The Four Horsepeople of the Workpocalypse
One Way or Another, They’re Gonna Find Ya
Benson’s Law of Willful Incarceration:
We are defined by the systems we are too lazy to define.
Every day, I see people ensnared in their own traps, trapped in their own cages, caged in their own prisons. They are surrounded by obvious opportunities for improvement, but they are afraid to see them. I see these same people be very disdainful of the traps, cages, and prisons of others…especially when they are personally inconvenienced by them.
We look at others and say, “Why doesn’t someone fix that?”
We don’t fix these things because we are all dealing with four nefarious phantasms. Otherworldly, unseen, and evil who ride together, yet apart. They conspire in the open, yet are stealthy. We recognize them in others, but not ourselves — except when we sleep, then they arrive in all our naked walking, late-for-testing, running-but-getting-nowhere REM-sleep gifts from our latent self-awareness.
These four equestrians of agitation are:
Learned helplessness — The feeling, real or perceived, that one is not safe to act in an autonomous or professional manner. Usually comes with observed or directly experienced repercussions for “acting out.”
Dunning Kruger effect — The moment when someone’s assumption of their expertise exceeds their actual expertise. The strange effect where they less someone knows, the more they think they understand. When this happens, people tend to make the same mistakes repeatedly because they don’t know any better.
Confirmation Bias — The act of finding data that supports, rather than challenges your assumptions and then using that data as “proof” that your assumption was correct. We do this because we are literally engaged in confirming our own position (which takes a lot less time than actual investigation).
Fundamental Attribution Error — The act of blaming the last person to touch a thing with the state of that thing before actually investigating what happened. We furthermore use that initial act of blaming as “proof” that the target has specific character flaws. (A.k.a. “Single wringable neck” or “accountability”). We do this because another person’s taking blame absolves us from responsibility.
When you add these up, we naturally and inadvertently build systems, with minimal effort, that destroy our agency and leave us with two primary actions: (1) suffer where we are and (2) complain about where we aren’t.
Neither are healthy, both are rampant.
In the now hundreds of companies and agencies we at Modus have had contact with, regardless of size, industry, or level of kumbay-osity, there exists Learned Helplessness, Dunning Kruger, Confirmation Bias, and Fundamental Attribution Error. They have always been with us, gaslighting us, getting us to gaslight others. Getting us to look for blame, look for absolution, look for the safe place to hide.
They are the source of our Imposter Syndrome, our propensity to choose narcissists to run companies and become elected officials, and why we simply refuse to improve anything.
We actually make entire industries out of our petulant refusal to improve.
Robert Irvine has recently launched even more Restaurant Impossible episodes (164 and counting!) which are sometimes a pretty good watch but, in the end, all have the same punch line. Over time, human beings forget to improve stuff. They move into a place in 1990 and by 2019 the carpet’s moldy, no one has painted, they’ve let grease build up behind the stove. Like 100 episodes of “OH MY GOD, LOOKIT ALL THAT GREASE!”
I can tell you after 100 episodes now of Modus Impossible, I’m not at all surprised to see company’s equivalents of unclean grease trays. I point at them and they always give that weary look of, “Do I have to?” And they answer is yes, you have to, you’ve always had to. You know the problem is here. It’s yours. Fix it.
You need to fix the broken handoffs, the hurt feelings, the information hoarding, the repeated rework, the quality defects, the resentment of your customers, and so on…
We Have Met the Horsepeople and They is Us
Now fully 60 years ago, Walt Kelly let us know we were our own worst enemies. We need not wallow in pity or self-doubt, we do need to recognize the system and take a call to action.
Over time, we all give in to the Four Horsepeople. We let them ride around our space spreading their petty wars, their attention starvation, their territorial or ladder-climbing diseases, and their career death. We give them power and then blame our fellow victims.
We can blame management for toxic environments, we can blame workers for being lazy, we can blame grease for always building up, but it’s all the same thing. It’s all dysfunction spread by the Four Horsepeople. We feel like it’s someone else’s job or we’re too busy, or that we got in trouble for trying to fix it last time. We feel like the problems are because someone else was stupid or that if they just would have done x everything would be fine.
All valid, all and some potentially true statements, all exactly what our four agents of angst wish to see. They can undermine your social structure and then just keep creating little divisions until finally your company / organization / country is so busy in-fighting or creating new overhead that nothing gets done.
So let me make this perfectly clear…making things work right is everyone’s real job. I don’t care who you are or at what level you are or what you perceive your institutional barriers to be…there is always something to improve.
When you get into meetings and people say things can’t happen or that someone in the room is worthless. When they sit quietly and listen to the guys, but interrupt the women. When there’s obvious parts of your work that don’t need to be done or that are consistently and programmatically done in a shoddy way. When you are consistently being fed the message that you’re substandard and don’t deserve (time off / resources / a balanced workload). When your teams just look back at you blankly when you feel like you’ve just brought them the greatest project ever. When, when, when… there are so many social, procedural, quality, safety, and so on … so many improvements we’ve seen. It’s endemic.
And they are surrounded in fear from the Four.
Don’t play their game. Improve something. Sound too difficult? You can start simply by not joining in on the negative behavior. Opt-out of piling on.
Then…just…improve something. That’s your power. You can’t change everything, you can’t fix everything, but you can improve something, that’s when things start to change. That’s when business gets better, safer, more profitable, more professional, and more fun.
You improve to create your own environment and if you lose that battle…there are other places to be. Ones with smaller Horsepeople and cleaner grease traps.
Just released: New online class on prioritizing your work with Personal Kanban. What Do I Do Next?
About Jim Benson
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author (with Tonianne DeMaria) of the best seller: Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He and Tonianne teach online at Modus Institute and consult regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working systems. He regularly keynotes conferences, focusing on making work rewarding and humane.
