Reflections on 40 Years of Workplace Reform
Part 2 of our series on workplace transformation in Australia
In Part 1, we explored the foundational work of Professor Bill Ford and the shift towards more dynamic, people-centric workplace systems. In this article, we explore the practical strategies that made those bold ideas real. As we progress the series, we will move between concepts and application.
Remember the buzzwords of the 80s and 90s? ‘Workplace reform’, ‘TQM’, ‘participative management’, ‘industrial democracy’, and ‘enterprise bargaining’ – these terms once promised a revolutionary new way of working in Australian organisations.
For many of us who lived through that era, these weren’t just slogans. They represented bold experiments in transforming workplaces. A key figure driving this change was Professor Bill Ford, whose work helped shift Australian organisations from rigid, industrial-age structures towards more dynamic, people-centric systems.
Now, forty years later, it’s worth asking: have we genuinely moved on, or are we simply recycling old ideas with shinier labels?
New Labels, Same Challenges?
The language has certainly evolved. ‘Industrial democracy’ morphed into ’empowerment’, which now appears as ‘Agile’ or ‘psychological safety’. Ford’s vision of moving from hierarchical ‘stove pipe structures’ to networked organisations is now discussed in terms of ‘ecosystems’ and ‘networked systems’.
Yet some core challenges remain remarkably persistent – as do many of the principles, methods, and processes developed back then.
Beyond Bill Ford’s influential work, inspiration was drawn from the work of Bjorn Gustavsen (Swedish Centre for Working Life), Donald Schön (‘Beyond the Stable State’), Fred Emery and Eric Trist (socio-technical systems), and Dr Jarl Bengsston (Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, OECD).
The Golden Era of Workplace Change
Bill Ford once called the period from the late 1980s to the early 2000s the ‘Golden Era of Workplace Change’. During this time, several leading Australian organisations implemented groundbreaking strategies that continue to inform best practice today.
Here are two powerful examples:
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From Training to Learning: Making It Everyone’s Business
‘Training is for cats and dogs, people learn.’
GJ Dusseldorp, Founder and CEO of Lend Lease
The Big Idea: Create a ‘learning enterprise’ where knowledge is continually shared to build dynamic comparative advantage, and integrate learning with all organisational innovation and change initiatives.
What Happened…
Learning as a KPI
Every project plan included questions like:
- How will this approach maximise learning for the greatest number of people?
- How will this contribute to becoming a learning enterprise?
- How will learning outcomes be monitored and shared?
Integrating Work and Learning
- Work organisation was designed around both production/service AND learning outcomes, including multi-skilling and cross-skilling
- Learning centres were created close to where work was performed – accessible spaces where anyone could visit to access learning modules or get updates
- Reward and recognition systems acknowledged both individual and team contributions to learning and knowledge outcomes
- Everyone received a common core set of problem-solving, decision-making, and analytical skills, regardless of role or status.
Learning in Business Cases
Learning processes became a critical component of project management – as important as cost, time, and quality. The system tracked:
- Demonstration of learning transfer to other projects during the project lifecycle
- Evidence of applying learning from previous projects
- Improvements and innovations resulting from stakeholder and customer feedback
- Learning agreements with vendors and suppliers to ensure demonstrable knowledge transfer
- Redefining project management excellence to include leading teams outside one’s area of expertise, ensuring distributed learning
Changing the Language
Reframing ‘the number of customer complaints’ as ‘the number of improvements as a result of feedback’ – a subtle but powerful shift in perspective.
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Start with Learning Teams, Not Just Project Teams
The Concept: Cross-functional teams explore possibilities around a ‘broad question,’ with experts serving as mentors and coaches rather than team leaders. This approach opens up space for genuine learning and innovation.
Operating Principles
- Bring together people who don’t usually work together (increase network density and diversity)
- Provide learning facilitators to build capacity through common tools and methods
- Visit workplaces outside your industry (create perspective shifts)
- Limit experts to coaching and mentoring roles (break pattern entrainment)
- Involve customers and other stakeholders (enhance diversity)
- Identify a minimum of five new ideas to try (explore the arena of possibilities)
A Real Example
The Customer Experience Learning Team from the Sydney Opera House visited the International Airport, a football stadium, and two large international hotels, asking: “What can we learn from these organisations about improving the customer experience that we might try at the Opera House?”
They then presented their discoveries to the Board for consideration – bringing fresh perspectives from entirely different industries to inform their approach.
Ideas we continue to apply…
The strategies from that golden era weren’t just workplace reforms – they were sophisticated responses to complex human systems, even if we didn’t always use that language at the time.
The language may change, but the fundamental challenge remains: how do we create organisations where people can learn, grow, and contribute their best work?
These are operating principles we share with current clients.
Recognise that learning is how complex systems adapt
By embedding learning outcomes into every business case and project plan, a fundamental truth was acknowledged: in uncertain environments, the ability to learn faster than change occurs is the only sustainable advantage. When CUB made learning a KPI alongside cost and quality, they weren’t being progressive – they were being pragmatic about complexity.
Understand that experts can become a constraint
Limiting experts to coaching roles in learning teams wasn’t about being democratic – it was about avoiding the pattern entrainment that traps organisations in outdated responses. When the Sydney Opera House team visited airports and hotels instead of other performing arts venues, they were deliberately introducing the diversity that complex systems need to generate novel solutions.
Build for emergence, not prescription
Requiring teams to identify ‘a minimum of five new ideas to try’ created options and possibilities rather than single solutions. This wasn’t indecisiveness – it was recognising that in complex environments, you need multiple experiments running to discover what actually works. Working with complexity is navigating the landscape of possibilities not identifying specific visionary goals.
Create conditions for knowledge to flow
Learning centres near work sites, cross-functional teams of people who don’t normally work together, reward systems that recognised knowledge sharing. These were not HR projects, but initiatives co-created, in context, to deliver agreed learning outcomes. In particular, deliberately increasing network density and diversity and creating the conditions for knowledge to move quickly across boundaries when most needed.
Reframe failure and complaints as feedback
Changing ‘number of customer complaints’ to ‘number of improvements from feedback’ transformed problems into learning opportunities. Complex systems need rapid feedback loops and the capacity to sense and respond. The linguistic shift enabled both.
