CONCEPT
Fix the Mine
Maslach's four-decade argument compressed into three words: burnout is an organizational problem requiring organizational solutions, not an individual failing requiring individual resilience.
Fix the mine is the operational principle of Maslach's career — the claim, defended against an entire wellness industry, that burnout interventions targeting organizational conditions outperform interventions targeting individual coping. The principle is not intuitive. When workers suffer, the natural impulse is to address the worker: teach her to cope, manage stress, build resilience. Individual fixes are contained, affordable, and do not require the organization to examine its own contribution. The evidence across four decades is unambiguous: individual interventions produce modest and temporary effects while organizational interventions addressing structural conditions produce larger and durable ones. The principle applies to AI-augmented work with particular force.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The bias Maslach has identified is structural, not malicious. Organizations prefer individual solutions because they are cheaper, faster to implement, and do not require the organization to examine its own practices. The wellness industry generates revenue by selling individual solutions to systemic problems. The worker who is offered a meditation app after reporting burnout is being told, implicitly, that