue out, right?

Will there be any rupture at some point?

No idea, but it is very likely not. We are in a phase of advanced capitalism where the accumulation of capital is becoming more and more exponential. The largest fortunes are increasing.

We are in advanced capitalism where there is no alternative, there really is no other system that seems like it could be a green shoot. And besides, those billionaires are spending their money on building bunkers and escaping to other planets. That is their plan. While they leave the debt of their wealth to all the rest of us, the ecological debt, the social debt.

It is very crazy because I do not know if they know they have no salvation. If the rest of us do not save ourselves, neither will they. They can go to another planet for four days, but it will not work. So if something is clear, it is that a society is a bunch of interconnected elements, of interconnected people. As Bertolt Brecht said, either all or none, all or nothing. One alone cannot be saved. That is how it is. It is true that those large multinationals that amass such fortunes have great difficulty implementing an approach like Agile. That is, it is very complicated for their companies to really use something like Agile or Lean. Because the culture of that company reaches a very early point where they have a ceiling, which is politics, because those approaches are full of politics. That, what we talk about being up here looking for how to escape to Mars or to Mars, no, because you cannot, but to or how to build a bunker?

That is in a context that is humanly surrounded by politics and everything that surrounds that man, who is usually a man, all that is politics. So those highly political organizations are very complex for something like Agile to work, and it is not, but it is quickly devoured, right? Any initiative that tends towards horizontality, to delegate decision-making.

But where is this economic system going, I have no idea.

That fits with our fast food culture

I believe we are many things and we are that and we are the opposite. It depends on who you focus on. We are talking about a trend, but there are different trends. And there is also the trend within this world of Agile, for example, of thinking about how this can impact a greater social change, also having approaches to responsibility with my ecosystem, with my society, with my ecological environment, even with labor relations. There are people within Agility who are considering how we can improve labor relations from a contractual level, from many places. I have a lot of hope that we have actually gone through a phase of Agile, I know you from when we were three cats and today it is mainstream. Obviously, when something becomes mainstream, what happens? Well, it is emptied of meaning, by extending it. There is a lot of this extension that is very vacuous, but it also matures.

Those who have the ability to change things are the consumers

And there are also people who are concerned that this has a greater social impact. I believe a lot in that. And of course, we have had years to practice and there are very good people in this. So there is that trend, we must highlight that danger, I think it is good and spaces like this where hopefully we can influence people to question, but there is also a lot of green shoots and many people doing things very well and with a lot of seriousness.

There is the world of ideas, and there are new ideas like this that we are saying, that companies should be something else for society, but then there is the world of the material and I think who is going to change things are the consumers; those who have the ability to change things are the consumers. It is the decision of what you spend your money on, within the things you can choose. Hopefully, we could choose energy, have many more options at the energy level or at the level of having information about where the food we eat comes from in detail that we do not have, but the consumer is the one who is going to change. Because it is in the material plane, it is the one who can handle the material plane.

What is the role of agility in all this?

For me, there is a change in management models from those that came from the manufacturing era, to those that come to the world of knowledge, because as we said before, the rules that apply to the world of knowledge work are different from the management of manufacturing based on management, on control, from verticality, on distrust. Suddenly we realize that if a knowledge worker is being breathed down their neck all day, that worker is not going to give their best. You need them to give their best. What does that worker need to give their best? They need autonomy, they need to be trusted in their work, in their technical ability, to be allowed to make decisions at their level.

Agile comes to capture in a very premature way in which it was not foreseen that this could be happening in the world and much less in the world of the technology industry. And suddenly it made sense and very interesting when we talked about the ideal part, how Agile has spread, how it has been adopted with that speed, how many companies decided they were going to go through Agile. From my point of view, there is an idea and a material part, and we are delivering results in the material part. A project managed with Agile has more return on investment than a project managed traditionally. Especially if they are well focused with Agile. So what companies want is that result. What do I have to do to deliver that result? Many times what costs us the most, and there I also have a very intergenerational analysis, is that from the management layer of companies they find it difficult to buy the idea.

