A refreshing dip

Summer Shorts 2

I’m taking August off and largely disconnecting but I didn’t want to leave you with a yawning gap in your intellectual input, an aimless cognitively-starved wreck wandering around reading crisp packets in a desperate effort to feed the hollowness you feel within. No! I have come to rescue your sanity by blithely recycling some old blog posts and making out I’m doing you a favour. Well, anyway, you might find these amusing or, if not, mercifully short.

They’ll be a couple in each weekly post until September, when what passes for normal service will resume.

Enjoy the summer! (but don’t forget your Pac-A-Mac)

Drowning In Horseshit

The problem with future of work is like the one that faced London in the late 1800s.

We are at risk of drowning in horseshit.

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 is a tale about an article in The Times warning that “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” The problem was subsequently debated at the first urban planning conference in New York in 1898 which disbanded without a solution being found.

This could be something of an urban legend, as doubts surround both the article (in 2018 The Times denied it’s existence) and the conference (there is no record of its outcome), but the problem was very real as London grew and relied on ever more horses for transport. Large areas around Kings Cross station were taken up with holding yards for the manure and knacker’s yards for disposing of horses, which caused an unimaginable stench. Manure, urine and dead horses on the streets of London attracted flies and caused diseases to spread.

Had we had to continue using horses for transport, it seems likely the system would have collapsed. Fortunately, the solution arrived in the form of the motor car and electric trams, which meant horses were no longer required. The streets became cleaner and the city became healthier.

So what’s that got to do with the future of work?

Offices were on the same path as horse transport. Having ever more people commuting into city centres to work in offices was becoming unsustainable. Transport links were groaning under the weight of traffic, people were getting ill and even dying from the stress, our communities and society as a whole were ailing.

Our equivalent of the motor car is mobile working. When people don’t have to commute into a city centre office every day, much of the stress and sickness disappears. People are healthier, happier, more productive. They get to spend more time with their families and in their local communities, to the benefit of both and to broader society.

What’s more, the air quality improves, congestion eases and the city becomes more energy efficient.

The whole concept of how all that horseshit was handled in a major city is very hard for us to get out heads around today. It is almost unimaginable.

In a decade or so, we’ll look back at how all those people used to travel in to office every day with the same lack of comprehension.

But right now, there’s still a lot of horseshit around.

What’s This Box For?

"And what's this box for? This one in the top corner, marked ‘AW’”

“Dunno. It’s always been there. I was told just to put ‘0’ in it”

“Well, I need to know what it’s for so I can put it in the new system”

Computerisation was a transformational event for business in the 1960s and 70s. Just copy the paper forms and the new system would have all the same faults. You had to question if it what things were for.

They asked around the factory, “What’s the box marked ‘AW’ for?” but nobody knew.

“I was just told to put ‘0’ in it” everyone said.

It was a puzzle.

Someone said his grandad, who’d retired ages ago, might know. So they asked him.

“Oh that!” he said.

“Well, it was in the war, and when there was an air raid warning we had to stop the line and take cover. If there were lots of air raid warning in day, production could be right down. So we needed to know how many there’d been”

Mystery solved. The AW box was just a relic, a habitual action that no-one had bothered to question. It wasn’t needed anymore.

So how many relics do we have in our work? How many habits that serve no useful purpose?

Loads, right? In this transformational event, COVID-19, we have a chance to ditch them.

Let’s not put them in the new systems we build after this is over.

(Dear Reader, we did. We put a lot of those relics into the new systems. And we left quite a lot of them in charge, too. - Ed.)