The ideal worker doesn’t exist. Most organisations are built for them anyway.
Organisations are built on assumptions about the people inside them: how quickly they adapt, how much complexity they can absorb, how decisions get made, how new technology fits into an already full day. Those assumptions rarely survive contact with reality. When they break, the organisation tends to ask the people to try harder, rather than ask whether the design still fits
It started with a line. On a panel, someone asked the usual question: how do we support staff at risk of burnout? Michelle said something that had been sitting with her for a while, that it is a leader’s responsibility to create people-shaped jobs, not to expect job-shaped people. It landed, and people were still messaging her about it days later.
The conviction behind it was hard-won. Michelle had burned out herself, badly, something she calls, lovingly and in hindsight, her dignified collapse. It forced her to rethink how work is designed and led. People Shaped Work is what came out of that: the argument that when the design is wrong, the honest response is to fix the design, not the person.
Most organisations are still designed around that impossible worker: always available, never distracted, no life outside the job. The cost of that does not stay hidden. It shows up in productivity, in how long it takes people to adopt something new, in who you lose, in risk nobody flagged until it was too late, and eventually in profit.
THE IDEAS UNDERNEATH THE WORK
The belief becomes practical through four frameworks. Used in sequence, they are how People Shaped Work reads an organisation: who a design excludes, why, what that exclusion costs, and what to do about it. Together they turn a vague sense that something is not working into a clear account of how the system is built, who it works for, and where it has to change.
People-Shaped Test → Ideal Worker Myth → Human Cost Diagram → People-Shaped Redesign
01
The People-Shaped Test.
Who is actually excluded by the way this is currently designed?
02
The Ideal Worker Myth.
Naming the impossible, always-on person organisations unconsciously design for.
03
The Human Cost Diagram.
When a system fails, who absorbs the cost? Making the invisible visible.
04
The People-Shaped Redesign.
Moving from the current design, to who it excludes, to what it costs, to what actually changes.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
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When performance, transformation or growth keeps getting stuck, changing the people inside the system is rarely enough. The system itself is what has to be understood.
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When someone struggles with a process, a structure, a technology or an operating model, the honest first question is what the design is asking of them. As Michelle puts it, burnout is not a performance issue, it is a design flaw. Many people problems inside organisations are design problems in disguise. Asking people to be more resilient leaves the design that exhausted them untouched.
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It shapes how decisions get made, how people absorb change, and whether strategy, technology and leadership translate into action. People-shaped work is flexible without being performative, and it is rooted in trust.
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An organisation is not a diagram. It is the lived experience of the people who run it, and a design that looks right on paper but fails in practice has not worked.