The First Industrial City: What Manchester Can Teach Modern Leaders About Scaling, Systems, and People

Kate Mulligan
Oct 30
3 min read

What if the way your organisation runs today, team structures, daily rhythms, and performance systems were never designed for your world at all?

We set out to trace the roots of the modern world of work on the Sooner Safer Happier 1st Industrial Revolution Tour. We visited the sites where it all began: the first factory system, the first production line, the first shift work, the first time human labour was treated as a repeatable input rather than a creative force.

The parallels with today’s world? Chilling.

These “firsts” laid the foundations of the systems we still operate within. And for many leaders, understanding this origin story is the key to building something better.

Here’s what we saw and what it taught us about delivering Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) today.

The cotton industry’s success was showcased through its impressive buildings.

The third stop: Manchester, aka Cottonopolis. The world’s first fully industrialised city. Here we saw what happens when a system built for scale and profit grows unchecked.

Manchester’s rise was driven by:

The first integration of steam, rail, and canals to power a supply chain
Total reliance on slave-grown cotton—a truth too often sanitised
The emergence of the urban working class, packed into cramped slums, facing disease, poverty, and exploitation

In the factories, deafening noise, dangerous conditions, and 13-hour days were common. By 1800, over 60% of the workforce at Arkwright’s mills were children. In Cottonopolis, similar patterns prevailed, surveys from 1818–19 found that around half the workforce began work before age 10, and by 1833, one-third to two-thirds of workers were under 18.

The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, just down the road from where we stood, was a powerful reminder of the organised resistance that eventually won many of the labour protections we benefit from today.

It raised hard questions:

If today’s companies still run systems first built in the 1790s, whose needs are they really serving?

Patterns That Persist

These weren’t just historical footnotes. They were origin stories. And we recognised ourselves in them.

1. Are We Still Using the First Operating Model?

The systems built to run cotton mills, command-and-control, fixed schedules, and functional silos are still baked into many organisations today. But they were designed for:

Replaceable, unskilled labour
Repeatable, predictable work
Stable markets and top-down decisions

They weren’t designed for complexity, knowledge work, or rapid change. And yet… we persist.

We’re still working like it’s 1771 in 2025.

2. The First Shift from Meaningful to Monotonous Work

Craftsmanship gave way to repetition. People stopped seeing the whole. Purpose disappeared. Motivation became extrinsic.

This was when arguably the first performance management systems emerged—focused on supervision and compliance, not collaboration, innovation or accountability. The hierarchy wasn’t just about control; it was a mechanism to scale a new kind of business system.

The implication? Many organisations today optimise for output metrics, not meaning, while trying to rebuild what was lost: intrinsic motivation.

3. Output Over Outcomes: A First That Needs Rethinking

Arkwright’s obsession was thread. “Spinning gold,” he called it. Output was king. And for that era, it made sense.

But today, in a digital, knowledge-driven world, outcomes matter more. Yet many organisations are still chasing quantity over quality, activity over impact.

Beyond the Blueprint: A New Future of Work

The Sooner Safer Happier 1st Industrial Revolution Tour made one thing clear:

We can’t build the future of work if we don’t understand its beginnings.

We saw the first time people were treated as cogs, and the first time someone questioned it.We saw the first systems that prioritised compliance over autonomy, and the seeds of resistance that grew from it.

Now it’s our turn.

Let’s stop working like it’s the beginning of the 1st Industrial Age and start working like it’s the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Let’s design for complexity, adaptability, and humanity.

Let’s build systems that enable Better Value Sooner Safer Happier because people are not machines. And we were never meant to be.