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FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At this time of year, many of us look back at the past 12 months, berate ourselves for not being more productive, and resolve to be more productive. But I’m starting to wonder if the individual is really the biggest obstacle to our own effectiveness. It feels like more and more of our time is being taken up by things we can’t control: compliance, the “computer says no” system, and the power of words.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that advances in technology would allow his grandchildren to work 15 hours a week. In fact, we seem to be busier than ever. Keynes never thought that a computerized call center menu would explain in detail how our data would be treated and invite us to try a website. Of course there is a website. Otherwise, why would we have picked up the phone and entered the 6th circle? hell?
Nor did he anticipate the proliferation of words and jargon that seem to characterize the 21st century. In the UK, the average annual report for the FTSE 100 now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the US, ESG reporting in the S&P 500 increased by a fifth in three years. Board packs have also been expanded, with an average length of 226 pages. A majority of boards in the US and UK told the survey that packs either have little impact or are a barrier to understanding the business.
In contrast, I recommend reading Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper that described the molecular structure of DNA. It’s only a few pages long. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which moved the nation, was 10 sentences long. Both are shorter than the introductions of most of the reports on my desk. This is a passage of words I picked up earlier. “Lack of absorptive capacity is likely to be a significant bottleneck for continued innovation.” This report is from a productivity consulting firm.
A few months ago, as I was sitting in a coffee shop in Massachusetts, I heard a woman rang me up at length about whether she should say “key learning objectives” or “stakeholder outcomes” in her presentation. , I tried not to listen to that story. I met a friend in London last week who had been asked to give advice to a Whitehall department, but the two-page memo she had sent beforehand had been translated into what officials described as a “word salad”. I realized that. The majority of the meeting was spent trying to decipher it.
How did we create a caste of people who write gobbledygook? What do we do when AI models are trained on it and produce even more gibberish? ?Management consultants also bear some responsibility. Years ago, when I started my career at McKinsey, we were taught a simple phrase that made it clear that “fast wins” were one of them. Today, many consultants’ reports are thrown around, perhaps to cover up gaps in their thinking or to justify their high fees. But even people who charge by the hour don’t actually want to read this stuff. A brilliant experiment by American lawyer Joseph Kimble showed that lawyers, like everyone else, hate complexity. When Kimble sent two versions of the court’s decision to 700 lawyers, they overwhelmingly preferred the simpler version.
“The more you write, the less people understand.” These are the wise words of the British government’s design manual, which urges officials to write short sentences in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is lost. Some parts of the public sector are models of effectiveness. You have just reported the death of an elderly relative on our ‘Tell Us Once’ service, which sends news of bereavement throughout the system. But the rest is a bastion of jargon. A framework agreement for architects wishing to bid for building contracts with London’s three city councils asks potential applicants, among many other questions, ‘How do you conceptualize collaborative social values? “What strategies do they implement to support their customers to maximize the return on social value?” Collaboration with stakeholders”.
Presumably, one purpose of this document is to encourage small businesses to bid for construction work. However, trying to generate a response with enough redundancy to meet the criteria is the most labor-intensive.
I’m reminded of anthropologist David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which argued that about a third of modern jobs are meaningless, simply doing work for others. These include “taskmasters,” or middle managers who create unnecessary work. and the “bad actors” – lobbyists and marketers who try to sell you something no one needs or wants. Graeber’s paper caused a huge stir, with many people writing to admit that they themselves were miserable in shitty jobs.
Redundancy, or as former Chief Justice Judge Igor used to call it, “an uneasy parade of knowledge” makes us miserable. No one wants to be invited to an “idea session”.
In Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Bullshit Job problem was solved by sending all the marketing consultants on the planet Golgaflinchum to colonize the new planet. On Earth, perhaps organizations could start moving all the people who are creating pointless complexity into useful roles. It could lower blood pressure, save time, and even solve labor shortages. As for me, I plan to make the Plain English Campaign one of my philanthropic efforts for 2025.
