How to tell if your white color is really blue

We primates are hierarchical sorts. As C. Northcote Parkinson, of Parkinson’s Law, noted there are more important people in the world than there are important positions for them to occupy. We would live in Hobbs’ state of nature, each man’s hand raised against the otherif we didn’t have some way to straighten out who gets what and who gives way.

In the Common Law, surviving in many modern guises, is the notion of master and servant.The rights and duties are, as you can easily imagine, asymmetric. The master has the right to direct the time, place and manner of the servant’s work, as well as its object. The servant has a duty of loyalty and diligence and is entitled to receive pay for actual work. Absent other agreement, the relationship may be broken off for any or no cause. In the nature of things, doing so is a greater risk to servant than to master.

With the increase of what Peter Drucker termed knowledge work, masters have gone to great lengths to preserve the old paradigm. Think about what someone with subject matter expertise is supposed to do: apply known or bespoke methods to a problem, usually poorly defined and implicating uncertain facts, to arrive at a solution satisfying constraints of time, money and quality.

In other words, classic R&D.

The types of problem that have become simple, because similar inputs appear to offer predictable outputs, can be routinized and delegated to non-experts or even automated. Complicated problems, composed of simple sub-problems, are harder to delegate or automate, but that is just a matter of scale.

These aren’t R&D.

The complex problem is one that has no unique solution and the solution to which is non-repeatable. Think “innovation.” Inventing the iPod was no guarantee of being able to invent the iPhone. Successfully arguing a case to the Supreme Court does not assure the desired outcome of the next case.

So, if your master speaks of company time, expects to find you always at your seat or at a scheduled meeting, insists on your using only IT provided equipment and software and best practices, that’s a pretty good indication that she considers you a servant working on simple problems.

In that case, you should insist on punching the clock. More hours won’t result in better results or even necessarily quicker results. When you’re wasting time, be sure it’s company time and not your own. Because time, place and manner are controlled, it’s up to your betters to come up with adequately specified problems and the conditions that your solution must specify. Conversely, if they can’t manage that trick, they can’t really explain how they know how long it will take, how it should be done and what the solution should look like.

How to resolve the contradiction? The sad fact is that your proximate master, your manager, could care less. To her you are head count. The more of you, the higher her status and the easier it is for her to count coup by firing your sorry ass as a cost save when conditions dictate.