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You ask me about “team disquantified org.” Honestly, the name itself makes my teeth ache a bit, sounds like something cooked up in a corporate retreat where they served artisanal kombucha. But the idea behind it? Yeah, that’s got legs. It’s about damn time, if you ask me. For two decades, I’ve watched folks in shiny towers try to measure everything that moves, everything that breathes. They put a number on it, slap it on a dashboard, and call it ‘progress.’ It’s a load of rubbish, most of it. The real work, the stuff that makes a difference, rarely fits neatly into a spreadsheet cell.
They call it ‘metrics-driven,’ ‘data-first.’ I call it ‘spreadsheet tyranny.’ How many times have I seen good people, smart people, bend themselves into pretzels trying to hit some arbitrary target, some percentage point, some ‘engagement’ score that means diddly squat in the real world? All so some middle manager can tick a box and report up the chain? It’s soul-crushing. It pushes people to game the system, to chase the number instead of doing the actual, useful job. You see it everywhere. Sales teams pushing product nobody needs just to hit quota, journalists cranking out clickbait headlines instead of digging for truth because ‘page views’ are king. It’s a sickness, I tell ya.
The Cult of the Quantifiable
Remember the old days? We knew what good work looked like. You saw it. You felt it. A good reporter delivered the story, built trust with sources. A good ad rep got results for their client, not just sold space. Now, it’s all about ‘performance reviews’ tied to ‘key performance indicators’ – KPIs, they love their acronyms, don’t they? It’s like they think human effort is some kind of factory widget, each one identical, each one measurable to the nanometer. It ain’t. Never was. A genuine craftsman, a true innovator, a team that clicks? That ain’t numbers. That’s alchemy, pure and simple.
What’s your gut tell you? That’s what I’ve always asked. After all these years, my gut, it’s pretty well calibrated. I can walk into a newsroom, look around, and tell you pretty quickly if it’s a tight ship or a leaky sieve. You watch the interactions. You listen to the chatter. You see the pride in the work, or the lack of it. That’s the real data. Not some fancy algorithm that tells you Sarah spent X minutes on Y task. Who cares? Did Sarah deliver something brilliant, something impactful? That’s the only question that matters. This whole “team disquantified org” thing, it’s a rebellion against that factory floor mentality. Good on ’em.
So, What Does “Disquantified” Even Mean?
It ain’t about throwing out all numbers. Don’t be daft. Revenue matters. Profit matters. You can’t run a paper on sunshine and good intentions. But it means the numbers aren’t the only thing. And they sure as hell aren’t the first thing. It means you look at the human stuff. The trust. The shared purpose. The way people talk to each other, the way they pick each other up when things go sideways. It’s about knowing your people, letting them do their best work, and trusting them to get it done. It’s about outcomes, real outcomes, not just input metrics. You want to know if a newsroom’s doing well? Look at the quality of the stories, the impact on the community, the respect it earns. Not just web traffic or ad impressions. Those things follow good work, they don’t define it.
How do you even begin to measure ‘team cohesion’ with a number? You can’t. You feel it. A team that’s firing on all cylinders, they practically breathe the same air. They anticipate each other’s moves. They cover each other’s backs. You think you can put that in a bar chart? Get outta here.
The Big Guns and the Small Guys Moving This Way
Even the big, fancy consulting outfits, the ones that usually live and die by the PowerPoint slide deck crammed with graphs, they’re starting to talk a different tune. I’ve seen Deloitte and PwC, for all their corporate speak, putting out reports on “human-centric organizations” and “organizational health.” They’re still charging a fortune for it, mind you, but at least the language is shifting. They’re telling companies to look at culture, at purpose, at how people feel about their work, not just how many widgets they’re churning out.
Then you got firms like RedThread Research. They’re not massive, but they’re smart. They study human capital, the real guts of how people work. They’re always talking about the qualitative side, the things that are hard to put in a box. They understand that a happy, engaged team does better work, plain and simple. And Josh Bersin Company, that analyst shop? He’s been beating the drum for years about moving past just “efficiency” and towards things like “team performance” and “employee experience” that ain’t always about hitting a target.
Smaller outfits too, the ones building things on the ground. You see it in places like Basecamp – not a consulting firm, but a software company that’s famously anti-hustle culture, pro-focused work, and they emphasize small, self-directed teams. They’ve been “disquantified” for ages without calling it that. Or think about firms like Gloat, they build internal talent marketplaces, helping companies match people to projects based on skills and interest, not just a job title or a ‘score.’ It’s a step towards valuing contribution, not just a metric. These companies, they get it. They understand that the best work comes from trust and autonomy, not from constantly looking over someone’s shoulder with a stopwatch.
