Work As Done vs Work As Imagined

Creativity can be dangerous

Toys are a great way to ignite our imaginations, even if we don’t always know how the resulting fire is going to burn. When work as done fails to conform to work as imagined, sometimes things get broken. Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Everyone who has spent more than two days in a job has discovered that the description of and practice of their job are often two different things.

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For example, in my job as a University professor, you might think my job is teaching, mentoring, and research. In fact, much of my job is filling out forms. Some days, several hours of my work day will be spent completing some damn form, and I hate it.

But what’s really awful is that the forms themselves are incomplete, obsolete, or sometimes, just ignored. At Arizona State University, we have forms that haven’t been updated in twenty years. Everyone just knows they’re obsolete, and nobody who knows any better even pays attention to them any more, but the Policy Handbook still requires them because no one ever bothered to revise a handbook that everyone knows not to pay attention to anyway.

Except me, it seems. And the discrepancy drives me crazy.

Still, my frustrations are trivial in comparison to the difficulties faced by medical professionals. For example, medical errors are still the third leading cause of death…