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Right, pull up a chair, or don’t, I ain’t your mum. But if you’re still standing, you’re probably one of the poor sods trying to make sense of what passes for sensible talk in the corporate world these days. Every year, same story. Some new phrase pops up, shiny and vague, designed to make you feel like an idiot if you don’t immediately grasp its profound, earth-shattering meaning. This year, or rather, as we roll into 2025, the latest bit of baffling management-speak doing the rounds is “crew disquantified org.” Sounds like something straight outta a sci-fi flick where the robots broke down, doesn’t it? Or maybe a bad metal band name.
Honestly, when I first heard it, I thought some posh consultant in a suit that cost more than my first car had finally gone completely off his rocker. A “disquantified org”? What the hell is that, a charity for spreadsheets with low self-esteem? But then you hear it enough, from enough earnest-looking young guns with their fancy degrees, and you realise it’s just another way to talk about something we’ve always known, but now they’ve put a label on it. A label that makes it sound like a complex problem only they, with their PowerPoint slides and six-figure fees, can solve.
So, what’s this “disquantified” malarkey all about then?
Look, it’s pretty simple when you strip away the corporate varnish, innit? It’s about the stuff you can’t stick a number on. The things that actually make a workplace tick, or fall apart, but don’t show up on a KPI dashboard. We’re talking about the chemistry between a bunch of blokes and lasses in a team, the spark of an idea born out of a random chat, the sheer grit someone shows when they’re up against it, the laughter that stops folk from walking out the door at 5:01 PM. All that messy, human stuff that makes an organization more than just a collection of job descriptions and quarterly targets. That’s your “disquantified” bit. It’s the vibe, the atmosphere, the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of a good crew. Or a bad one.
I’ve seen it a hundred times in my 20-odd years editing newspapers, watching businesses rise and fall. You can track every click, every sale, every phone call, and still miss the bleedin’ point. I remember back in ’08, during the big kerfuffle, we had this young reporter, barely out of uni, a real nervous Nellie at first. The numbers said she wasn’t pulling her weight on breaking news – too slow, too many rewrites. But what those numbers didn’t show was how she’d spend hours on the phone with ordinary folk, listening to their stories, digging up angles no one else thought of. She built trust, mate, proper trust. And because of that, she brought us some of the most compelling human interest pieces we’d ever run, the kind that made people actually buy the paper, not just skim it online. You can’t quantify empathy on a spreadsheet, can you? You try and put a metric on someone’s gut feeling or their ability to calm down a screaming reader, and you’re already lost. That’s the heart of a “crew disquantified org” right there. It’s the recognition, finally, that some of the most vital bits of any operation just don’t fit into a tidy little box with a dollar sign next to it.
The Great Measurement Obsession: How We Got Here
For years, it’s been all about the numbers, hasn’t it? Every manager, from the fresh-faced grad to the grey-haired veteran, has been told to “measure everything that moves.” If you couldn’t count it, chart it, or graph it, then it apparently didn’t exist. It became this holy grail, this relentless pursuit of data, data, data. And don’t get me wrong, data’s got its place. You need to know if you’re making money or losing it, if your customers are happy or if they’re about to run for the hills. Fair enough. But somewhere along the line, it turned into this weird religion. Everything had to be quantifiable. Every single interaction, every creative spark, every quiet act of kindness that holds a team together when the chips are down.
Is this just another corporate buzzword that’ll vanish by 2026?
That’s a fair question, aye, and one I get asked a lot when these new phrases start bubbling up. My gut tells me this one might stick around a bit longer than most, though not necessarily because the consultants are finally talking sense. More likely because the problem it describes is actually getting worse. Think about it: we’re drowning in more data than ever before. Every click, every keystroke, every online meeting is tracked. AI’s getting smarter, telling us what happened, and even why it happened, according to its algorithms. But it still misses the “how” and the “who” in the human sense.
We’ve become so obsessed with the measurable, we’ve started to forget about the immeasurable. And that’s where the “disquantified” bit comes in. It’s a pushback. A quiet, probably frustrated, recognition that you can’t manage human beings like they’re lines of code or widgets on an assembly line. You can’t just optimise “team spirit” or “employee happiness” by throwing a survey at it and then wondering why the numbers don’t go up. People ain’t numbers, mate. They’re complicated, messy, emotional, and sometimes downright irrational creatures. And that’s exactly why they’re so damn good at solving problems that AI can’t even dream of. That’s where innovation actually lives, not in a spreadsheet.
I recall an old layout designer we had, Geoff, bless his cotton socks. He wasn’t the fastest, and sometimes his designs were a bit… colourful. But put him in a room with a stressed-out journalist, and he’d calm ’em down, make ’em laugh, and somehow pull together a page that just worked. His “productivity” on paper was mediocre, but his actual contribution to the newsroom’s sanity and quality of output was astronomical. He was a disquantified asset, pure and simple. Try putting that on a performance review, eh? “Demonstrates exceptional ability to prevent colleagues from having public meltdowns: 10/10.” You can’t.
