In his book ‘Burn Out Society’, Byung-Chul Han, suggests that today’s psychological maladies (from a psychoanalytic perspective) do not stem from the negativity of repression (i.e. repressing what you shouldn’t do) as was the case in Freud’s times. Instead, today’s maladies such as depression, burn out and ADHD etc., stem from an excess of positivity – an excess of können / an excess of can-do.
At first it made no sense to me either. Burning out from excess positivity?
I’ll try to summarize briefly, and then try to link to the term ‘agile burn out’.
Burn Out
Basically, burn out couldn’t have existed in my Grandfather’s time or before, only now due to the type of society we have.
In my grandfather’s ‘disciplinarian’ era, the verb that dominated was ‘dürfen’ (should) and psychological problems of the time were related to the repression of things that people should or shouldn’t do. Today, the dominant verb is ‘können’ (can). We are thus in a ‘Leistungsgesellschaft’ / Achievement society. Everything is possible. The problems in our current achievement society are different and new, and a consequence of the gluttony of what people can (potentially) do – thus, excess positivity.
Initially, the mention of ‘burn out’ caught my eye. Especially at this time of the year when I start feeling miserable anyway due to, what I think, is probably the lack of sunlight. I have heard people talk of ‘agile burn out’, but mainly in reference to the pace of work and the relentlessness of ‘sprinting’. Often assumed to be exhaustion and insufficient time to recuperate.
But is there more to it than that? I wondered if Byung-Chul was onto something here.
What about Agile Burn Out?
The command-and-control (disciplinarian) hierarchies of past eras have, today, been flipped into self-empowered teams, quite in line with Byung-Chul’s dominating verbs of the times. The very notion of the self-empowered team epitomizes not only ‘we can’ (as in self determination) but also ‘we can do it’ (achievement and success). You could rephrase some of the key elements of a scrum team into linguistic ‘can-do’ statements, for example:
- We can set our objectives.
- We can set our work for the sprint.
- We can set our pace / capacity.
- We can plan our work for the day.
- We can measure our success / we can deliver more value to the customer.
- We can improve how we work (and ourselves) continuously, etc.
Herein lies the psychological ‘pressure to achieve’ of our Leistungsgesellschaft. A relentless self-inflicted pressure. The master and subject dynamic is no longer structural, it’s within us. Always pushing ourselves to achieve more until we can’t / can’t do it. Burn out. And now: Agile burn out.
Burn out – when the ego overheats; hyperactive – like the immune system’s reaction to something alien (like a virus) entering the body. Thus, a rejection of the massification of the positive at a psychological level, says Byung-Chul.
Not an exhausted self, but a burnt out soul.
So maybe ‘agile burn out’ is simply nothing more than ‘burn out’ and has nothing specific to do with agile frameworks per se. Likewise, maybe Agile is a reflection of our ‘achievement society’ applied onto organisations and organisational behaviour.
Have you experienced burn out whilst working in an agile organisation? Could it be too much can do?