What Truly Counts Doesn’t Have To Be Measured | LSW#49

Hey! It’s Sheril from Leading Sapiens. Welcome to my newsletter, where I share strategies for getting savvier at the game of work.

In this edition, I share a hilarious passage that captures an unfortunate reality of both how we work and live. It’s followed by my own observations on peak performance, and an entire collection of pieces covering different aspects of the same phenomenon.

ICYMI:

• Doom Loops that Stall Growth

• If Miranda Priestley was Your Boss

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Measuring the orchestra

Frederick Taylor’s notions of performance and managing people evolved on the factory floor more than 100 years ago. Unfortunately, even today, managers work with the same logic. We extend this same “machine logic” into our personal lives as well.

Consider the farcical account below of an analysis by a recent MBA grad wanting to optimize a symphony orchestra. The unfortunate reality is that this is not in fact a farce and happens every day at work.

A young, enthusiastic MBA was finally given the opportunity to apply his learning. He was asked to carry out a survey of a group with which he was not normally familiar and submit recommendations as to how its efficiency could be increased. He selected as his target a symphony orchestra. Having read up on the tools of the trade, he attended his first concert and submitted the following analysis:

a. For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. The number of oboes should therefore be reduced, and the work spread more evenly over the whole concert program, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys of activity.

b. All twenty violins were playing identical notes. This would seem to be an unnecessary duplication, so the staff of this section should be cut drastically.

c. Obsolescence of equipment is another matter warranting further investigation. The program noted that the leading violinist’s instrument was several hundred years old. Now, if normal depreciation schedules had been applied, the value of this instrument would have been reduced to zero and the purchase of more modern equipment recommended long ago.

d. Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demisemiquavers, which seems to be an unnecessary refinement. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees and lower-grade operatives more extensively. . . .

e. Finally, there seemed to be too much repetition of some of the musical passages. Therefore, scores should be pruned to a considerable extent. No useful purpose is served by repeating on the horns something which has already been handled by the strings. It is estimated that, if all redundant passages were eliminated, the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes and there would be no need for an intermission.

— cited in Managing the Myths of Health Care by Henry Mintzberg

Some observations

• It’s fashionable in social media “broetry” to quote the Pareto principle: “Just focus on the important 20% and forget about the rest because it’s the 20% of the input creating 80% of the results.” That’s only half-true.

  • What they forget is that to figure out the 20% you have to first do the messy 80% as well. The pivotal 20% becomes obvious only in hindsight (if it does). You don’t know the “useless” 80% beforehand.

  • Invariably, in practice, the 80% is very much connected to the other 20% which means you can’t simply cut it off.

  • It’s also fractal and a never-ending process. This means if you’re trying to avoid the required “work” why are you doing it to begin with?

• The Eisenhower matrix is another one — focus only on the important and urgent, and so on.

  • But what do you do when you have 4 things that are equally important and urgent? Now it becomes an existential decision of making a choice rather than simple optimization by rules that promises easy answers. Clue: pick one. Choice creates energy. Limitless optionality meanwhile reduces power.

• Just because we can count something doesn’t make it any more valuable. And just because you cannot, doesn’t make something any less important. Unfortunately, ease of measurement means that we give more importance to those aspects.

  • E.g. Money is only one form of value but invariably we default to it when making career choices. There are other more valuable forms like time, energy, and identity that are not as easy to measure but way more impactful.

  • The volume of something doesn’t always correlate with its impact or even utility. This is why measurement is only one way to look at things, and should not be the only way.

• What often looks “unproductive” and “inefficient” is, in fact, a requirement for consistent productivity. The language of machinery doesn’t lend well to working with human beings.

  • Some of my most productive and creative stretches were invariably preceded by even longer stretches of fallow time that felt unproductive in the moment.

  • The industrial complex does not like deviations or deviants. But it also wants innovation. These things cannot co-exist. Best practices and breakthroughs are oxymorons.

  • Modern and newer doesn’t necessarily mean better. Fast and efficient doesn’t mean useful, or even needed.

• There are aspects that simply cannot be figured out by focusing on individual pieces in isolation. The whole is much more than simply the sum of all its parts. The same goes for our lives.

• Performance (and especially the ever evasive notion of happiness) is not linear.

  • Part of what produces music is the empty spaces in between notes. Without empty spaces, it would just be noise.

  • To have peaks, you need valleys, and vice versa. One cannot exist without the other. What we want instead is a flatline with a slope of infinity. The quest for a never-ending sequence of peaks is what makes us go looking for hacks, gurus, or substances that promise to buck the trend.

  • Measurement also skews our attention on the wrong things. E.g. trying to “gauge” my level of happiness paradoxically makes me less happy. In fact, the less I think about it, the happier I am. Too much measurement and we miss the whole point of the exercise. Frankl said it best: “Happiness cannot be pursued. It has to ensue”.

• Grappling with challenges and inefficiencies is how we get better.

  • As cliched as it sounds, often the greatest gains come only after a long period of “confused complexity”. Those gains can’t be had if we aren’t willing to put up with confused complexity to begin with.

Related pieces

• How rules twist the game itself

• Don’t worry about work-life balance

• Self-doubt is not a problem

• Speed is the wrong criteria

• Un-guruing ourselves

• Dead horse theory of management & careers (LinkedIn post)

• Peter Drucker on managing knowledge workers

• Laws of systems thinking and the systems thinking iceberg

• Circular causality

That does it for this edition. If you found this valuable, please like and share. It makes my day, and helps other folks to find this publication. See you next week!