Summary: The dominant mental model for organisational design is outdated and no longer fit for purpose. The practices that exhaust and disengage people are not making organisations more effective. It’s time for a new approach, offered by the rewilding lens. This asks which management structures are actually earning their keep, and which are costing more than they return?
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report put global employee engagement at 23 per cent – more than three in four people at work were either passively or actively disengaged. The 2025 report recorded a further drop to 21 per cent, matching the lowest levels seen during the COVID lockdowns.
Organisations have responded with many sorts of resilience training but after more than a decade of comparative data, none of it has shifted the dial. We are treating symptoms of a systemic disease as though they are personal ailments.
The machine mindset is the problem
The dominant mental model for organisational design still traces back to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ – the idea, born in early 20th century factories, that human work could be optimised like any industrial process. Divide it into tasks, measure each one, eliminate waste and control the people doing it.
This model shaped not just factories but offices, hospitals and public services. It functioned when work was repetitive, markets were stable, and the future looked more or less like the past. But those conditions disappeared decades ago.
When you manage a living person as though they are a component in a mechanism, two things tend to happen.
- They underperform because the control-based environment suppresses initiative, creativity and engagement.
- They deteriorate, because living systems cannot sustain chronic misalignment without cost.
In 2019 The World Health Organization classified burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ – not an individual pathology. The cause is not that people are insufficiently resilient, it’s the conditions in which they are required to work.
We are treating symptoms of a systemic disease as though they are personal ailments
Wellness programmes can’t fix a broken design
Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist and systems thinker whose work, particularly Thinking in Systems, published after her death in 2008, became foundational to how we understand why complex systems resist change.
Her central argument was that the behaviour of a system is determined by its structure, and that the intentions of the people inside it matter far less than the design they are operating in. Change the people without changing the structure, and the structure reasserts itself.
Over three decades of consulting across primarily energy, banking and pharmaceuticals, I have witnessed the same dynamic play out: the tighter the management and structure, the more disengaged and exhausted the people become.
Increased measurement rarely produces better performance, just better compliance. Wellbeing and engagement initiatives could not override the structural logic generating the problem.
How living systems actually work
Nature is not managed in the same way as our organisations. There isn’t a central authority that directs a forest, nor quarterly reviews that allocate resources to individual trees. And yet forests are extraordinarily effectual: they are adaptive, resilient and self repairing.
The ecologist Merlin Sheldrake documented in his book Entangled Life that beneath every forest lies an intricate mycelial network connecting trees and plants across extraordinary distances.
Through these fungal threads, trees share carbon, nutrients, and chemical signals. They support struggling neighbours and transmit warnings about threats. Resources flow toward areas of greatest need – not because a coordinator instructs them to, but because that is how the system is structured.
No management consultant designed this. It evolved over hundreds of millions of years into something capable of sustaining life under conditions of radical uncertainty and constant change. We can learn from this.
Change the people without changing the structure, and the structure reasserts itself
Rewilding in practice
In ecology, rewilding is not about imposing a new design on a landscape. It is about removing the constraints that prevent natural processes from reasserting themselves – and then stepping back.
At Knepp Estate in West Sussex, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell stopped fighting their heavy clay soil and began working with it. They removed internal fencing, introduced free-roaming herbivores and allowed the land to find its own dynamic equilibrium.
Turtle doves, which had declined by 98 per cent in Britain since 1970, returned. The estate now hosts around 1 per cent of Britain’s entire breeding population of nightingales – not through intensive management, but through the withdrawal of inappropriate management.
The practices that exhaust and disengage people – surveillance-based performance management, excessive reporting, decision making centralised far above where actual work happens – are not making organisations more effective.
They are the equivalent of the intensive monoculture that depleted Knepp’s soil, consuming enormous energy while suppressing the processes that would otherwise create real value.
Rewilding an organisation does not mean abandoning structure or accountability. It means asking honestly which controls are load bearing and which are just the accumulated habits of an industrial model that no longer fits the circumstances.
The conversation HR needs to have
HR functions are frequently tasked with addressing culture without the authority to change the structures that create it. Wellbeing initiatives end up operating at the surface while the underlying system keeps producing the same outputs.
Shifting that requires a different conversation at leadership level – one that starts with how the organisation is designed rather than how employees are coping.
Senior leaders are often more open to this than HR teams expect. They can see the machine model’s limitations clearly enough from inside it. What they frequently lack is a different vocabulary for the problem.
The rewilding lens offers that – a practical question rather than a manifesto: which management structures are actually earning their keep, and which are costing more than they return? The engagement data makes this clear. At some point, continuing to ignore it becomes a choice.
Rewilding an organisation does not mean abandoning structure or accountability.
Key takeaways
- Burnout is a systems output – the WHO’s classification as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ reflects this directly. Address the system, not just the individual
- Control-based management suppresses the autonomy, trust and psychological safety that enable real performance
- Living systems offer working design principles such as distributed intelligence, functional interdependence and resources flowing toward need
- HR’s most important role is shifting leadership conversations from symptoms to structure
- Start with one question: if we designed this to enable rather than extract, what would change?
Thom Dennis is founder of Serenity In Leadership and author of Rewilding the Corporate Mind: Rediscovering Nature’s Blueprint for Leadership in an Age of Disruption and Division.
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