There’s irrefutable proof that rules aren’t enough to make an organization work: work-to-rule strikes (in French “grève du zèle”).

When workers want to block a system without breaking the law, they follow regulations to the letter. No walkout and perfect obedience. And everything stops!

The living work

Working isn’t executing. It’s bridging the gap between what you’re asked to do and what actually needs to happen.

The operator who senses the breakdown before the sensors do. The nurse who adapts the protocol to the actual patient. The developer who knows the code “works” but won’t hold. This isn’t disobedience. This is work itself. Aka the “living work”.

Working = Cooperating = Cheating

Let’s call it what it is: real work is constant cheating. Tolerated and necessary. Denied by the very people who benefit from it.

And it’s in this cheating that cooperation was born. We don’t cooperate by following the same rules, but by figuring out together how to work around what doesn’t work. These arrangements passed between peers, never in the procedures, are the product of clandestine deliberation.

A system that tolerates no deviation from the prescribed is a system that can no longer learn.

And now there are AI agents that do exactly what they’re told…