DD475 - Entangled Work: The Confusion Tax and the Leadership Load by Dr Richard Claydon.

Modern organisations often describe their pressure as pace, complexity, transformation, collaboration, or leadership challenge.

The problem is often less dramatic and more specific. The work has stopped sorting itself properly.

Delivery issues arrive wrapped in stakeholder anxiety. Change work gets added to already saturated routines. Meetings become places where people try to manage performance, reassurance, alignment, and redesign all at once. Reliable people become shock absorbers. Responsive people become emotional infrastructure. Transformation becomes one more layer of work, only wearing better clothes.

Stefan Norrvall calls this Confusion Tax: the hidden cost of work that has not been clearly distinguished, ranked, or coordinated.

In a separate Drinking Dialogue, Stefan will explore how to reduce the Confusion Tax through enterprise architecture and organisational design. In this session, we’ll explore it through the lenses of people and leadership: what happens when badly sorted work becomes an entangled leadership load.

We’ll use three simple distinctions:

• Run — the work of continuity: keeping promises, maintaining standards, protecting reliability.
• Serve — the work of responsiveness: translating, repairing, adjusting, and holding interfaces together.
• Change — the work of adaptation: redesigning what the current arrangement can no longer carry.

All three are necessary. The problem is unmanaged mixture — when they are loaded onto the same people, forums, and roles as though they were one thing.

As usual, this will not be a lecture. There will be short provocations, small-group dialogue, and enough structure to help the conversation go in interesting and unexpected directions.

-----

Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).

He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”

Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.