Designing a New Workplace with Vonnegut and Beanie Babies
It’s time to reimagine the modern work experience lest the satire and science fiction stories become prophecies.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut entered my world in the Fall of 2003. I devoured it and everything else he wrote. The absurdism was at first an escape—his caricatures and plots were too chaotic to be real, right? Yet, today, I find myself referencing his work prophetically.
Vonnegut envisioned innovation outpacing ethics, curiosity detached from morality, mass automation eliminating human labor among other futuristic states. He wasn’t the only one— Atwood, Butler, Orwell, and more provided eerie looks at society’s future through fiction.
So, in building a blueprint for the future of work, I turned to the cautionary tales of fiction. My ideas below are part book club, part intuition, and part hope. Because there’s always hope in the alternatives, adaptations, subversions, and remakes. ♥️
The nature of work is illusory and ephemeral.
Cat’s Cradle examines the human tendency to find meaning in the meaningless, in particular, crafting systems like religion and politics to make sense of things. The systems may even be arbitrary or absurd like a cat’s cradle string game, which produces neither cat nor cradle, just patterns if you’re careful and tangles if you’re not.
Company cultures often feel like tangles. They have intentional artifacts like values and policies, then less intentional ones like norms, folklore, and what actually happens in practice. All of it’s orchestrated by people with their histories, biases, preferences, and unique behaviors. The everyday experience is a tangle.
So, we try to make sense of it. We layer in company roadmaps, KPIs, org charts, and rituals like all-team meetings. These “systems” are destined to change yet we work toward them with certainty. We stay busy, busy, busy.
Our desire to unearth meaning in the meaningless is quaint and human. But sometimes the systems we attach meaning to, like company values or culture, let us down. We’re let go, denied promotion, excluded from conversation, or otherwise experience harm at the hand of our employer.
This matters because work isn’t just money for talents, it’s our social currency. Work gives benefits, connection, purpose, and an answer to a stranger’s “what do you do?” And I believe most people want an answer. They want to be useful, to create, to do, to help their family, friends, and neighbors.
Yet, our society offers no guarantee of a livelihood or way to contribute.
My daughter recently inherited my 1990s Beanie Baby collection. She assigned each a friend group and a job—the Erins are poisoning bakers, the Claudes are hairdressers, Waddles is a full-time father, so it really spans the gamut.
After this exercise, she fired a few, marking them as “unemployed” in her Google Doc, because that’s “more realistic.” Even in Beanie Baby society not everyone has a ready-made answer to “what do you do?”.
Work may be a shortcut to identity, but it’s not given freely.
I believe there’s a cooperative version of society where our basic needs are met, so our focus is on crafting a life toward collective good. We contribute our talents through each stage of life without sacrificing the trappings of family, health, enjoyment. It’s possible because we believe everyone inherently has value instead of valuing only based on what someone can produce, control, or accumulate.
To actually do this would require a new economic system and individual divestment from power, status, and money. That may feel forlorn today, but bringing cooperation, creativity, and care into work is well underway. These sparks of humanity feel novel in a world that feels more artificial by the day.
For one, we’re wired for human connection and cooperation.
One of the great things about the Beanie Baby society is community. They “live” and “work” together in friend pods. A lot of effort goes into ensuring no Beanie is lonely.
We, however, have a loneliness epidemic, including declines in time spent with friends or social events. That’s less time spent eating, conversing, dancing, and celebrating together.
Part and parcel of the problem is affordability. The everyperson is often priced out living where they work leading to long commutes and limited time for quality relationships. On the other hand, remote workers lack shared space for organic conversation. This social isolation, while convenient, hinders our physical and mental quality of life.
And technology has failed to replace the proverbial village. The online content from AI, bots, advertisements, or templates drowns out human presence. We’re seeking a rebuke to these digital ghost towns. Instead, we crave community—grounded moments and intentional presence with others.
The office deserves a renaissance with flexibility at its core.
Call it nostalgia or romanticizing the past, but I liked the ritual of the office. It provided scenery to chew on and easy-bake connections. Sure, some of those connections were superficial, but others blossomed into deep friendships or collaborative mind melds.
Younger generations, in particular, crave this experience, especially those who missed out on the traditional college experience during lockdowns. There’s a way to do it by focusing on the experiential element instead of presence as a proxy for productivity.
So, cubicle farms are out, and craft rooms are in. Bespoke, flexible, and co-working spaces provide allure and fluidity to employees. There are no set hours or required days. Some may skip it altogether. The office is a novelty, not a routine.
Office design bridges indoor and outdoor spaces to conjure moods like creativity or calm, akin to an artist’s retreat. Each nook and cranny curates an eclectic experience and interactive flow. It’s intentional, not stodgy. Perhaps it’s Google in the 2000s—colorful and playful, or it’s wabi-sabi—soothing and natural, or both.
