The Magic Number
I started Decrapify Work mostly out of inchoate rage at the stupidity of the modern workplace and the appalling quality of leadership. I wasn’t really sure what it was about, so I wrote about everything that infuriated me and everything that I thought people should know.
I’ve been writing for about 4 ½ years, firstly through posts on LinkedIN and, for the past 3 years, in this weekly-ish missive (there’s a full archive of these available on my Substack page, if you want to while away an hour or several!)
What has emerged are three areas, each separate but obviously inter-related.
One is ‘How we work’. This is about all the bits of work that are crap and should be removed - the pointless meetings, the obtuse processes to get anything done, the endless streams of crap and the arse-covering messages that fill our working day. It’s more than that, though, it’s about better ways of working, replacing the failing approaches of the past with new, agile, trust-based methods. It’s about getting beyond the tedious debate about location (office v WfH) to the meat of the opportunity, giving people real freedom and capabilities to produce their best work.
Another is about the work environment itself, which you might call ‘Culture’ (but I’d rather not as it’s not a meaningful concept, in my view). It’s about making it more human-centric and removing the toxicity, which has increased over the past 40 years like the salinity in our ever-warming seas. It’s about removing the incentives that cause psychopathic behaviours, and the systems that reward those behaviours. It’s about addressing the poisonous power dynamics, about creating a fairer and more inclusive space.
And the third area is about how we manage ourselves in these environments. How we navigate our way through the hazards and dangers that they present and keep ourselves safe. How we get ourselves out of surviving and into thriving, and avoid falling victim to trauma, burnout and workplace PTSD.
Conventional business wisdom says that you should focus on one thing and have a clear and unambiguous message because if you stand for more multiple things, you confuse your audience. So I ought to pick one of these and become known for that. The ‘New Ways of Working’ guy. The ‘Human-centred Culture’ guy. The ‘Corporate Survival’ guy. Make my choice and double-down on it.
Bollocks to that. These are, to me, three legs of the same stool. So I am going to write and develop offerings in each of these areas.
And I’m also going to write about all the other stuff that I’ve touched upon, and anything else that seems appropriate. It’s all context to the aim of making the workplace, and especially YOUR workplace, better.
Besides, I’m already the ‘Decrapify Work’ guy.
Changing now would just be, well, confusing, wouldn’t it?
The Way It Is
The gap between railway lines is 4ft 8 1/2 inches (or 1435mm) in the UK, the USA and many other countries.
So why do we use this odd measurement?
The short version is that this was the gauge used by George Stephenson (the inventor of the steam locomotive) when he built the first intercity line between Liverpool and Manchester (being slightly wider than on his original Stockton and Darlington railway). It was known as ‘Stephenson’s Gauge’.
There were other gauges used on other railways, particularly Brunel’s ‘Wide Gauge’. It was eventually decided to standardise to allow interconnection and Stephenson’s Gauge won the day.
As the USA developed it’s railways, they imported the rolling stock from the UK and so adopted the same gauge. This was true in the North but not so much in the South. However, when the North won the war, they rebuilt the network in the South to the same standard gauge that they used.
As the UK, and then the USA, exported their technology around the world, Standard Gauge became common to many countries. It is used on over half of the world’s railways.
There’s some debate as how Stephenson arrived at this measurement but one plausible story is that he measured the wheels of a number of wooden carts and took an average.
A colourful extension of this story is that the carts were that size to fit the ruts in the roads. The first roads were built by the Romans and so the first ruts were made by Imperial Roman War Chariots. So the width of our railways is due to roman chariots!
Either way, no-one questions the width of the rails. It’s the default. It’s always been that way (literally, in this case!).
But it wasn’t inevitable. Brunel’s ‘wide gauge’ might have won out as the standard. The South might have won the US civil war and used a different gauge to replace railways in the North.
It’s the default through accident rather than design.
So now look at work.
How much of the default is through accident rather than design?
How much is due to some historical precedent, set for some long-forgotten and no longer relevant reason?
How much could we rip up and replace?
What would the benefits be?
The office is an obvious example of a historical accident. It evolved from the factory, the room where all the clerks worked. It’s design copied the factory floor, serried ranks of desks, in and out trays, with supervisors for the people manning the ‘production line’.
When the factories moved out of the cities, the offices remained, drawing upon the labour pool and the infrastructure for people to flow in and out every day.
