Let me explain what I mean by that - because it’s not a metaphor. It’s a precise diagnosis of what went wrong, and when.

The Industrial Revolution gave us something genuinely extraordinary: scale. For the first time, you could make things - real things, in enormous quantities - by breaking production into repeatable tasks and compensating people for the time they spent on them. Clock in, clock out. Hours worked, wages paid. It was a brilliant solution to the challenge of its age.

The problem is it didn’t stay in the factories.

As the industrial era gave way to the knowledge economy through the mid-twentieth century, organisations carried that same logic with them into the office. The infrastructure changed - dark satanic mills became open-plan floors, looms became computers - but the underlying model didn’t. We still measured productivity as output divided by input. We still compensated people primarily for time. We still organised work around processes rather than outcomes. The factory moved indoors, and then it moved online, and then - somehow - it moved into our pockets.

And now we’ve handed that model the most powerful tool ever built.

Every week brings a new headline about AI saving organisations hundreds of thousands of hours. Entire job functions automated. Processes that took days reduced to seconds. It sounds like liberation. But look at what most organisations are actually doing with those gains, and you’ll find something much more mundane: they’re making the same things, in the same ways, just faster and cheaper. The Victorian equation - output divided by input - is being turbocharged, not challenged.

This is what I call the Victorian Trap. Not a failure of technology. A failure of imagination.

Here’s the distinction that matters. Efficiency asks: how do we do this better? Effectiveness asks: should we be doing this at all, and what would actually serve the people we’re trying to serve? Efficiency is about process. Effectiveness is about outcome. And the uncomfortable truth is that most of the processes we are now rushing to automate were never designed with outcomes in mind. They were designed for a world of standardisation and scale that no longer exists - carried forward through inertia, dressed up in digital clothing, and now being handed to an AI to run faster than ever.

I wrote Business Reimagined over a decade ago arguing that the way we work was stuck in models first devised at the time of the Industrial Revolution. I pointed out that we still rewarded time rather than outcomes, still organised around processes rather than people, still measured the wrong things in the wrong ways. The book was about flexible working, but the underlying argument was always about this: technology had given us the tools to work completely differently, and we were using them to replicate what we’d always done.

Nothing fundamental has changed. If anything, it’s got worse - because now we have a tool powerful enough to expose the full absurdity of the situation. We are applying 21st century intelligence to 19th century thinking, and calling it transformation.

The organisations that will look back on this moment with genuine pride won’t be the ones that automated the most. They’ll be the ones that asked a harder question first: what are we actually trying to achieve, and how do we design work - with AI as a full partner - to get there?

That question doesn’t start with the technology. It starts with the outcome. And it requires us to be willing to let go of processes that were never really serving us in the first place.

The Victorian era ended a long time ago. It’s time our organisations caught up.