It’s not just about the physical; it’s about setting aside time for imagination. People solve deeper problems when given space to reflect, daydream, and tinker. Part and parcel of an office designed for things like creativity, connection, calm, collaboration is time to enjoy it.
With AI absorbing rote tasks and busywork, there’s more opportunity for individuals to contribute complex, innovative, and nuanced work. It’s the moment to test out creative work schedules. Instead of piling on more work per person, time saved goes to mentorship or learning, testing new ideas or businesses, spending time in nature or with family, or anything that allows an individual to feel whole.
It's unheard of for someone to spend all day engrossed by their laptop or meetings. To foster adoption, roles like experience designer or belonging coordinator usurp the traditional office manager to ensure lollygagging and socialization are on the menu.
As we reimagine the office, we can also reimagine “the team.”
What if we built teams like communities—not just in name, but in structure?
Let’s get back to the Beanie Babies. They offer an inanimate study in grouping folks together based on compatibility of their talents, work styles, and experiences.
Whether it’s dubbed micro-communities, culture clusters, or human hives, these pods come together based on how they work—async, deep focus, quality v. quantity, anti-meeting, neurodivergent friendly, mission-first, and so on—creating work "aesthetics.” It’s a mechanism for belonging and as close to utopian as a workplace could get via a social contract. They even built performance previews before new projects based on past projects to weave learnings and accountability into the fold.
Talent mapping programs connect people based on their preferred work aesthetic, talents, and future potential. Companies may even hire fully-baked teams or collectives who (through shared history) already speak in shortcuts and feel safe to debate and disagree. It takes time and friction to build civility and pseudo-society.
Pods share responsibility for their collective effectiveness, which includes training the next generation and making team recommendations. Each pod balances generalists vs. experts and technical vs. soft skills to create a patchwork of complementary abilities. An engineer may be paired with a philosopher, so technology and ethics pace forward together. Each pod is a yin-yang of feminine and masculine energy.
After major milestones, entire pods take sabbaticals or micro-retirements for structured rest. These give the team a true break without the pressures of overworking or falling behind due to vacations. Pods roll on and off projects.
Work becomes modular, not monolithic.
Instead of cyclical hiring and firing, the full-time job increasingly shares space with fractional roles, project-based work, consultants, and creators. Individuals want to own or license what they create. Companies, especially startups, tap into these groups to leverage niche experience or deep audiences quickly and temporarily.
There’s a burgeoning market for fractional folks who form multi-disciplinary co-ops and collectives. Inspired by unions, they build camaraderie, partnership, and equity while also giving companies a deep well of resources.
Freelancing offers independence, flexibility, and control. It also honors stages of life allowing parents or those aging out of work (as examples) to share their talents in a reduced fashion.
In diversifying the types of workers, companies become less precious about the unbreaking, linear career path. The career becomes a collection of experiences, talents, and problems solved. Companies index for the most diverse collections effectively hiring more generalists, who bring curiosity, broad skills, and a tapestry of experiences. Generalists fill ephemeral gaps and solve problems with ad hoc support from fractional experts. Instead of job descriptions, companies focus on what problems they have and who can best solve them.
With more ways to contribute to a company there’s a flattening of organizational structures dovetailing with waning interest in management. To ensure pods, fractional resources, and other contributors don’t become siloed there’s a shift in how information flows across a company.
Storytelling builds up the society of a company.
New roles such as company historians or super connectors pop up to analyze and catalog stories, learnings, and priorities across pods to ensure alignment without having to pull anyone and everyone together for a meeting.
These folks also facilitate introductions, similar to my daughter who runs orientation as friends and family donate Beanie Babies to her collection. In general, employees want algorithmic connection IRL. Connectors design events for shared interests, networking across teams and other companies, as well as affinity groups.
Book clubs reign as the master of connection. They offer a safe haven for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It allows folks to model civility and a social contract in a low stakes work environment. Reading fiction builds collective empathy, helping humanize teams as they read stories together. It rewires brains for nuance, context, and care.
Imagine a book club where everyone reflects on how the character handled conflict, growth, or power. Those lessons flow into work through individual reflection; almost like a performance review or self-assessment in an open-minded environment.
Reflection, in general, weaves into our companies.
With AI worming into every tool and process, the need for critical examination burgeons. It’s not only about individual reflection, but companies understanding their emotional, societal, and long-term impact.
Companies stretched their teams to the brink squashing creativity, debate, and idleness with growing role scopes, endless meetings, quick turn deadlines, and threat of lay-offs. These issues stem from unadulterated belief in individualism and meritocracy alongside the tying of worth to productivity.
All of it needs reevaluation to be an employer of choice.
Employees want more control over their livelihood, so we get inventive with compensation.
Employees are the constants in their career, yet so much is dictated company to company. Instead, work pods collectively negotiate their salaries like the cast of Friends. They also receive a slush fund, which can be allocated to perks, resources, or be paid out as a bonus if goals are met without spending it. It allows the pod to foster accountability without a manager.
