The umwelt of getting tasks done
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
I think we all have a tendency to do certain tasks and not other tasks that may be far more significant in the scheme of things. There seems to be more difference between people in whether they can admit this to themselves than it whether or not they avoid stuff.[1] If you feel that you always get on with the most important task you face then this blog is for you.
For a corporate illustration of this, where I was in the very eye of the storm, I go back many years to a new motorcycle insurance system being built at Norwich Union. At the time, Norwich Union was a proud institution with a huge reputation. With my then partner Howard, I consulted to the project, helping with the design and the implementation approach. The project to build the system was about five people for maybe six months. But the project periphery caused the project to balloon to fifty-five people: interfaces with the print system, the mailing system, the billing system, and probably the flower arranging system.
The project plan said that the project was within a week of completion, but Howard and I reckoned it was at least six months away still. KPMG were asked to take a look, and they said it would never complete. You would have to have been there to see an organisation go into shock. Mike, the senior manager I worked to, one of the very best, was moved rapidly sideways, his career finished. The whole development area went into self-doubt, if not despair, and no new systems were delivered for the next two years, across two hundred developers. The only way this deadlock was broken was to do some development that was officially unimportant and so could be done with new technology.[2] Unbelievable.
From all that sorry tale I want this. My brief to KPMG was they should look, amongst other things, for displacement activity: for tasks that were being done to avoid facing things that were more important but possibly career limiting if they went wrong. Better-to-avoid-the-issue stuff. That is a basic explanation for why the project plan was so completely and utterly misleading. And KPMG, to their eternal discredit, claimed not to know what a displacement activity was.
Although this is an old sorry tale, I think the situation in general has not changed. The people who claim IT systems should be built by evolving a simple system that works are addressing this problem, at least obliquely.
Life à la Alexander
Christopher Alexander’s magnum opus, across four large volumes, describes how a room, a building, a campus, a street, a district, a town can have life. By which he means that, in that environment, people are enlivened to bring their own unique contribution to the world. This of course is the polar opposite of David Graeber’s notion of bullshit jobs where people know they are not contributing of themselves, or indeed doing anything useful. Alexander is quite clear that people, given a chance to say so, are themselves quite clear about whether a space brings them alive or not. Which means of course that architects in general could massively improve the nature of our lives but they do not: typically, they build public and corporate buildings that make us feel small and insignificant.
Alexander knows, and we know if we care to know, where it is that we can best do real work. [3] He also knows that in general it is not OK to voice these feelings in public or in a formal process. He found that when asked, people make up spurious “factual” and “technical” things to say to carry their message, such as a development increasing the traffic too much, not that it feels wrong. You can probably feel your own reaction to this language here. Feeling wrong is often taken to be a namby-pamby, wishy-washy, inadmissible lack of articulation. [4] That is our culture speaking and it means we ourselves cannot do real work.
The umwelt of von Uexkull
It may seem a long way from Alexander’s architecture in Berkley to von Uexkull’s work in the Baltic at the beginning of the last century, but we need to talk about ticks. There is a whole school of Baltic biology that is much more aware and insightful than the standard issue. The case that is now classic in this discussion is the tick. Which is not to deny that you can get a very nasty dose of Lyme’s disease from ticks in the Baltic including bleeding from behind your eyeballs.
Apparently, a tick, as the free part of its lifecycle, climbs a long stalk of grass and hangs from its tip. Indeed, it hangs there essentially forever, waiting for the warmth and smell of an animal passing underneath. It then drops onto the animal, burrows through the fur and into the skin to begin the next stage of its adventure. It can wait for this event an improbable eighteen years. In order to stay alive all that time its shuts down most of it life systems to conserve itself for the one event that counts.
The notion of umwelt is this: the tick has a very particular world. That world is as far from general as it could be: it has been narrowed to almost nothing in our terms. Of course, every animal and plant has an umwelt. We do too, but we are arrogant and hubristic and think that we see what is there. We don’t: much of the subject of these blogs is just that.
The tick has a task. It has to bury itself in an animal or die. The umwelt of a tick and the real work of a tick are two sides of the same coin. And Alexander says that we need an environment in which we can do our specific and particular task, where we come alive to what only we can do, just as the tick comes alive when it smells warm animal smells nearby.
Our umwelt is largely social because we are social animals. You will hear people call for leadership and organisation and coherent values, but we are inherently social. We do what we need to do in the social umwelt that we cannot escape. Leadership phooey.[5]
Radical uncertainty
There are lots of people in the world who think they know what you should be doing, what your task today is. They may have something useful to say but they absolutely don’t know. You parents, your teachers, your boss, the priest, your lawyer, whatever, may very well be dead wrong. In fact, if most people think their work is a bullshit job, of no use to anyone in the greater scheme of things, then the statistics are in favour of anyone advising you being a bullshitter.[6] Alexander is the wise one here: he did not allow anyone to report whether they felt alive other than the person themselves. Never in a million years would he ask your boss if you were working well.
The downside of recognising that you are drowning in bullshit is trying to clear a way to understand for yourself what it is you should be doing. I am reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and very disturbing and creepy it is too. Early in the first volume, the narrator (no-one is allowed a name) gets to speculating that the six months of intensive training she just did for this expedition to Area X was more likely there to make sure she concentrated on the wrong things, that precisely the most important thing is obscured by the emphasis of the training on other things.