What About Accountability? Don’t People Slack Off?
Someone always asks this. Always. “If you don’t measure it, how do you know they’re working?” My answer? If you need a spreadsheet to tell you someone’s slacking, you got a problem way bigger than the numbers. You got a trust problem. You got a hiring problem. And you got a leadership problem. Good leaders, they know their team. They see who’s pulling their weight, who’s struggling, who’s a superstar. It’s not magic. It’s observation. It’s conversation. It’s being present.
Accountability still exists. It just looks different. It’s about delivering quality work. It’s about meeting commitments you made. It’s about contributing to the whole, the team disquantified org ethos. If someone isn’t doing that, you have a chat. You don’t need a red mark on a ‘performance dashboard.’ That just makes everyone resentful. People often respond to trust with more trust, not less. And you know what? Some people will always take advantage. That’s life. They don’t last long in a healthy environment anyway. They stick out like a sore thumb.
Why Now? What Changed?
Well, a lot changed. We just came through a few years where everyone worked from their spare bedroom, or kitchen table, or wherever they could plonk a laptop. Suddenly, those old metrics, they looked pretty silly. How do you measure ‘office presence’ when there’s no office? How do you measure ‘water cooler chats’ when the water cooler is your own fridge? Leaders had to trust their people. They had to rely on outcomes, not just process. And guess what? A lot of work still got done. Pretty good work, in many cases.
The sheer exhaustion of the ‘hustle culture’ plays a part too. Everyone’s tired of being on, all the time. Tired of chasing endless targets that move the goalposts every quarter. This push for a “team disquantified org” it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s about humanizing work again. It’s about recognizing that people aren’t just cogs in a machine. They got brains, hearts, lives outside of work. When you respect that, when you trust that, you get more out of them, not less. Seems simple, doesn’t it? But simplicity is a hard thing for a lot of these big corporations to grasp. They like things complicated. Makes it easier to justify the consultants’ fees, I suppose.
The Qualitative Overload – A New Problem?
Now, I’ve heard some chatter, the kind that makes your eyes roll back in your head. People worrying about “qualitative overload.” They say, “If we don’t have numbers, how do we compare? How do we scale?” Nonsense. You compare by observing, by understanding context. You scale by building robust internal communication, by fostering a shared understanding of goals, by trusting your leaders to lead.
It’s about having honest conversations. It’s about feedback that feels genuine, not like a box-ticking exercise. You know, when I sit down with a reporter and we go over their story, I don’t give them a ‘score’ on their lede. I tell them, “The start’s weak, doesn’t grab me. Try again.” Or “This paragraph here? Golden. That’s the stuff we need more of.” It’s specific. It’s direct. It’s about improvement, not about a number that goes into a database. The same principles apply to a whole team.
What if My Boss Still Demands Numbers?
Look, some folks, they’re just stuck. They’ve been told their whole career that if it ain’t measurable, it ain’t real. You might not be able to turn the Titanic around overnight. But you can start small. You can focus on your own team. You can advocate for different kinds of conversations in your performance reviews. You can show, by example, how a “team disquantified org” approach can actually deliver better results, happier people, and frankly, a more sustainable way of working.
You want people to be innovative? You want them to solve hard problems? You want them to come up with ideas that change the game? You don’t get that from telling them to hit a specific metric. You get that by giving them space. By giving them trust. By letting them fail without it being the end of the world. By celebrating the effort, not just the easily measured output. That’s how breakthroughs happen. Not by chasing a number someone cooked up in a spreadsheet. Never.
Where Does This Go Next?
I reckon this “team disquantified org” thing, it’s not a fad. It’s a natural correction. We went too far down the rabbit hole of quantification. The pendulum, it’s swinging back. Smart companies, they’ll lean into it. They’ll figure out how to value the unmeasurable. They’ll hire leaders who can lead with empathy and judgment, not just with a calculator.
It means more emphasis on things like emotional intelligence, on communication skills, on actual leadership. Not just managerial competence. There’s a difference, a big one. Managers manage things. Leaders lead people. This whole movement, it’s about leading people. It’s about recognizing that a team is more than the sum of its individual parts, much more. And that ‘more’ isn’t a number. It’s a feeling. It’s a power. It’s what makes good work, great.
It ain’t easy. You got to have courage. You got to be willing to trust. Some folks will never get it. They’ll always want their dashboards, their percentages, their neat little boxes. Let them. The rest of us, we’ll be building something real. Something that lasts. Something that actually makes people want to come to work in the morning, not dread it. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Getting good work done, with good people, in a way that doesn’t make you want to rip your hair out. The metrics can follow. Or not. I don’t really care.