Even though organizations flatten, there’s a premium on roles dripping with humanity—support, people ops, customer success. The wage gap between technical and non-technical roles closes. Feminine attributes like empathy and cooperation rise as a counterbalance to AI, abating the salary disparities in women-dominated fields.
Related, the diversity of employment evolves the full-time offer letter. It includes predetermined salary increases, structured rest, and separation packages. Instead of at-will employment, there are decision points to renew or end the relationship. This allows for scheduled roll-offs, mutual exits, and transparent talent planning. If an exit isn’t mutual, either party has the chance to appeal the decision to force honest discussion and feedback.
These orchestrated exits foster potential redeployment of talent either into new roles or to portfolio, parent, or sister companies. This is a way to engage vetted talent that may no longer be right for or interested in their current role or company.
Most notably within the realm of compensation is that executive compensation is transparent and not more than 10x the lowest salary in the company.
This radical shift requires mature, self-aware, and open-minded leaders.
Employees don’t want to follow leaders prioritizing profit over safety, reputation, and quality. So, it’s lucky that the authoritarian approach to leadership runs its course. The same generation that ushered in gentle parenting, brings forth gentle leadership.
One big way leaders infuse empathy into their veins is in partnership with trauma-informed counselors, ethics professors, work therapists, and etiquette coaches. These resources unearth and reduce leadership harm structurally.
The intricacies of how people work together often hide behind closed or virtual doors, so culture designers work with companies to untangle powers and processes that aren’t serving the collective good.
And it’s the collective that decides whether a leader is effective. A vote of no confidence from the team could oust a leader or send them to remediation. By reducing the pay gap and power for leaders, the role appeals less to those craving only command and control.
To evaluate the efficacy of a leader, companies measure meaning at work. Meaning exists when employees feel belonging and safety to dissent or speak up. So, companies measure leaders based on attributes such as—quality and quantity of ideas they green lit, mutual exits, how honest team feedback is, examples of transferring talent to another team or sister company, and meaning audits.
Meaning audits ask employees—What’s the most meaningful thing you did this quarter—and for whom?” It’s a way to fold meaning into the shared reality.
Shared meaning moves us beyond hierarchy toward something more human.
How work gets done in a company has more influence than an individual; instead of trying to improve individuals one by one, we improve the systems.
One system to abandon is hierarchy which layers people over each other, stack ranking them by power. This contributed to the compensation inequity, and also keeps decisions short-sighted and made by those furthest from the problem.
There are so many other models to pull from whether it be matriarchy’s reliance on wisdom and community or holarchy’s decentralized decision-making. We can shape organizations with cooperation, care, and distributed power to prioritize growth, curiosity, and ethics over control.
Leadership is no longer about domination but contribution. Decision-making lies with those closest to the knowledge and problem, aka the work pods. Power is shared, and so is the belief that everyone is both interconnected and a unique, autonomous being. These principles invite a more participatory, layered way of working—one that puts people at the heart.
Building these systems means integrating our cognitive and emotional selves. AI shows us the limits of competence without self-awareness. It can process data, but it can’t feel moral tension, navigate ambiguity, or intuit context from lived experience. We need that at work.
As technology evolves faster than our frameworks for humanity, we get to decide how we engage with it. I hope we choose the protection of original, ethical thought. Either way, tech, social media, work, and society will all be a mirror. The question becomes whether we’ll look in it to recognize what we’ve built.
There are many things I can imagine, such as real-life filters that dampen or grant pretty privilege, personality-changing brain implants, software that won’t open without watching an ad, alarms that sound when bias is detected, and finite, non-renewable stores of power granted to every leader. And, we’re not too far from having your bot talk to my bot.
Whatever the technological progress, the human desire to contribute, collaborate, and find meaning together will persist. My utopia includes shelter, food, education, healthcare, and purpose for all. In the meantime, the place I have the most influence is in my workplace. We need more people to want to raise the well-being of all in whatever way they can, including at work.
The weird and dreamy reign supreme even in a bleak world.
The thing about Vonnegut is he was subversive. As long as people subvert the status quo, there’s hope. Over the next few years, work may mirror the ills of society, but it’s human nature to keep connecting and creating.
Beyond all the ways tech “makes” people redundant, we’ll see the counterbalance with humans creating art, questioning society, spending time outdoors, calling friends, and returning to a bit of nostalgia. Especially for the millennials who straddled pre- and post-internet. We can imagine what it feels like to be unreachable, to be in conversation with friends, and to be building something through only the construct of your mind.
I saw this article as a blueprint for the company I’m building, a bit of promises to myself and future team.
The mind is our humanity; letting it atrophy is a waste. So, expect to see companies, new and old, reimagining work for a more connected and cooperative workplace, because the value of true human creation matters even more in a world of artificial.
The most rebellious thing you can do in dystopia is hope.
XoXo, Courtney
If you enjoyed this, read our piece on workplace trends—The Future of Work Is Already Unfolding.