Then COVID showed us that there was no reason to work like that. That we could operate just as well, arguably better, with a different ‘guage’. And slowly but surely, the old tracks are being ripped up and replaced with something that meets the needs of today.
We surrounded by ‘standard gauge’, forcing us along lines that no longer lead to where we want to go. Look hard and you will suddenly notice them.
The opportunity we now have is to question everything and what it’s relevance is today.
It’s time to rip up the tracks, move out of the steam age and imagine new ways of doing the work. The lay down the tracks to take us there.
Train To Nowhere
One of the things that will rip up the tracks is AI, if it delivers on it’s promise. Given my healthy scepticism, I don’t think it will deliver everything it’s advocates claim but it will bring some significant change. That will probably take a bit longer to arrive than is forecast too, because, well, people. (Recent events suggest CEOs will gladly look a gift horse in the mouth if it challenges their worldview).
Let’s say the AI takes away much of drudgery of today’s work. That will leave us with an exclusive focus on knowledge work, the deep and thoughtful stuff, the creativity.
We can only do about 3-4 hours of that kind of work a day. We simply don’t have the mental capacity for more. So inevitably we will work shorter hours. Having time to rest will be essential to our level of performance too. It will be a ‘must have’, not a privilege.
When we’re not doing the work with the heavy cognitive load, we’re going to be spending time developing relationships and building trust. Both of these things are force-multipliers for performance and productivity. However, we also have a limit to how much energy we have for this (apart from the screaming extroverts amongst us!).
So we’re going to have much shorter working days and probably fewer. They are going to be for deep work or relationship building.
That pattern of work is definitely going to need different tracks to the ones we have today.
It’s not enough to just rip up the tracks, we have to lay new and better ones. Like the Pirates, who didn’t just break the rules but put better ones in their place.
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Say Something
I had a lovely catch-up with Michelle Minnikin, she of Work Pirates, the Unf*cking Work podcast and Good Girl Deprogramming, this week. Talking about the latter (it’s a book, a course, a community - a mission!), she brought to my attention a comment by Tesco’s ex-Chair John Allan.
'A lot of men say to me they're getting increasingly nervous about working with women, mentoring women, something I've done a lot of right through my career,’
'What quite a few people are saying to me, and saying to others that I know, is that they're going to be very cautious in future about how they interact with women in the business world.’
Needless to say, Michelle was not impressed. It’s a perfect example of the privileged thinking of high-status males. And it’s also complete bollocks.
Casting women as the ‘danger’ when it is clear that they are the victims is a pretty scummy move but would be, no doubt, perfectly acceptable in the boardrooms of the UK, which is where I suspect most of the men Allan refers to reside. Men remarkably like Allan. Powerful, privileged, and with the self-awareness of a brick.
Let’s just strike this out now, shall we? Women are not the problem here. It’s us men. If you are ‘nervous’ about working with women, you need to have a good hard look at yourself. It’s your attitude and behaviour to women that is the problem, not their responses.
Some might defend Allan on the grounds of his age, 74, and being of an ‘older’ generation. Well I’m of advanced years myself and I’m not buying it. If he wants to work in a modern business environment, and especially if he wants to work at the highest level, then he has to adapt. If he can’t adapt, he should retire and go and do something else.
Michelle also ranted about the fact thatcourses for the likes of Allan on how to be allies for women are being largely taught by men. These are often older men who are doing it in the later part of their careers. Presumably they fit it in when they’re not doing their DEI and cultural difference training.
If you want to know how be an ally for women in the workplace, I suggest you go and ask a woman. Not some male, pale and stale geezer with a powerpoint deck on ‘Allyship’. You could do a lot worse that start with Michelle.
P.S. A bit of context on John Allan.
Allan was asked to resign from Tesco’s following allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards women. No evidence has been found to support the allegations.
Barratt also asked him to step down. There were no allegations against him there but they felt it was in the best interests of the firm for him to go.
He was also subject of similar allegations in 2019 when at the CBI. He admits making an inappropriate comment about a woman’s figure, for which he apologised, but says no evidence was found of anything else.
In 2023 the CBI was consumed in scandal around allegations of misconduct, sexual harassment and rape.
He made these comments to the media as part of an effort to clear his reputation. He feels he was not treated fairly.
He says some of his friends have suggested someone is out to get him but he doesn’t subscribe to that. Maybe he’s just unlucky.