A familiar management reflex still dominates organisational thinking: if we optimise output per unit of time, everything else will follow.

Productivity is assumed to be unambiguously good. More productivity, better outcomes. Organisational success is framed as the aggregation of individual efficiency: more features shipped, more reports generated, more emails processed, more meetings attended.

For a long time, this logic worked. In an industrial economy, productivity thinking was the correct response. Materials were stable. Processes were linear. Environments were predictable. Scientific management, time–motion studies, and standardisation delivered extraordinary gains. They helped build the modern industrial world.

But we no longer operate in that context. Applied to information work, productivity thinking produces pathological outcomes.