How Does Work Really Happen?

Understanding Human Dynamics in the Age of AI

TL;DR: At a struggling tech company, Elena uncovers that team failures stem from broken trust, poor communication, and misaligned expectations between departments. Success depends on understanding human dynamics, not just processes

How Does Work Happen?

As I continue to explore how AI might augment human interactions, this story of Synergy Solutions offers a glimpse into the complex dynamics of workplace collaboration. It's a reflection on the intricate ways teams work together, and I'm hopeful about how emerging technologies could augment our capabilities in coordination.

Synergy Solutions

The quarterly results were dismal. Synergy Solutions had missed its targets. Heads were bowed, eyes averted. A mood of resignation washed over the team, heavy with unspoken tensions.

"Looks like we overestimated market demand," Mark sighed, defeated. The product team exchanged knowing glances—they'd warned about aggressive forecasts months ago, but their concerns had been dismissed.

Sarah, usually optimistic, remained unusually quiet, staring at the disappointing figures. The marketing team's relationship with product development had grown strained after several missed feature deadlines. Each side blamed the other for communication gaps.

These tensions weren't new. Six months ago, a failed product launch had created rifts that never fully healed. The development team felt rushed by unrealistic deadlines, while marketing believed their market insights were being ignored. Trust had eroded slowly, meeting by meeting.

Elena stepped forward, sensing the team's withdrawal and the weight of past conflicts. "We might have misjudged the competition," one developer admitted. "Their latest release has features we didn't anticipate." The bitterness in his voice hinted at rejected feature proposals from months ago.

"Our marketing message isn't resonating," Sarah's deputy responded sharply. "Maybe if we'd had accurate timelines for the features we promised..." She left the accusation hanging.

The room crackled with old resentments. During last quarter's crisis, the development team worked weekends to meet deadlines they thought unreasonable. Meanwhile, marketing felt blindsided by last-minute feature changes that undermined their campaign messaging.

David, a senior engineer who'd been with the company since its early days, shifted uncomfortably. He had serious doubts about the product definition but had kept them to himself. After seeing how his previous technical concerns were dismissed, he'd grown increasingly hesitant to speak up. His silence, born of past disappointments, had widened the gap between the team's commitments and their outcomes.

Elena recognized the surface conflict masked deeper misalignments. After the tense meeting, she began a systematic assessment:

First, she mapped the mood shifts: development's increasing defensiveness, marketing's growing frustration, and David's withdrawal into silence. These weren't just personalities clashing—they reflected broken trust and unmet expectations.

Next, she examined promises made versus understood. Marketing had heard "we'll deliver these features" while development meant "we'll try to deliver if technically feasible." Each missed deadline widened this gap.

Most critically, she uncovered how teams assessed each other. Development saw marketing as unrealistic; marketing viewed development as obstructionist. These assessments, built on past disappointments, shaped every interaction.

"Before we can move forward," Elena concluded, "we need to rebuild how these teams see each other and their work."

Commitment: A Social Act

As Fernando Flores observed, a business is fundamentally a network of commitments. People coordinating their promises to each other create the fabric of an organization. Each commitment connects to others, forming chains of mutual obligation and possibility.

A commitment emerges when one person asks another to do something by a specific date, or when someone offers to do something by a date, and the other person agrees. This seemingly simple interaction requires several key elements:

Two distinct roles: A customer who needs something done and a performer who will do it. At Synergy, marketing often played customer to development's performer role, but neither fully understood their responsibilities in these positions.

Clear conditions of satisfaction: Both parties must share enough background to understand what's being requested. Elena saw how different professional backgrounds led to misaligned understandings - what marketing meant by "ready to launch" differed from development's interpretation.

Explicit timeframes: A commitment requires a specific due date that both parties understand and agree to. Vague timelines like "as soon as possible" or "next quarter" created confusion at Synergy.

Mutual sincerity: Both parties must be sincere - the customer in making the request and the performer in accepting it. At Synergy, sometimes marketing made requests they knew were unrealistic hoping development would "do their best," while development sometimes accepted timelines they didn't believe in to avoid conflict. This lack of mutual sincerity undermined real commitment.

Change and renegotiation: Commitments often must be renegotiated when circumstances change. This renegotiation frequently extends beyond the original parties - when development needs more time for a feature, the entire organization may need to renegotiate their commitments to customers, investors, and other stakeholders. At Synergy, isolated renegotiations between marketing and development created cascading problems because other affected teams weren't included in revising their interconnected commitments.

Moods: Our Constant State of Being

We don't exist outside of moods - they are our continuous way of experiencing the world. Each person operates in multiple moods simultaneously, shaped by their history and background.

At Synergy, Elena saw these layered moods. David's engineering background in German precision manufacturing created a mood of technical rigor, overlaid with resignation from years of ignored warnings. Marketing's startup experience generated both urgent optimism and defensive pressure.

Understanding these mood combinations helped Elena see how each person's background shaped their basic way of being in the workplace.

