Progress VS Work
There is a term I like to use in my line of work called “Business Theater.” Business theater is loosely defined as:
Doing all the parts of work that look like work, but don’t actually help you make progress towards a real goal
Business theater looks like spreadsheets to organize tasks, meetings to “get on the same page,” projects that don’t have firm deliverables, teams without leaders, and discussions where a specific person is taking minutes.
Business theater is the result of the conflation between progress and work. Not all work results in progress, and confusingly not all progress is the result of things that look like work.
Everything is work. Some things are even “workier” than others. Making spreadsheets? Very worky.
Meetings also feel like work, which is why we like to have them when we are unsure how we make progress. When people don’t feel momentum, they like to do things that feel worky.
Progress is hard because it isn’t as tangible as work, and some work really leads towards progress while other work just fills time.
Just because you’re laying bricks doesn’t mean you’re building a house.
Work without a concrete goal is just work. The difference between building something and just moving stuff around is actually pretty difficult to discern if you aren’t the architect of the plan.
Progress is hard to measure, especially when a project is complicated and messy. If you’ve ever seen a building being built, there is always a moment towards the end of construction where it all comes together. When people see this, they think “wow that came up fast,” even if a week previous they were commenting on how the building has been under construction for a really long time.
This is because the parts that contribute to progress don’t look very worky. Installing electrical and plumbing is hard to see from a distance, and each floor requires infrastructure so it seems like its been taking forever. Yet, once the glass is put on the outside, the building all of a sudden looks finished.
Figuring out where to go and what to build is the hardest part of business. It’s what CEO’s get paid hundreds of millions of dollars for, and why investors put millions towards Entrepreneur’s vision of the future. It’s not that building a building is particularly hard, it’s that figuring out how the building works, where its located, what it looks like, and how to make sure it doesn’t collapse and kill everyone inside is pretty effing complicated.
People often find themselves in this rut where they aren’t sure which direction progress is, so they participate in Business Theater plays and create spreadsheets that get converted into powerpoints that get reviewed in meetings that have action items, yet they never seem to go anywhere.
The next time you find yourself in one of these plays, stop the meeting and ask “what are we trying to accomplish here?” If no one in the meeting can answer that question, get up and leave.
