The Trap of Soulless Productivity

If there’s one thing I wish I could burn entirely to the ground and wipe away all traces and remnants of, its the misplaced notion that the productivity of Knowledge Work can be managed, measured, analyzed, and optimized as if all one needed to do was drip feed heroin up the arse of their hapless workers.

What is Knowledge Work™, you ask? There’s two concepts of Knowledge Work that I’m thinking about right now. The first is Knowledge Work as Imagined, and the second is Knowledge Work as Done. (I’m temporarily ignoring the actual literature definitions of Knowledge Work for the sake of ranting out some frustration. Forgive me pls)

Knowledge Work as Imagined is when you take the best of humanity, you embrace it, and you turn the lovely unbridled enthusiasm and exploratory nature of humanity into a powerful self-feeding engine that paints the world with the colors of the human soul itself as it learns to understand the world around it. It’s art, beauty, love, and life. It’s this amazing fucking thing that happens when you take a bunch of humans and you stick them in a pile and say “go forth and learn to love the world.”

Knowledge Work as Done is what happens when you take art and artistry and creativity and imagination and the soulful awe inspiring wonder of a child and you figure out how to forcibly shove it into something that is roughly shaped like an assembly line.

Knowledge Work as Done is where the love of the world goes to die, it’s where one of the most unique and beautiful aspects of the human mind gets turned into its most terrible weapon, it’s the snake that eats its tail, it’s the adult world equivalent of taking the quiet artist, giving them a wedgie, and shoving them into a high-school locker while you laugh at them and take all their pictures and shove them into chat jippity do dah, zippity day, my oh my, we’re gonna IPO today.

It’s a disgrace.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. We could be a lot better at this; we could be infinitely better at this, even. But, that requires understanding what makes Knowledge Work tick, what makes it… Work, and how one might nourish it and encourage it to grow rather than brutally ripping it out by the roots and screaming at it until it learns to behave. In short, understanding Knowledge Work means understanding the human condition itself, and taking a dark look at how we managed to turn humans from a social equitable animal that has unlimited curiosity and a desire to help each other succeed into a raving, bloodthirsty mass of hyperindividualistic demons solely bent on hedonistic self exploitation at the expense of the other. Seriously, how the fuck did we do that? How? How did we so deeply and fundamentally break humanity like this?

Now you might be reading this and going “Hazel, that’s a lotta emotions, goodness; but, be real now, how do you actually expect a company to pay millions of dollars for knowledge workers and not want to optimize them?” Well, you, my dears, are probably not thinking this, but this is unfortunately a realistic question one might ask when attempting to be Doing a Capitalism™.

Sure, fair enough, let me rephrase that question a bit:

“How does one measure creativity, the growth of institutional knowledge, and the value of that knowledge in terms of dollars per hour?”

Which is really what you’re asking when trying to define productivity for Knowledge Work. But it probably feels like a more ridiculous question now, doesn’t it? (That’s because it is)

As for the answer to that question? About dollars per hour and Knowledge Work? Here it is: One can no more abuse a dog into loving them than one can “productivity” a knowledge worker into generating a positive ROI.

In fact, you can replace “measuring productivity” with “inflicting animal abuse” and get an accurate idea of what’ll work and what won’t. If it sounds like animal abuse, it won’t actually measure productivity for Knowledge Work.

Here’s an example!

BEFORE: I’d like to [[measure productivity]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and withhold promotions for the bottom 10% performers]]

AFTER: I’d like to [[inflict animal abuse]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and using shock treatment on the bottom 10% animals]]

Sounds horrific, doesn’t it? Guess what: it doesn’t work. Amazing. Who woulda thunk. Fear and abuse and spreadsheet hacking doesn’t help people be creative and share ideas? Astounding really.

Humans want to be creative, humans want to love each other, humans want to make the world a better place, humans want to do art, humans want to be art, humans want to inspire, humans want to be inspired, humans want to learn, humans want to teach, humans want to heal the world, humans want to heal each other, humans want to collaborate, humans want to build, humans want to be beautiful, humans want to find beauty, humans want to create, humans want to be awed, humans love this fucking universe.

One of the best things for me recently has been watching all of the research fly out about how humans work, how they cooperate, how they really learn, and guess what? It’s not even a “you can have your cake and eat it too” thing. It’s literally “you can stop eating coal and start eating cake”. Seriously! Humans are wired to be productive by sharing, by loving, by growing.

I spent my entire life thinking I had to put that aside when Doing Capitalism in order to be successful. That’s not true!

It just breaks my heart that we have so much out there still that’s stuck in this old way of thinking that the only way to have humans create efficiently is to torture them into submission and rip out their very souls and dump them into the Capitalism Monster. It’s beyond aggravating to have to explain that, no, one can’t measure productivity, but they can measure belonging, and safety, and learning, and all of these wonderful ideas.

Not only is that “fine”, it’s better.