So, it seems that our lives are full of information these days. It takes a quick Google search and then sifting through a few links to find out pretty much anything. I've found useful information about varied topics (some of which I post on this site) from how to fix my radiator to which jobs I should apply for? Its the age of information and its never been easier to "find the answer". So - if its that easy then why are there so many people who seem to move through life unable to find the answer to the simplest little things. There seems to be a complete lack of drive to find the solution to a problem. I live in a nation that previously conquered the waves, built bridges, invented TV (arguably) and steam engines. I assume we had drive and determination that probably put other nations to shame. In my opinion there seem to be several reasons why this country has begun to languish and only remember past greatness.
Schooling
We seem to be taught to do little tasks which increase in incremental amounts of complexity and finally culminate in an exam. The lack of critical thinking or solving real world problems is ridiculous. Children absorb information at a stunning rate and yet our schooling methods simply give them worries about how much they can cram before sitting an exam. We all know that most of the facts which we learn at school end up giving us a bit of dinner party conversation and general knowledge. The idea of school was to teach you about learning itself. To give you a thirst for "finding the answer", as well as how to structure an argument and validate conclusions (and appreciation for art, dance etc.). Sadly, we've given that up to give a larger number of children basic facts which have simple right or wrong answers.Why? Because its easy for adults to punish and reward in this system. Much harder to actually mark against problem solving ability or through tried and tested failures before ultimate success. After all, its the failures that teach you the most in life. Company directors complain that graduates aren't ready for work - that's because most middle class graduates haven't experienced anything like creative problem solving or results based rewards. As that generation grows up games manufacturers have even cottoned on to this. "Brain training" games which give us a tiny reward for the completion of a tiny thought as opposed to deep thoughts or puzzles that take time and energy to think through. Also, education certainly didn't prepare me for office politics and purposeful misdirection but that's the next topic.
Office jobs
I'm often struck by the lack of drive at work. As a graduate I started a "good" job dealing with small tasks as efficiently as I could. When I came up against an obstacle I'd feel annoyed with myself when I couldn't overcome it before asking for help. Although there were clearly other people like this, the prevailing attitude was to ask for help and when a problem couldn't be solved instantaneously, to give up and wait for instructions. Slowly, the kids who had that spark and drive are beaten down by the lack of support for new ideas and the general insistence to keep the status quo by those around them. Now I'm all for chain of command but large corporates are effectively turning their employees into drones who simply nod along to instructions. Without seeing your ideas flourish, or battling to improve, you're left with a group of people who simply move paper around from 9 to 7 (or later) before they go home. Sure, we review paperwork and draw PowerPoint slides but ask yourself how much this actually teaches you? Does it give you a sense of satisfaction? How many of you in a large firm have charged for your time and achieved very little? In our brave new world we simply want time to go by and enterprising people at the top of your firm are happy to profit for it. The alternative value-added model should be charging for real results not "forecast benefits realisation" but actual results. If you can improve a company's profits then charge your costs + 5% profit and redeem your results based rewards, say 15% on top, after 6-12 months when you show the improvements. That would keep people honest and stop the merry go round of consultants arriving with PowerPoint presentations as their main achievement. Revenue sharing & risk/reward payments based on "balanced score card" results do exist but they are not the norm and consulting companies discourage their use because its riskier to make a profit.
Large companies want drones, and to make sure they get them they reward that drone-like behaviour. Do your "box ticking" job; fulfill your hours target; make your sales target; fill out your deficiencies report; write out some slides; or finish your PowerPoint slide at midnight after re-writing the same sentence a thousand times. In an ideal world you should be given a "box ticking" job in order to make it automated and move to the next inefficient process to re-engineer on a regular basis. Those nuanced jobs requiring specialisation would exist but there would be far fewer because of the drive to commoditise. But we don't do that because vested interests wouldn't be able to make their return and management couldn't charge outrageous rates. What would all the middle class do for work if our office based work became more efficient through IT?