And that is often the ceiling we have in the implementation of Agile, because my hypothesis is that Agile belongs to this generation of the 21st century, at the level of ideas, it belongs to these new generations that come from the end of the 20th century and now at the beginning of the 21st century, that is the clash. It is a clash in the world of ideas, but the result is there. Agile would not have succeeded if it did not really work, if it did not achieve better results.

A transformative pull occurs

Culture has two engines of change. One is the material conditions, that is, the more physical, more material part. That is, a change occurs because we need to adapt to better survive certain conditions. What happens? That there is an industry that needs knowledge workers and that is a palpable physical reality. I have said that I did not believe in reality, but there are more material dynamics. In that material terrain, there are changes in the productive model. And we need to adapt to that change in the productive model.

Both things happen: an industry that needs knowledge workers and a generation that has developed the concept of the individual to the point of saying: I do not have to lose my life in exchange for a salary.

That would be the first line of change at the cultural level, the material one. And then we have the world of ideas, which is the other line of cultural change, which is when suddenly new ideas arise that generate new possibilities. That is why the issue of reality being so volatile, because really things start to be possible when we think they are possible many times.

Both things happen at the same time. On one hand, we have a change in the material conditions of existence in which we have an industry that needs knowledge work and there is a whole way of producing and obtaining material benefit. And on the other hand, there is a generation that, from my point of view, ideologically comes from the French Revolution and the Declaration of Human Rights, with the rise of the individual as a being of rights and freedoms that develops during the 20th century. And at this moment, due to a generational issue, the generations of the 21st century.

What has happened for the ideas to have a different approach? From my point of view, it has been the evolution of that concept of the individual that comes from the French Revolution, which coincides precisely at the beginning of the industrial era, and that concept of the individual develops until today, in which a young person says they are not going to sacrifice their life for the world of work and that they want to have a relevant, meaningful life.

They want to feel that they have lived fully and are not willing to work for just anyone. That is an idea that we cannot say is the majority, that it is not extendable to all social classes, nor to all countries, nor to all socioeconomic conditions. But it is a shoot that has been born and is spreading. Therefore, what tells us that the conditions are ripe for that thought to germinate and spread. I believe both things happen: an industry that needs knowledge workers and a generation that has developed the concept of the individual to the point of saying I do not have to sacrifice myself at the labor level, lose my life in exchange for a salary.

Infantilization of Agile

A couple of things happen. The first is that tools are being used that are from another context, I have worked a lot with those tools when I worked with teenagers, with children. That is their language and it is great to work like that. But we are in an adult context and in a work context. For 99% of humanity, it is not a place where they are going to have fun. So that leap is what makes us feel very strange.

If you are going to do something that tries to change the system, the system will devour it.

Then something else happens. Anyone can talk about group dynamization techniques and anyone can make a game. So I think there is a lack of certain rigor to study. I mean, I think it's great that you do it. Study, train well and you have to know what you are doing and what risk it entails, because it entails risks for the people we can harm a specific person. And then, already on a more philosophical level, like a friend of mine, who is gamifying everything, who thinks life is very boring. I do not need to play a game for us to have a good time.

The most relevant part for me anthropologically of this that seems to me to the moment we study in sociology, when El Corte Inglés put a showcase with punk fashion, and from there it destroyed the punk movement. I was taught in social work very early.

If you are going to do something that tries to change the system, the system will devour it.

And it makes sense that the system tries to devour, devour Agile and take away the most reformist sense it may have. And I do not say revolutionary because we already know it is not revolutionary, but it is reformist. So let's take away everything that we do not like so much from where we are today and infantilization seems to me the most effective way to empty Agile of meaning.

