For a long time it was believed that it was necessary to manage people like machines, work extremely standardized, procedures minutely described, activities broken down to such a micro level that each person was just a small cog within a larger system. Charles Chaplin exemplified this management model well in the classic Modern Times, the criticism was simple: people are not machines, and should not be treated as such.
This criticism had an effect, especially in a world marked by the post-war period, having to figure out what to do with all the machinery and industrial products of an armed conflict that now no longer had market demand. Added to a need to recreate a modern infrastructure in countries that were devastated by war. There, it was no longer useful to say that people were machines; they were discarded in the same way as the shells that annihilated entire cities. Management should then value its members, and the idea that workers are "the organization's most important assets" emerged.
This idea was based on Maslow's pyramid of needs, who, studying the openings and ventilation spaces on the factory floor, ended up discovering that human behavior was linked to the way their needs were met. Thus, factories began to gain open windows, natural lighting, and the workers began to have autonomy over the work that was performed, management then began to look only at a few key indicators.
The truth is that some experiments focused on the well-being of the worker started much earlier, the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam is a good example that this concern was already present, in a visionary way, in 1925 in a mere Coffee, Tea and Tobacco factory. The factory (on the cover) is an example of the management's concern for the well-being of its employees, reasons that led it to become a Unesco heritage site.
Although it is a step in the right direction, the problem with these two models is that they simplify people, the first as machines, the second as assets. The simplification occurred because understanding the complexity of human nature was simply boring for any management model, which then preferred to opt for simplifying the scenario, abusing assumptions and restrictions, and seeking to look at only one side of the story.
The digital revolution brought a new quotient to the variables that involved management, which started to rely on so much new information, and arriving at a faster and faster pace, that it became simply impossible to manage any system through simplifications. The answer to the complex is no longer the simplification of the system, or the resistance to change, but the ability to accept it and grow with it.
This is where the idea arises that we don't actually want to manage people, but the system, which is the basis of Management 3.0. Just like several agility practices Management 3.0 does not seek to simplify the complex, but to embrace it. Understand that workers bring to the workplace their emotional charge of personal and family problems, that they have their dreams and ambitions independent of the organization they work for, that they have the capacity to organize their own work and execute it without supervision.
Management 3.0 seeks to understand people for what they are: people, and it is by understanding people that we begin to understand a little of what the system is, and instead of seeking to control key indicators in a system, management 3.0 seeks to give the system the tools it needs to manage itself: information radiators, lifelong learning, constant feedback, flexible and multidisciplinary structures, stimulating intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and many other practices that have a single goal: managing the system, not people.