We also seem to have created a collaborative culture bordering on insanity. Sure, work is about team work and using the ideas and skills of those around you to improve your ability to solve a problem but our corporate jobs have fulfilled the middle class desire to chat your way through the day without actually moving a task forward. Those who are masters of this art climb the political management tree and continue to simply re-iterate other people's ideas or have sufficient eloquence to convince others of a particular direction. We've turned into a nation of reviewers and box tickers for tax and regulatory rules that we've made up for ourselves - that's why we don't have an export led economy! I'm sure the balance of payments between the UK and the rest of the world is set to get steadily worse for some time to come. We charge for services to fulfill our own tax, legal and accounting rules (making them more complex to give the middle class work). But we now have to pay more for the necessities of existence i.e oil, power, food because we don't have anything else of importance to trade with in return.
Or, if you're a junior banker you spend your life writing slides that have very little impact on any decision making. If people decide to buy or sell a company they make that decision based on experience and the counsel of a few trusted individuals. No one has time to read through a mound of pointless CAGR graphs and obvious risks observations showing forecasts and models which have little chance of emulating real life in the long term. It doesn't stop them pretending to have read and understood it all but that's part of the problem when our job roles expect no failure. A lot of "due diligence" is done to give some evidence that the decision made has some pseudo scientific backing. Just look at the evidence - no merger has ever been regarded as successful. Its just a type of strategy that enables expansion faster than organic growth - which generally means bigger rewards for management.
It seems fairly obvious that these activities or styles of working occur on a regular basis and yet no one draws attention to it because there is a collective emperors new clothes element to our lives which no one talks about.
The middle class system
The system seems to be as follows. Do well in exams ( and a bit of extra curricular activity) go to university, get an office based job, get married, have kids and then give them the ability to do the same. Some people who take a chance stray out of this path and are very successful, others fall flat on their face. But most don't risk it. They get a mortgage which ties them to debt and a life of servitude. At no point in education do we actively encourage people to think freely, test out new ideas, or help them through repeated failures. Why? Because the elite don't really want lots of them to succeed. The reason for this is simple. There is a class above who are perfectly happy with the status quo, their family got there first and they are happy with not working but simply enjoying their life after the labours of their forefathers. An enviable position but not one that the majority can enjoy. Some of them become politicians or industrialists but most are content to be anonymous. You always need a pyramid scheme to make this work. In my view, most organisational structures humans seem to make are a type of pyramid scheme that lasts greater than one generation. As long as it does that then no one cares that it is unsustainable in the long term. A few people at the top always benefit from a majority at the bottom. Equality is not really something that most powerful human beings actually strive for. I'm not saying you can't be successful e.g creating something that society requires and profiting from it. I'm just saying that its much harder than it should be and generally requires helping someone who is wealthy to get wealthier. Vested interests will always want the middle class to fulfil the role of the tax paying people who observe the letter of the law and are given jobs that involve box ticking or fulfilling a "role". Its not all bad, in exchange for this Faustian pact you get fed, some leisure time and the ability to raise a family. But we lose our ability to explore different ideas or try and fail as those our "risky" activities. For someone to achieve an idea or success they generally have to create something completely new with a small team who have similar goals or they profit from connections they have and pay workers to create something new. Why can't we actually do this as a collective where we benefit everyone? Why does it have to be outside the social norm to achieve and execute new and exciting ideas?
The lack of trust for employees
Has anyone wondered why we seemingly pay £1500 and upwards a day for a consultant to do a simple job that staff could do? Sure, there are obviously the usual implications of higher tax and long term pension liabilities associated with employees over consultants but really it all boils down to trust.
Senior management at larger companies just don't trust their employees to problem solve. In my view, you should create a "consultant pool" in any large company. Those people who are bored with repetitive tasks in their job role or want to earn some more money (to complete project based work with fixed deadlines) should move into these pools when they want to. Its fairly obvious that people have different priorities at various times in their career. For instance, as a new graduate you're capable of burning the midnight oil for a while whereas as a new father you have other commitments. At different times we need different things so why don't we realise that and actually cater for it? The reason seems to be politics. We employ consultants so we can blame them when ideas don't work or blame them when we "down size" to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of decision making. "We did it because the advisors said so" is the typical line you'll hear from the RBS board on the take over of ABN Amro or when a large scale project fails. Its easier to use external ideas and them blame an external party than have a falling out with your own management team who are harder to sack and also create political consequences in your organisation.
