Good day to you all. I trust you are well and enjoying the first shoots of springy goodness? I have worn shorts for the first time this year and have adapted to summer slippers so all is right with the world. How are you?
It’s been another month of many projects – meaning a lot of staring off into space and feeling like I’m not accomplishing anything. But the thinky think does mean my mind goes off into some different places, and I seem to have collected some interesting bits and bobs for you. Plus pulling together some threads that have been slurping around my noodle.
What things have been going round my head that I’m trying to think through this month
Return to office is, once again, top of mind this month. IBM and a few others have issued decrees. People aren’t happy. I think we know this story well enough. On the one side the theories about shadowy business dealings and real estate share prices driving demands to use dormant office spaces and make rich people richer, coupled with statistics pointing to people leaving, a decline in diversity and impacts on mental health, real income and wellbeing. On the other, arguments about an increase in serendipitous conversation and camaraderie, but more importantly, productivity.
Which caught my attention. We often talk about productivity as if it’s a highly tangible metric, a measurement of the amount of work done. And for the most part you can see why this would be a beneficial thing to measure. How much work are you actually doing every hour or day? Now for some roles, it seems to be easily defined. A customer service representative by how many outbound calls they made, or a software developer by how many lines of code they wrote. But does reducing it to those metrics work for everyone? This article by Stowe Boyd posits that there should be two measures, one of “productivity” in terms of financial business value and one termed “progressivity” which is value to the business are two separate things.
“The productivity ledger makes sense only at the level of large organizational units that are created to make things or provide services. A second ledger must be employed at the fine-grained level for progressivity at the individual and small group level, where the metrics for accomplishing goals, making headway, and pushing forward work initiatives can’t be reduced to labor in and product out.”
Reasoned in this way, it made me think it could go some way to explain the frustration between managers and workers. In short, they are just perceiving value in different ways.
And it’s this idea of how you measure these things and report them which also struck me through reading this article. Essentially, it’s about income and the way it is measured in America, but ostensibly, at its heart it’s an article about how large scale statistics contain a multitude of decisions. What you decide to leave in or leave out of measurements and how numbers are arrived at.
“The deeper you get into how GDP is actually calculated and allocated, the more you feel as though you’ve fallen through a wormhole into an alternate dimension. Let’s say you own a house. Government statisticians imagine that you are renting out that house to yourself, calculate how much money you would reasonably be charging, and then count that as a form of income that you are, in essence, paying yourself. This “imputed rent” accounts for about 9 percent of all GDP, or more than $2 trillion.”
With all of this swimming round my head, the conclusion I’ve come to is that when people quote stats, it’s interesting to think about what’s actually being measured, and consider whether you think that’s actually the right thing. Definitely will be more pondering on this in the next month though.
And now onto the links
Work-related stuff
Cyber security professionals are selling their services on the side on the darkweb
Thought-provoking piece around the idea of a Lazy Girl Job and how it is predominantly a white phenomenon.
Wanna know why Boeing is having so many problems? This article posits the idea of its long-term slide of cultural values and putting profits before…well many things.
And if you think it’s just the ol’ blue chips that suffer with this, check out this piece around Google’s culture change, and it’s results.
Creative stuff
Really nice creative idea from Hinge that tries to inspire people to get off their phones as a way to cure loneliness…I mean, it does seem to be a bit rich coming from them but it’s a nice creative idea nonetheless.
The design stuff for the Paris Olympics is coming out and they’ve done a big where’s wally type deal. Has had some haterz saying it’s a woke representation but putting all that aside, it looks lovely.
Do you want to see scale models of some of your favourite TV and film sets? Course you blummin’ do.
Mega cheesy Virgin ad celebrating its people. It is so joyous.
And finally
If you’re interested in the power of language and framing then this will blow your little socks off. An in-depth research piece using different language to talk about climate change and measuring its success.
Thanks for reading this far…see you next month don’t eat all your easter eggs in one go byeeeeeee