CONCEPT
Organizational Dams (Maslach Reading)
The structural interventions that redirect AI's amplifying force toward sustainability — the beaver's dam applied at organizational scale through workload ceilings, protected recovery, decision-quality metrics, relational community, transparent fairness, and values protection.
Organizational dams is the synthesis of Maslach's fix-the-mine principle with Segal's beaver metaphor from You On AI. Maslach's framework identifies the six Areas of Worklife along which organizational conditions determine whether AI produces flourishing or burnout. Segal's beaver provides the metaphor for what the organization must do with those conditions: not stop the river of AI-amplified productivity but shape what it flows toward. The specific dams required for the AI-augmented workplace are workload ceilings, protected recovery structures, decision-quality performance metrics, deliberate reconstruction of community after specialist dissolution, transparent distribution of productivity surplus, and organizational spaces where depth and craftsmanship retain value.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Each of the six dimensions requires a specific structural intervention the organization can implement. Workload ceilings cap output expectations at worker capacity for sustained direction rather than tool capacity for production — the organizational willingness to leave tool capacity unutilized rather than converting every efficiency gain into additional demand. Protected