Innovating Nothing: How the System Reinvents Itself to Stay the Same
Interacting with the System: The Small Business Experiment
One of the clearest points of experimentation in this phase of the 99-Day Rewire has been observing how small businesses interact with bigger systems. Specifically—how they’re forced to.
What I’ve noticed is this: In order to grow, small businesses climb upward through economic hierarchies. First, they cater to individuals or local needs. Then, they try to serve larger companies, and eventually enter corporate procurement pipelines.
That growth? It comes at a cost.
To play the game, they must comply with corporate frameworks: approved suppliers, formalised policies, inflexible schedules. Even boutique businesses, born out of creativity or family legacy, slowly shift toward mirroring the very systems that broke their founders in the first place.
What’s worse, passion fuels this burnout even faster. Because when you care about your work, you push harder. That’s where the danger creeps in—providing value becomes debilitating.
And so, the survival-of-the-fittest dynamic kicks in. Growth becomes a race. And work culture, even in the smallest of settings, becomes indistinguishable from the very environments we were trying to escape.
The Startup Mirage: Agility Disguised as Hustle
With some well-deserved clarity of mind over the past couple of months of detox from toxic work environments, I come with new hopes and I explore the realms of boutique companies, family-owned setups—and I can pragmatically sit and compare. Having had my own boutique consultancy at one point I am noticing a lot of similarities.
In fact, in 2023 I ran my own boutique consultancy while developing an app with my partner. Our goal was to innovate while still catering to corporate clients between the UAE and the UK. I genuinely believed I could balance both—offering something new while staying 'relevant' enough for the larger system. But the truth? I was pulled back into the same cycles. The meetings, the timelines, the unspoken rules of “how things are done.” There was no space left to actually create. I wasn’t building something different—I was just rebuilding the same broken machine in a smaller frame.
The only difference is, back then my intention was to grow as a business—not to interact sustainably with multiple businesses to experience different work models.
First couple of weeks so far I notice the hustle that takes precedence over wellbeing, I also see a lot more creativity and connectivity but sad to see that the work model is a copycat of what we have on a corporate level.
Henry Mintzberg, in Structure in Fives (1983), outlines five configurations of organisational structures. He found that startups and small firms often default to bureaucratic templates, stifling the flexibility that initially made them attractive. Fast forward from the 80s and Dee Hock, founder of Visa, counters this with his concept of chaordic organisations—blending chaos and order. In One From Many (2005), he outlines how decentralised structures empower innovation, resilience, and adaptability. Unlike traditional top-down approaches, chaordic systems foster self-management and distributed authority.
“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” – Hock (2005)
Just like Hock, my instinct was similar—we are really, really bad at getting rid of what no longer serves.
Repeating the Loop: Why Awareness Isn’t Enough
Here’s the strange thing: we’ve known about these problems for decades. From academic papers to global trend reports, the critiques are there—robust, insightful, and often eerily accurate. And yet… nothing really changes. We just keep saying the same things in different packaging, dressing up old dysfunctions in fresh terminology.
Shoshana Zuboff warned us back in 1988 in In the Age of the Smart Machine that emerging technologies wouldn’t just enhance productivity—they’d reshape it. Her insight was that information systems were less about empowering workers and more about visibility, control, and surveillance. She foresaw how digital tools would shift the emphasis from meaningful work to the performance of work—a dynamic that now defines our era of Slack notifications, Zoom fatigue, and 24/7 “presence.”
Decades later, David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs (2018), exposed the emotional and societal toll of this performance culture. He argued that many modern roles—especially in white-collar sectors—exist primarily to justify their own existence, creating layers of bureaucracy that add no value but require constant maintenance. People aren’t burned out from work itself—they’re burned out from the performance of work.
And this isn’t just theoretical. The Microsoft Work Trend Index (2023) reveals that nearly 64% of workers report lacking time and energy to do their actual jobs because of meetings, notifications, and digital clutter. Even more concerning, 60% of leaders are already worried about productivity—despite rising hours worked. It's not that people aren't working—they're drowning in performative tasks that give the illusion of output but starve creativity and real progress.
