Complex issues rarely admit simple solutions. Smart working, too, belongs in this category. Public debate has gradually reduced the subject to a deadlocked confrontation: on one side, the idea that people are being brought back to the workplace to keep them under control; on the other, the belief that employees want to stay at home simply to avoid working. Both positions offensively trivialise the legitimate arguments on either side.
The question of smart working is, in fact, about the nature of work in complex settings. It is not a question of trust or control.
One also often hears that if an organisation cannot make remote working work, it means it does not know how to manage by objectives. The reasoning seems logical: if the objective is precisely defined, where people work becomes irrelevant, because what matters is the result. That is one way of looking at it. And in certain cases this approach works. Yet it assumes some far from trivial prerequisites. The objective must be capable of being clearly defined in advance, the path towards it should not substantially alter its content, and the interdependencies among the people involved should be relatively stable.
There are numerous activities in which these conditions are met, and in such cases management by objectives is effective. Remote working can therefore operate very efficiently. These are the ideal situations in which physical distance has little bearing on the quality of the result.
The situation changes when we enter areas in which work follows an emergent trajectory. In many business functions, from innovation to marketing, from advanced design to crisis management, the objective is a point of reference that is continually redefined along the way. The problem is not fully given at the outset: it takes shape as it is addressed.
Karl Weick described this dynamic as a process of sensemaking in which organisations understand reality by acting and reflecting on the action itself. In these settings, value derives from the ability to continually recalibrate direction.
When work is highly interdependent and strategic, alignment between people becomes a high-frequency process. The system changes as it operates, and requires continuous micro-corrections. If interaction is frequent, deviations are detected early and corrected through minimal interventions. If interaction becomes less frequent, discrepancies accumulate and correction becomes more extensive and more costly. This is a typical dynamic of complex systems, in which order is maintained through constant adjustments.
The difficulty in accepting this distinction stems from the fact that the idea of work that cannot always be reduced to stable objectives is counter-intuitive. Moreover, certain cognitive biases contribute to these misunderstandings:
The Dunning–Kruger effect shows how those who have not managed highly interdependent systems may overestimate their ability to organise them. The outside observer tends to attribute outcomes to individual abilities, underestimating the situational constraints that shape action in practice.
Hindsight bias, the wisdom of hindsight, makes events seem predictable after the fact, fostering the idea that difficulties could have been avoided through better planning.
The illusion of control reinforces the belief that a rigorous definition of indicators and KPIs is enough to govern any process, while the bounded rationality described by Herbert Simon reminds us that our capacity to represent a system in its entirety always falls short of its actual complexity.
Finally, genuine experience of managing complex settings often produces greater caution rather than confidence: those who have navigated highly interdependent situations know that there are dynamic trade-offs rather than definitive solutions.
The discussion often shifts to moral ground, invoking people's maturity or managers' trust. Individual maturity can be taken as given; what matters is the density of coordination the work requires. In some activities, coordination can be asynchronous and relatively independent of the immediate context. In others, it is continuous, situational and informal. Turning the latter into sequences of discrete objectives may generate a greater sense of formal order, but diminish adaptability. Objectives are redefined several times, priorities change before they can be formalised, synchronisation demands further energy, and the organisation ends up investing more resources in coordination than in substance. Formal order increases, but effectiveness does not always increase with it.
Physical presence, in this context, takes on a significance that goes beyond control. It can become a mechanism for high-frequency collective learning. In unstable settings, which often coincide with phases of growth and innovation, many decisions emerge from rapid, unplanned interactions: a brief conversation, an immediate change of direction and a shared reformulation, for example, can change the course of a project or of a company's history. When the system is stable, such micro-corrections can be formalised and made asynchronous. When it is unstable, formalisation tends to chase reality, arriving with a certain inevitable delay.
The most common mistake is to apply, or to imagine one can apply, a single organisational model to structurally different kinds of work. Remote working is a powerful tool, but its effectiveness depends on how well it fits the nature of the activity being performed. Mature organisations do not choose between remote and on-site working as a matter of principle; they design around the degree of interdependence, the speed at which priorities change and the place where value is generated.
The debate on smart working becomes sterile when it is reduced to a cultural battle. Organisational complexity is managed by recognising that not all activities are designed in the same way, and that interdependence changes the form of coordination. Management's responsibility is not to choose between on-site and remote working regardless of circumstances, out of sheer stubbornness, but to build configurations consistent with the degree of complexity of the work, recognising that organisational activities are not all alike and that designing work systems requires a nuanced understanding of the complexity within which one operates.