From Feeling to Structure

A distribution warehouse can tell you how many orders are waiting to be picked, aisle by aisle, to the minute. Anyone walking the floor can see where the work has piled up.

The same company cannot tell you how much work is waiting on its head of financial reporting on a Thursday afternoon. That queue exists in one place only, which is her working week.

The last essay ended on a person who could name, precisely, the one strand of the structure her hands were on. This essay is about that kind of account: what it is, why nothing else can replace it, and what has to happen to it before an organisation can use it.

The floor that disappeared

The disciplines that reshaped production in the last century started from one idea. Most of what looks like individual performance is a property of the system around the individual.

They could act on that idea because the system was visible. Queues, cycle times and defects could be counted without asking anybody anything.

Office work kept the idea and lost the floor. It still has queues and bottlenecks, but they sit inside people's weeks, where nobody can stand and count them.

That leaves two ways in. An organisation can watch the person and guess at the work, from hours logged in, emails sent and meetings accepted, which is surveillance however lightly it is done. Or it can ask.

The only instrument that reaches the work without watching anyone is the account of the person doing it.

Two sentences

Ask the head of reporting how her month is going and she will say it is impossible. That is true, and it is a fact about her.

Ask what makes it impossible and she will say the figures she reports on arrive on the morning the report is due. That is a fact about the arrangement, and it would still be true if she never said it.

The first sentence can only be weighed. The second can be checked, compared with what other people say, and handed to whoever decides when the figures are produced.

Organisations have been asking people about their work for years. Why do they hold so many first sentences and so few second ones?

Because the instruments ask how the work feels, and stop there. The answer is not to stop listening. It is that the second sentence is the one the organisation needs, and the first one is hers.

A witness, not a subject

When she gives the second sentence, she is not being measured. She is giving evidence about something outside herself, and the employee becomes the witness rather than the subject.

That also answers a fair objection, which this series has raised itself. People are poor at summarising how a year has felt, because the mood they are in colours what they remember.

She does not need to remember anything to say when the figures arrive. Evidence about a specific arrangement, given at the time, is a different thing from a recollection of how things have been.

Hers, and theirs

The step from the first sentence to the second does two jobs, in order.

First, it keeps her safe. How she feels about the month stays with her, and the organisation is excluded from it and has no claim on it. That matters for accuracy as well as decency, because an account given to someone who will judge the speaker is managed before it is given.

Second, it hands the organisation something it can act on, which is a description of its own arrangement. How the step is made is not the subject of this essay. That she makes it herself, before anything reaches the organisation, is.

The room it goes to

The natural place for the second sentence is the one to one. That meeting usually turns into a review of tasks, because tasks are the only thing both people have words for.

A description of the arrangement gives them a second subject, and neither of them has to ask for or offer a feeling. It also gives the meeting something that can leave it: her manager may not control when the figures arrive, but a sentence about it can travel to whoever does.

One account, then several

On its own, her sentence might describe one difficult month. Set beside other people's, it becomes something more.

Three people saying they are stretched add up to nothing. Three people saying their figures arrive on the morning the report is due point to one decision, made somewhere, that can be found.

The thing being counted is the blocker, meaning a feature of the arrangement that keeps producing the same strain whoever sits in the chair. Counting how often it is named observes the arrangement, not the people who named it. What happens next, and who acts, belongs to the essays still to come.

Opinion: The Instrument Is Already in the Building

Our position is that the account of the person inside the work is the only instrument that reaches structure without surveillance. It becomes useful when it is carried one step further, from how the work felt to what produced it.

What a person feels is theirs. The organisation's claim stops at the structure, and the step between the two is what holds it there while handing over the part that can be acted on.

None of this needs a new survey. The instrument is already in the building, and it is being switched off just before it becomes useful.

The provocation we would leave open is a test. Take the last time someone told their manager the workload could not be done, and find out what the organisation kept.

If it kept a feeling, it learned something about one person. If it kept a description of the arrangement, it would know by now whether anyone else had said the same thing.

Earlier in this series
Essay one, The End of Structured Thinking.
Essay two, The Most Measured, Least Informed Person in the Room.
Essay three, The Organisation Nobody Chose.
Essay four, What the Survey Cannot Ask.
Essay five, The Last Room Left.
Essay six, What the Tasks Were Hiding.

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process:
The author made use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies in the preparation of this post.

The contents of this article are for informational purposes only and do not constitute professional, legal, or financial advice.