Even in supposedly progressive or “anti-corporate” environments, this performativity persists. Meetings become rituals. Internal comms become proof-of-work. “Productivity” software becomes digital surveillance. We optimise for optics, not outcomes.
And the most frustrating part? We’re not short on knowledge. We have the data, the diagnoses, the vocabulary. What we lack is structural courage. Implementation stalls because transformation requires dismantling—not tweaking. And dismantling feels dangerous to systems that rely on control and predictability.
So, we keep rebranding dysfunction. We slap on new terms like “agile,” “hybrid,” or “flex,” and pretend that’s evolution.
It’s not. It’s stagnation with a facelift.
The Cabinet Metaphor: Why We're Afraid to Start Over
Today, as I was reflecting on system-wide stagnation, I had a clear image of building an IKEA cabinet. You follow the steps, and halfway through, you realise something’s off—maybe a screw is misplaced, or the wrong panel is flipped. But instead of going back, you keep building, hoping it’ll hold. Eventually, it stands—barely. One leg shorter, slightly crooked, but “good enough.” That’s exactly what we’ve done with work structures. The foundations are flawed, but rather than dismantle and redesign, we patch it with well-being seminars, flexible Fridays, and Slack emojis pretending to be culture.
To truly fix it, we need to take it apart. That means stripping it back to the blueprint and rebuilding with principles of interconnectedness, adaptability, and neuro-alignment. Because what we’re doing now isn’t just inefficient—it’s neurologically unsustainable.
When people stay in the "mill" too long—constantly in productivity mode without downtime—they operate primarily from the Task Positive Network (TPN). This brain network is crucial for focused, goal-directed tasks, but it suppresses activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN), the area associated with introspection, creativity, and big-picture thinking (Margulies et al., 2016). The longer we remain in task mode without pause, the more we inhibit divergent thinking, insight, and emotional processing. In short, we lose our ability to imagine a better way of working.
What’s worse is that chronic overactivation of the TPN—without sufficient transitions into the DMN—leads to fatigue, mental rigidity, and emotional dysregulation (Menon, 2011). This isn’t just burnout. It’s a neurological bottleneck. Our brains need rhythm—cycles between execution and reflection—not endless sprints.
We can’t meditate our way out of a structural misalignment. Creativity and focus must co-exist in any sustainable work design. And just like in neural systems, the health of an organisation depends not only on how well it executes tasks, but on how it integrates downtime, reflection, and spontaneous idea generation into its very framework.
So… What Now?
I do have an idea so crazy that may actually work… but one I know for now, is impossible —so I will stick to my experiment…. And leave you with question:
What happens when we stop trying to mimic success and start designing our own metrics?
The future isn’t a one-size-fits-all framework. It’s not “flexible hours” slapped on top of a broken hierarchy. It’s about creating adaptive systems where small businesses don’t have to conform to harmful corporate practices just to survive. Where growth doesn’t mean burnout. Where working hard doesn’t mean working yourself into the ground.
We don’t need another tweak. We need a paradigm shift. One that starts with questioning the assumptions we’ve normalised—and finding the courage to dismantle the cabinet and start again.
What is your experience?
Let’s rewire together!
References
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs: A theory. Simon & Schuster.
Hock, D. (2005). One from many: VISA and the rise of chaordic organization. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Margulies, D. S., Ghosh, S. S., Goulas, A., Falkiewicz, M., Huntenburg, J. M., Langs, G., ... & Smallwood, J. (2016). Situating the default-mode network along a principal gradient of macroscale cortical organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(44), 12574–12579. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1608282113
Menon, V. (2011). Large-scale brain networks and psychopathology: A unifying triple network model. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(10), 483–506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.08.003
Microsoft. (2023). 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report: Will AI fix work? Retrieved from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index
Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in fives: Designing effective organizations. Prentice Hall.
Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power. Basic Books.
