Sewage Design

I've been doing organizational design work, and I've come to think stress is like sewage.

You can't let it sit. It stagnates. It rots. Rot contaminates everything around it. So you need systems that collect it and keep it flowing. One-on-ones and surveys are the sewer pipes — infrastructure for collecting what's pooling inside individuals before it backs up. And at the end of those pipes, you need a treatment plant.

The problem was that designing the pipes was hard.

Surveys with psychological analysis built in were specialists' territory. There's a technique where you ask the same question multiple times from different angles. Cross-validation, or what's called a lie scale — it measures response credibility. If someone answers Yes to "I have never told a lie in my life," you discount everything else they said. Designing surveys like that required training in industrial psychology.

AI is changing this.

You can now work backward from a goal — "I want to measure these stress factors" — and generate a question set with cross-validation baked in. Response analysis, contradiction detection, factor analysis. Things that used to require statistical software and domain expertise have come within reach of natural language instructions. Organizational sewage infrastructure is finally accessible to smaller companies.

In IT, I honestly didn't struggle much with this. Not that stress didn't exist. But the sources were identifiable. Relationship with your manager, project deadlines, technical dead ends. One-on-ones could pick up most of it.

When I started working in the entertainment industry, I found the geology of stress was entirely different.

The frustration of plateauing in dance or vocals. Friction unique to group dynamics. Interpersonal stress exists in IT too, but in entertainment, another layer sits on top: the relationship with fans. One-to-one relationships, plus one-to-n. As n grows, stress doesn't scale linearly — it scales geometrically. Both goodwill and hostility arrive in proportion to n. And neither is within the person's control. It's a receive-only channel, always open.

The pipe diameter isn't enough. The narrow pipes from IT can't handle this volume. That's why you need the sophisticated surveys AI can now design. A surface-level "how are you doing?" won't reach the aquifer beneath those layers.

Then what do you do with what you've collected? The treatment plant is a manager who listens. Even if the situation itself can't be controlled, if the person feels they're in control, the water clears. Not fixing the situation — restoring the sense of control. That's what purification really is.

AI can make the pipes wider now. The treatment plant is still a human's job.