Government organisations do this often - they spend tax payers money to bring in external consultants for work that they should really be doing themselves but since the majority work for a set time (9-5) rather than to produce results, consultants are the easy option. I should stress that not everyone is like this but there becomes a herd mentality and those bright young graduates who want to change things are slowly beaten into conforming to this model. Why?
Debt
We've become mired in debt. We've all read about it but how does that create our lack of effort? Well we as a nation have begun to expect our services based on debt. We used our previous good grace (our credit rating) and borrowed to its limit to facilitate municipal spending that had no longer term benefits. This created our box ticking culture. We spent our money trying to give our nation education and jobs and future prospects but ended up just trying to spend our way out of problems. Thatcher told the unions to change the sense of entitlement but we just created another middle class sense of entitlement. Even now, when you look at what our government is chastised about its lack of spending and cuts not the lack of new sustainable long term ideas (although we've heard some murmurings about growth plans recently). Spending does not equal success or growth!
We have spent our way into giving people what they want without understanding what they should do in return e.g completing/creating work that is socially beneficial enhancing our quality of life. Instead we created more rules, laws and taxes and therefore more estate agents, administrators, lawyers, accountants, bankers and consultants. We killed our design ideas building nothing and teaching people nothing of the future requirements our society will need.
It seems pretty obvious really. For more people to exist in our society we need more power, more food, more housing and the ability to give people jobs which make something that the world finds useful at a reasonable cost. We either specialise or we generalise but it has to be something that we design and build (yes, a bit of banking, accountancy and law but its become about deals and speculation to benefit the short term few rather than long term benefit for the many). Debt has made it a bit too easy to fulfil desire and consequently, without the idea of hardship and overcoming obstacles our society feels its entitled to basics which are actually luxuries and this has led them to a lack of effort and no desire to "find the answer". Obviously when you realise you have to pay it all back people baulk but for the last 25 years we have created nothing of long term value, nothing that justifies the growth in income and spending levels we've seen. Debt is a system that has its benefits, it enables society to focus capital injections on products and services required to expand our society and increase standards of living e.g railways, roads, buildings. But we have subverted it to pay for our day-to-day shopping or leisure time. Activities which will not generate enough return to pay back the debt. Here's a question I find interesting. For years we didn't borrow as much, we balanced our books by spending our North Sea oil revenues. Whilst Norway has a large sovereign wealth fund and an enviable social welfare system to show for it (albeit with higher taxes) we have a social welfare on steroids and massive debt. How did we spend our money?
Real wage value
The wages of the average employee are actually falling. There are more middle class workers out there than ever before and we need to work longer and harder with two incomes to provide what used to be achievable on one income. We created a raft of graduates with a smaller ability to generate ideas and then gave them jobs with higher than average earnings. Most of the earnings we give them come from debt i.e government pays private company for a service; or government gives loans/subsidies to firms enabling private companies to churn through power point or legal contracts and pay their employees. Most people just don't understand this or realise it. They should tell you in school - every year your wage goes down about 4% on average. You need a pay rise of 4% just to afford the same things you can the previous year! If you're going to spend the majority of your income purchasing something that has a high rate of inflation (housing for instance) then you need an even greater pay rise just to afford the status quo.
We seem to have distracted the vast majority of people with popular culture and leisure pursuits (afforded by debt rather than sustainable growth). So, why are people content with this? Its like any dictatorship - keep your people fed, their minds occupied with TV and having babies and you will always be in power. Most people want a comfortable life that that is an achievement for them. So we pay more people less money to do their "box ticking" jobs compared to older generations so again there is no benefit to "finding an answer" for the vast majority it is a daily slog governed by tenure served. Unfortunately the more people we have that use resources and don't produce something for future generations the more unsustainable the world of "Work" becomes.
Comments welcome.
