avoid-parkinson

Parkinson’s Law is a book from the Penguin Business Library written in the 1950s. It’s one of those entertaining books you sail through from one laugh to the next, but still so relevant. Why? Because it’s about how humans behave and organise themselves and that has not substantially changed, ever.

The main gist is this: we spend far too long on execution, focus far too often on trivial things, and tolerate far too much nonsense. In short, the law itself:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, those quarterly goals you have…guess how long they’ll take?

Strive to minimise

The obvious answer to avoiding the law taking effect is to avoid work completely or at least redefine it as something less ghastly, like play or learning. The next most obvious solution is to reduce the time available for completion, but this would require a level of ruthlessness possessed only by those types who are, let’s say, not fondly remembered (“Oh God! He was such a xxx!)” So, as far as I am able to work alone, I try to limit time available with self-imposed deadlines, story points (borrowed from Scrum) and pomodoro timers, and inevitably find myself reading The Economist (or anything, really) when the bell rings. I’m not one of those ruthless egoists, so I don’t count helping others as a distraction from my own work. When others succeed, as I wrote here, that’s good failure.

Since I started with personal OKRs, I’ve been experimenting with a daily todo list of one item and I almost nearly have the list ticked off by the end of the day.

If more than one person is involved in your work, then good luck. Now you not only have to minimise time, but also the number of dependencies, the number of people, and the level of formality. Formality is very bad, maybe even requiring—gasp!—a presentation to push your agenda get people on board.

Watch your meetings

But really, people love maxing out the available time. This is why we have intricately planned workshops and meetings which last an entire day instead of knocking out a decision in a few minutes with the person who has the authority and will make the final decision anyway. The quality of the meeting (like having any kind of impact whatsoever) is inversely proportional to the amount of froth it generates, for instance, sticky notes or superficial excitement. Everyone knows the best thing about workshops are the breaks and informal conversation, so instead of distracting people from what matters with clever whiteboards, half of which never see the light of day, just pick five people at random and put them next to a coffee machine for 15 minutes.

Avoid specialisation

This is tricky. What does Parkinson say?

Seven officials are now doing what one did before

and

…it is manifest that there be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.

Specialisation occurs for several reasons.

1. It seems like a good idea

Sexy job titles; cross-functionality; complexity. And other exercises in avoiding making decisions. Of course: expert domains require expert knowledge but ignore at you peril the cost of accessibility (“I’ll have to check and get back to you…” quoth the expert, and never did) and common or business sense. Going down this path is possibly irreversible.

2. People need promoting

This is why we have a hierarchy, right? Without it, all hell would break loose. On being promoted you obviously can’t just do what you were doing before—you’re more important now—and people would ask awkward questions. To justify the cost, you’re given at least two staff (one would be ridiculous), who divide your previous tasks between them, but skewed or weighted based on their preferences. Congratulations, you have created two specialists.

Instead of one person doing something, with a clear grasp of the whole process and the requisite decision-making authority, the process is atomised and the parts spread across specialists lacking broad-spectrum knowledge and insulated by bureaucracy from the forces (think Porter) buffeting the organisation. Authority is, of course, retained by the newly promoted. The main tasks of specialists are moaning about other specialists, waiting for their superiors to make decisions and squirrelling inefficiencies away in meetings. A smooth and simple process has become disjointed and complicated. Hopefully the customers won’t notice! Maybe not, because two or three employees will be working massive overtime so problems won’t manifest until they burn out (or leave).

3. Growth

Because all the promotable people can’t be promoted to the same job, new functions have to be created. Now we have not just seven people doing the work of one (see above), we have seven teams doing seven different specialist things, like passing off tasks between each other and making sure other teams don’t out-perform them. They:

Make work for each other

4. Drift

Left to their own devices, people will let their natural skills and prejudices define how (or if) they work. This is specialisation by default. It’s happening constantly. I’m reminded of the Tower of Babel: at some point, no one understands each other any more.

Plan for the present

… perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan…

It seems to me that an inordinate amount of time and stress go into planning, a process nobody is content with, for something that will never exist, i.e. the future. The result, an abstract series of numbers, and how they fare against reality, will interfere with all sorts of important things for the next 12-18 months: culture, esprit de corps, tone at the top, capacity for innovation to name but a few. The process will possibly even turn on some of its creators (victims of their own stress or made scapegoats).

If planning, then as a second step to creative long-term thinking. Who cares about next year—what will we be doing five to ten years from now? Parkinson is saying a focus on the abstract and arbitrary as a measure of success, in a physical and visceral world, is proof that discovery and progress have lost importance. And if you want growth, or even the same output, then discovery and progress are essential ingredients. It’s like walking up an incline that is getting steeper—nothing stays the same in business, nothing gets easier—and if you’re doing the same thing one year from now, your performance is guaranteed to be worse.

Planning is usually the domain of the upper echelons of management. You’ve got your top line, costs, ROI lined up, some good ideas for projects and actions, know what trends are coalescing in the industry, right? Now is the time to plan for the present—make sure your people are equipped for the journey ahead. Hiking boots and motivational singing won’t cut it when full mountaineering kit is required.