If you believe that working with groups and with activities of this type is your thing, great. The only thing I say is train yourself, study. We have also gone a lot on the side of coaching. People who have not had flight hours in helping other people. And when I have had the luck to be asked, I have said go volunteer, go volunteer with people. And start to approach coaching from a simple help relationship in which little is expected of you. You cannot pay for a coaching training and start charging someone from the next day because you do not have a journey yet as a coach.

Is Agile a revolutionary change?

No, Agile is not a revolutionary change. A revolution is changing the foundations of a system. Changing the logic of a system. Agile is not proposing, for example, that the greater benefit we are going to obtain with adaptive project management, that extra benefit we are going to obtain will be redistributed among the workers who have contributed to it. We are not proposing, we are not questioning that. Moreover, I would tell you that we do not want to question that, because if we questioned that, Agile would not have reached where it has, and because that is another conversation. And I do not have a model for that. I am not clear about it. I applaud the initiative that exists in that sense, but I think we are not mature enough to talk about that. Agile proposes that we are going to improve efficiency in project management so that you can obtain benefits, even more benefits than you are. In fact, it is a criticism that has been made to me many times by my friends: are you going to make this multinational earn more money? Yes, but I am not only doing that. I am doing something that for me is much more important.

I believe there is a deficit in our societies of the capacity for coexistence and we live in democracies that should mature

And that is the other issue, which is the issue of education in coexistence, education in values. We have evolved towards a much more individualistic society. As we said, we have moved to cities, we live in smaller families, with much less community. We are not so inserted in communities, we are not inserted in so many collective projects and that means we are losing training at the level of social relations, at the level of undertaking projects with others. Before, when you lived in a village, you had a boundary or you had a community land. A pasture that had to be managed, the Town Hall had a certain weight, but not as much as the coordination of neighbors, collaboration. Even when a neighbor's house burned down, a Sunday was made for everyone to go build or help restore the house.

There was a sense of community belonging. We have lost that, and that means we do not socialize with such a diversity of profiles. More with our family. The Church has also lost an important part of what it had. The number of people who went to church and listened to talk about values. That preaching now can be had by television, but we already know that television first is not what it was and second does not talk about values and many times what it works with are anti-values. I believe there is a deficit in our societies of the capacity for coexistence and we live in democracies that should mature, in which we should be deepening the capacity to understand others, to agree with them. So for me, that area has remained in the world of work, it is one of the few areas where we still have to undertake projects with other people. We have to understand each other and they are not people we have chosen. It is the one who was passing by and I have to work with them.

And that is a great lesson at the social level. If we are able to take advantage of that to learn to understand, to talk, to accept the other, to let ourselves be influenced by their ideas, which is really what Agile is doing, forcing teamwork, forcing collective decision-making for the good of all. That is, it is teaching us to cooperate.

And for me, that is like a mini social rehearsal. My dream is if we all learn in the world of work to relate to others, this world can be better than we will come out of there. We can teach our children to accept different ideas, we will go down the street and we will be able to understand what is happening to another person and we will be able to have the skills because we have trained them in the world of work. So for me, it is an opportunity to learn democracy.

Sustainability vs Convenience

Especially because the benefits are based on what we said before, a debt for the rest. That is, at the environmental level, for example, we are talking about technology and very little is said about the ecological cost of technology. I have been concerned about this for many years. That is, it is a topic that at some point we will have to face because the cost exists. But the benefit for certain companies. And then something else happens, also at the State level, which is the governance of the Network, of the Internet. That is, it is a territory without a State and it must also be governed. Just like space. That is, space is something that will have to be governed in some way. We have great challenges at the management level for the future and I do not know if it happened to you in the pandemic, but I said that "they should call us to manage this, we are agilists," we know about management.

We are learning a lot about management. But what does not make sense is clear. There are many interests, right? Who will bell the cat? Well, what we do not have is very difficult. And politics is as it is. I believe that before I die something will have changed, something will be coming out somewhere, some kind of initiative, hope, model, proto-model, because yes, I believe it is changing, what happens is that we still have a way to go.