The Perils of Over-Quantification: What Happens When You Try to Measure Everything
You start to lose the plot, that’s what. When you push too hard to quantify every last thing, two main things happen. First, people game the system. They focus on hitting the numbers, not on doing the right thing. If you measure call times, calls get shorter, quality goes down. If you measure articles published, you get a load of rushed, half-baked rubbish. It’s human nature, innit? We’re told to aim for X, so we aim for X, often at the expense of Y and Z, even if Y and Z are actually more important for the big picture.
Second, and this is probably more damaging in the long run, you crush the spirit. You turn what should be a creative, collaborative environment into a sterile, soulless factory floor. When every moment is tracked, every conversation potentially logged, people stop taking risks. They stop being creative. They stop having those spontaneous, slightly daft ideas that sometimes turn into gold. Why bother, if it’s just going to slow down your metric for “ideas generated per hour”? It stifles that natural spark, that bit of magic that separates a great team from a mediocre one. It’s like trying to weigh smoke. You just can’t do it, and you’ll probably burn your fingers trying.
The Human Element: The Unseen Force
Let’s face it, most of us in the real world, the ones actually doing the work, we know this stuff instinctively. We know that the person who brings in the donuts on a Monday, or stays late to help a struggling colleague, or just tells a cracking joke that lightens the mood, is worth their weight in gold. You can’t put a price on that, but it makes a hell of a difference to how a day feels, and ultimately, to how well a team works together.
I remember my first proper editor, old man McKenzie, a proper Glaswegian, sharp as a tack and tougher than old boots. He never cared about how many stories you filed, or how many phone calls you made. He cared about the quality of the story, and if you had the guts to chase it down. He’d say, “Aye, lad, you can count the pennies, but if ye lose the soul, ye’ve lost everything.” He knew then, what these fancy folks are only just getting around to calling “disquantified.” It’s the soul of the crew, the passion, the shared purpose that makes them want to turn up every day, even when it’s raining outside and the bosses are being right plonkers.
What’s a manager supposed to do with this ‘disquantified’ idea, then?
Good question, you probably think I’m just here to moan, don’t you? Nah, not entirely. If you’re a manager, or even just someone trying to get through the working week without pulling your hair out, this “disquantified” notion isn’t about throwing out all the metrics. It’s about balance, innit? It’s about remembering that the numbers are a tool, not the master. You still need ’em for the bits they’re good for. But you also need to use your eyeballs, your ears, and your gut.
Spend some time observing your team. Not just looking at their screens, but watching how they interact. Listen to what they’re saying in the coffee room, not just in the formal meetings. Are they laughing? Are they helping each other out without being asked? Are they looking genuinely stressed, or just a bit knackered? These are the real indicators of how your “disquantified org” is faring. You gotta be present, truly present, and actually care about the people, not just their output.
It means trusting people to get on with it, even if their methods don’t fit your perfectly engineered workflow. It means fostering an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes, to have a bit of a laugh, to be human. Because those are the places where creativity flourishes, where loyalty is built, and where people genuinely want to go the extra mile. It’s about building a sense of belonging, a proper crew, rather than just a collection of individuals hitting targets.
The Future of Work (and Common Sense)
As we sail into 2025, with AI getting smarter and the world getting faster, it’s going to be even more tempting to try and automate and quantify every last thing. But that’s exactly why this “crew disquantified org” concept, for all its clunky name, actually matters. It’s a reminder that at the end of the day, businesses are run by people, for people. And people are wonderfully, frustratingly, unquantifiable.
The real win isn’t in finding new ways to measure the unmeasurable; it’s in accepting that some of the most powerful forces in an organization simply defy easy classification. It’s about focusing on the human side of things, the relationships, the shared passion, the intuition, the sheer bloody-mindedness of a good team when they’re up against a deadline. These are the things that differentiate a truly brilliant outfit from one that’s just ticking boxes.
Can’t we just use AI to measure this ‘disquantified’ stuff?
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? And frankly, it’s the sort of daft idea you hear floating around these days. You want to use AI to measure “team spirit” or “employee morale”? Good luck with that, pal. You’ll end up with a load of fancy graphs that tell you absolutely nothing real. AI can spot patterns, sure. It can tell you that when people use certain words in emails, morale seems to dip, or that collaboration tools are used less when sales targets are missed. But it doesn’t tell you why that’s happening, or what the underlying human emotion is. It can’t understand the sigh of frustration after a bad meeting, or the quiet triumph when a colleague finally cracks a tough problem. It can’t feel the tension, the joy, the exhaustion.
AI deals in data. Human experience? That’s a different beast entirely. Trying to make an algorithm understand the nuanced, often contradictory, feelings that drive a “disquantified org” is like trying to explain the taste of a good pint to a spreadsheet. It ain’t gonna happen. We’ve got to remember that these machines are tools, very clever tools, but they ain’t got a soul. And the “disquantified” bit of an organization, that’s where the soul lives. It’s the unique blend of personalities, experiences, and quirks that makes a group of people truly a “crew.”
So, there you have it. This “crew disquantified org” business, it ain’t some earth-shattering new idea. It’s just a new, slightly convoluted way of saying what common sense has always told us: people matter. The stuff that makes them people – their feelings, their interactions, their unquantifiable spirit – that’s the real gold. And if you try to put a number on it, you’ll probably just scare it away. Stop looking at your damn dashboards for everything, and start looking at the faces of the people you work with. You’ll learn a hell of a lot more, believe you me.