Assessment: Seeing Through Our Histories

Assessment isn't just evaluating situations - it's seeing possibilities through the lens of our experiences and training. Our professional and personal histories determine what we can and cannot see.

Elena discovered how different backgrounds created different capacities for assessment. Development's experience with technical debt made them acutely aware of quality risks. Marketing's history with missed opportunities made them especially sensitive to market timing.

These weren't just different opinions - they were different ways of seeing shaped by years of professional experience and cultural context.

Listening: Where Understanding Emerges

Communication happens in the listener, filtered through their moods and background. The speaker's challenge is understanding what the listener can hear given their history and current state.

At Synergy, Elena mapped these listening contexts. She saw how development's engineering culture made certain market arguments unhearable. She noticed how marketing's customer-focused background affected what technical explanations they could absorb.

Effective communication requires first understanding these listening contexts - the professional training, past experiences, and current moods that shaped what could be heard.

Trust: Three Essential Elements

Trust emerges from three fundamental elements: demonstrated ability to fulfill commitments, sincerity in making promises, and genuine care for others' concerns.

At Synergy, Elena mapped trust breakdowns across these dimensions:

Ability gaps: Development's technical capabilities were sound, but their capacity to meet aggressive timelines was compromised by technical debt. Marketing could spot opportunities but could not assess technical feasibility.

Sincerity questions: Each group doubted the other's commitment to promises. Development suspected marketing of making unrealistic pledges to customers. Marketing questioned development's willingness to meet market needs.

Care deficits: Neither group fully understood or valued the other's core concerns. Development didn't grasp marketing's market timing pressures. Marketing missed development's quality imperatives.

Building trust required addressing all three elements - strengthening delivery capabilities, ensuring sincere commitments, and fostering genuine care for each other's concerns.

Power: The Unspoken Architect

Power flows silently through organizational spaces, invisible yet omnipresent. It speaks through subtle gestures - a sigh that shifts a room's mood, a silence that carries more weight than words.

In Synergy Solutions, power manifested through unequal voices. Mark's defeated utterance carried an implicit authority. David's strategic silence revealed more about organizational dynamics than any explicit communication. Each team member became a careful choreographer of their own expression, navigating invisible hierarchies with precision.

The Human Complexity of Work

Work is not a machine, but a living system of human interactions. Commitments, moods, listening, and trust form an intricate dance that determines collective potential.

Our deepest challenges lie in understanding the unseen - the layers of mood, background, and unspoken expectations that shape every interaction. Communication happens in the listener, filtered through their experiences, fears, and hopes. What seems clear to one person becomes opaque to another.

Technologies like AI offer a fascinating lens - they might illuminate these invisible forces, but can never fully replace the fundamental human foundation of collaborative effort. Our challenge is to understand the deep, often unspoken elements that create - or obstruct - genuine teamwork.

Building a Real Team

Elena realized that despite shared project plans and regular meetings, Synergy didn't have a real team. They had groups of people attending the same meetings, nodding at the same milestones, but operating in separate realities.

Teamwork would require rebuilding fundamental capacities:

• The ability to have genuine discussions where people could surface concerns
• Trust that would let them question assumptions without triggering defensiveness
• Skills to listen across their different backgrounds and experiences
• Ways to make and keep promises they all understood similarly
• Shared assessments that integrated multiple perspectives

The path forward wasn't about better project tracking or more meetings. It was about rebuilding these basic human capabilities for working together. Only then could their project plans and milestones reflect real shared commitments rather than surface agreements.

Technology

The recent advances in GPT and AI technologies offer exciting possibilities for augmenting human collaboration:

1. Context Synthesis: GPT may rapidly analyze communication histories, revealing hidden interaction patterns that shape workplace relationships.
2. Perspective Translation: AI may bridge professional languages, translating between technical and marketing perspectives with nuanced understanding.
3. Commitment Mapping: Advanced AI agents may track organizational commitments, visualizing interconnected promises and potential conflicts.
4. Mood and Trust Analysis: AI may provide deep insights into team dynamics, detecting subtle trust erosion before it becomes critical.
5. Collaborative Intelligence: AI agents may surface unspoken concerns, offering neutral perspectives that enhance team communication.

The true potential of AI lies not in replacing human complexity, but in illuminating it. As we explore these technologies, we're discovering new ways to augment our natural capabilities for coordination, understanding, and collective problem-solving. AI becomes a mirror and a bridge, helping us see our collaborative potential more clearly.

Conclusion: The Human Foundation

Effective work emerges from a deep understanding of human dynamics. Recognizing diverse backgrounds, acknowledging varying moods, and fostering shared understanding are key to enabling collaboration.

Elena's approach at Synergy Solutions demonstrates that success is not just about processes or techniques, but about appreciating the fundamental human elements that make collective endeavors possible. Engaging with this human foundation is the key to unlocking genuine effectiveness in our organizations.

Note: This paper is deeply influenced by the work of Fernando Flores, Terry Winograd, and Gloria Flores in understanding organizational communication, human-computer interaction, and the critical role of moods in workplace dynamics.