I expect I am just getting old but I just tried to go ‘round a French hypermarket with a short mental shopping list, maybe five items. No problem in England but the array of so many new things and different ways of carrying on left me unable to do my task.[7] I think I got three out five. It strikes me that the hypermarket is a decent metaphor for how we get to do some things absolutely fine but it is just not our shopping that we need for tonight.
My public world is a hypermarket of crazy bullshit asking me to address it. But just like the present Twitter meme about whether anyone should engage in public debate with fascists, the answer is just say no. The fascists and the hypermarket of life thrive on our attention when we actually have real work to do.
Warren Buffett famously asked Mike Flint to write down the top 25 things that he wanted to do with his life, and earnestly advised him to throw away all but the top five. Those other 20 things (and everything else that the hypermarket of life throws at you) are things to avoid at all cost. Which isn’t to say that you can’t change your mind about what the top five are, of course, but that the almost-top items are what Oliver Burkeman called ‘near enemies’, highly seductive displacement activities masquerading as your real work.
Displacement activity
There is a public announcement that makes me squirm every time. It goes “we are working really hard on this”, or “we are working round the clock to restore your service”. I am acutely aware of the gap between work and outcomes. I have been in too many situations like Norwich Union above where more work equals less progress or even going backwards. In general, the people who created a problem or a failure should not put in loads of effort to resolve it, they should ponder awhile and take some advice. After all, it’s likely to have been loads of misdirected effort (read: bullshit work) that caused the current situation.
I read someone’s thesis a long time ago, promoted I think by Tom DeMarco. It contained a very mathematical analysis of a workload that consisted of just two tasks, x and y, where x is easy to measure and y is hard to measure. Performance is held to depend on the right ratio of x and y. But of course, if x gets measured and y does not, then it is x that gets done, and performance is lower than if no measures are taken at all. Even in the most simplified ideal work system we can imagine, work gets displaced in a way that means that important things get neglected. In the real world this effect is huge.
The more we try to organise and impose a work scheme the less real work gets done. Even self-organisation, the way it is reported in the literature, looks for organisation ahead of people naturally responding to their social context to do real work that only they can do. Don’t take it from me: put forward these truths in your place of work and see how vehemently they get rejected.
The domain I remember from my youth where these things were clear is rock climbing and mountaineering. If you are going to push some limits in a dangerous situation then you can’t afford bullshit. Neither can you afford to put pressure on any member of a team beyond good-natured challenge and a ready acceptance of any push back.[8] There is a whole language of “taking a look at a route” and an etiquette of who takes a literal lead. If that seems too much for simply rocking up at work and doing some stuff, then probably you are not doing the real work.
I listened to an excellent talk from a mid-west farmer on his understanding of his no-till system, improving the soil year-on-year and using a large array of different plants sown together to achieve that. He said he and his son had a rule of thumb: if they didn’t fail with something each year they weren’t trying hard enough to innovate. We would do very well to adopt that rule, while remembering that Christopher Alexander was the wise one.
[1] The massive number of books and blogs on conquering procrastination testifies to the number of people who admit this privately to themselves. Unfortunately, a whole subset of this genre does use words like ‘conquer’ and other warlike language in the ‘struggle’ against ‘resistance’.
[2] New technology being permissible only because the project was low risk, non-core, etc., and so didn’t need to adopt the full cumbersome rigour of a standard project. Seems so common that invigorating solutions are found only by bypassing official methods. Almost as though formality calcifies the bullshit jobs, leaving little room for real work.
[3] The feeling from a workspace, the push door that has a pull handle, the straw that’s too short for the bottle — it’s this procession of small things that individually make no difference that accumulate to make modern life more misery than delight. Addressing the micro-delights of life is a worthy design challenge, and arguably real work.
[4] In my work alongside a psychotherapist who specialises in family-owned businesses, I’ve learned to mistrust articulate reasoning. A smooth narrative is one that has been practiced, has worn grooves into the brain, and obscures some of the messiness of the world. In short, an abstraction that stands in the way of genuine novel thought and noticing. Many solutions to perceived problems are found in the abstraction rather than in the world.
[5] Related, of course, is our post, The Abject End of Management
[6] My neighbour, the capitalist/entrepreneur/manufacturer, views all of his advisors as parasites. The best of them have a necessary function, such as his accountant who keeps him from being on the wrong side of the prison bars, but even they overstep and try to tell him how to run his business. He’s got a clear and impassioned sense of real work and bullshit jobs, but can’t/won’t try to articulate the distinction. “What can you do to help me?”, he asks, with no patience or time for meetings or describing the challenge he faces. He’s off in the morning to save a multi-million-pound contract. In his view, anyone who wants to know how to help, can’t help.
[7] So many of our habits and abilities are fragile to encountering new things in the world, in changing the context of action, the category of stressor, etc. Particularly changes that hit a level or two down the Maslow hierarchy, they’ll knock you for six every time. But even as something as a business trip can dislodge what you thought was an established daily habit.
[8] One of my worst sporting injuries was during a parkour class in which, tired and cold, I was forcibly encouraged to do one more circuit. Crack! went my Achilles tendon. It ranks alongside the time I returned a rental car in two pieces, wrenching my knee in the process. Seriously. Best $1 of optional insurance I ever bought.
