“This is what real police men look like, this is what real policemen smell like” – Whitechapel, TV series

Soldiers don’t polish boots and iron clothes and clean rifles and paint tanks because they need to go into battle looking good, it is for 2 distinct reasons that this tiresome drudge of never ending attention to equipment happens. It makes no difference to the business of soldering that your boots are scuffed if they are effective at being boots.

• To instill discipline without question, this is often called pride but it is not that, it’s mindwash.
• To keep the efforts focussed, and use up time. Idle soldiers cause trouble.

The reality of a thing is not the perception or the description of it. Often I hear stupidities like “our clean desk policy”, as if that makes someone or some thing better by the evaluation of another person’s need for neatness. Workshops are never neat because there is work going on in them, organised in a way that you, the observer, may not understand, but not neat by the reckoning of what a person who has no experience of a workshop may think. I remember Vauxhall lauding their network Q multi-point check for cars, the local dealer built an in-customer-view fake garage that was spotless, the mechanics changed into clean overalls to be in there playing pretend. No actual work was done other than inspection, but that wasn’t the point.

The point of Network Q was to present a falsehood so as to create a perception that matched an expectation. That by doing this fakery they looked more professional, matching the expectations of the uninformed. Of course if the vehicle needed actual repair it went round to the real garage, the one the public didn’t see, to the mechanics with the oil stained coveralls. I know this because I knew a couple of the guys that worked there. They thought it rather funny and somewhat pointless.

The key is not to try to show the reality, it is to let the facade stand in its place and fool the viewer. The viewer, we must conclude, wishes to be fooled. Only disappointment and confusion will come from drawing back the curtain on this bullshit. My pal Dave often Quotes a former boss of ours when he says..

“The important thing is to manage expectations, rather than to meet them” -Brenda

When I was a soldier I quickly realised that ‘clean’ is not a sanitary term, it is a visual term. We used non cleaning products because they made the sinks and the floors look shinier than real hygiene supplies would. There’s no way you’d want to wash veg in a sink I’d cleaned back then. It’s the same application of the same effect when you present data that relates to work. Most of the people I know from various places I have worked at never actually worked hard or were very useful in getting anything done, they merely put their efforts into massaging the perception of their output. If you happen to be a floor cleaner you quickly get to realising how much floor the other floor cleaners get clean and strive not to exceed that measure.

This serves multiple purposes, first to not alienate others you have to work with by making them look lazy by your maximal effort, second to give yourself an easier ride than you would otherwise, and thirdly to please your employer just enough to manage their expectations, which is the most important thing. Another way to look at it is the Scotty Effect (star trek), giving yourself some redundancy in what you do so that you can achieve more on some occasions. More output that looks like a big effort, like a short term boost of the turbo. I worked at an airport in the 90s, one of my colleagues had become a new dad, so we did his work and let him sleep a lot of his shift, value served well for all, perception of efficiency, redundant capacity used for a short while. You get the point, nobody loses?

Bosses play this game too, I had a boss that had a boss that spotted us drinking tea and talking, so big boss had a word with little boss, “they’re just sitting there drinking teas and talking”. Little boss explained that “they are discussing and planning their various roles in how they go about doing something that is difficult, could go wrong, and will have a big impact. They are not just chatting”. The perception was that time was being wasted, the reality was that it was being best spent. It’s tempting to look at someone doing something you do not understand well and surmise that they are just chewing the end of their pencil. You understand what you do and others don’t, does that mean that your role is simple? I’ve heard this called the peak of mount stupid, referencing the Dunning Kruger diagram where what you don’t know makes you think you do.

An old work colleague told me of the Grab a brush mentality he used to use on the factory floor where he would brush the floor around his machine regardless of if it was dirty or not when the supervisor was about, another told me of the Piece of paper trick where as long as you held a piece of paper and walked purposefully you would be assumed to be on an important mission and not to be disturbed by anyone asking silly questions like “what you were doing?”. These are examples of busy work, work that is not work, but looks just like work to those that perceive it, and feels like work to those that are made to unnecessarily do and not understand it.

A tactic is to expand, to work so that the simplest task becomes a behemoth of complication and endless communication, thus making people work hard so that they look like they are worth the remuneration that you are giving them. Many things that do not need to happen then happen, many processes and procedures are replicated without any purpose, many people who cannot contribute to the outcome are included, and they create pauses in movement as things they should be oblivious to are explained to them. I often think this serves twin purposes, the first to realign the plaudits of output where they, the unnecessarily inserted persons, can be said of, by those that pay them, that they participated in a critical capacity, and for the secondary purpose of adding comfortable yet false assurances that supervisory expertise has been employed to make sure that checks and balances are in place that the task doer would be assumed to miss because of their lowly position.

A person can get bogged down in creating procedure, and forget completely about the goal of the task, especially if they don’t trust expertise, again this is likely because they don’t understand it other than thematically. I’m not saying that people are stupid, just that the smart guy that does the accounting may not be a smart guy when it comes to building infrastructure tasks. We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not brain surgery” or the other one “it’s not rocket science”, but brain surgery is not rocket science and vice versa, it would be silly to think that either of these tasks is not done by a smart person, but equally as silly to think that those people were interchangeable. Associated Narcissism is the term for what happens when you talk all the time and everyone nods because they don’t think their best interests are immediately served by disagreeing with you. What I mean is nobody tells the boss they are evaluating the situation incorrectly (my old boss did though, it didn’t go well for him. Being right is not a bulletproof vest).

Of course the strategy of busy work is the death of efficiency, but we are talking about perception here, not usefulness. It may serve the psychology of a person paying the wage to feel like effort is being maximised regardless of if output is being best served, though that condition cannot last in a competitive environment. The pauses created are not merely in the flow of the persons then burdened by overprocess, but exist in equal measure in the flow of the persons injected into the process as the pause, for they would have been doing something else other than this, or a least they should have been.

This was ever one of the criticisms of Nationalised industry, that it could be made to look like work was being done but in reality the tasks were drowning in procedure and pointless box ticking of checks upon checks, each justified in logic but ultimately only serving the wage takers needs. A worker will put in 8 hours, a lot of them don’t care what they are doing, or if it has any point, as long as it is not too taxing and they keep getting to turn up. We are not all engaged in the forward motion of the firm, though that lax perspective may be a mistake I think, because the firm’s success is very often the employee’s future. It’s a criticism we can also easily level against government funded entities, that their lack of competitiveness leads to this same manifest situation where abundant funds have to be swallowed up somehow or they may not continue to be abundant when measured.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t wish to work hard just to work hard, that’s not what doing what I do is about. I need time to think so that I can do what I do correctly because it is not without complexity.

Paul S Wilson