My current job has an almost obsessive relationship with Japanese production principles. If my employer was a person, they’d approach you, unprompted, to tell you why katanas were superior to European folded steel.
Working here has meant expanding my vocabulary by a lot to a great extent. Beyond the usual corpo-speech of taking conversations offline, so we can circle back and refocus our efforts to get these low-hanging fruits and exceed stakeholder expectations for the current Q, I’ve had to learn about Kaizens, Obeyas, Gembas and possibly one or two Pokemon names from a generation I’m not familiar with. (Funnily enough, the lost generation alludes to the demographic that started their adult/ productive life during the First World War, between 1910 and 1920)
But among all the new words that I now pretend to understand and trust (and trust that others understand as I do), a seemingly familiar word has wormed its way into my brain. It’s a loaded word, with whole chunks of religious text dedicated to dissuading people from falling into it. And yet, this word has been going through a heavy PR campaign to clean up its image. I’m talking about pride.
We are supposed to take pride in our work. If we are proud of what we do, we will do it better, and will want it to succeed. So we will involve ourselves more in the overall success of “the great project”, in which our little cog plays but a part. So week after week, reviewing my stated goals and projects, I get asked if I am proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve started to run out of excuses to explain why pride and professional activity haven’t usually vibed together in my experience. I can’t take refuge in a religious upbringing (I’ve had a radically different experience there), nor in an overall humility from which I start all interactions (people who know me will point out that I think highly of myself, even when I haven’t given many reasons to justify this belief).
So why haven’t I felt proud about my work?
Power can be seen as the ability to mold reality to closely resemble the intentions and desires that one has. By exercising power, (in any shape) a person changes reality, hopefully towards what they had in mind. The process of creation (not to be confused with the creative process that shines heavily in artistic endeavors) is an exercise in power. “Can you make a thing where there was none, that does what you wanted?”. Should you be powerful enough, you could. But I’m not that powerful, so my efforts always carry a degree of compromise with reality.
If I state more clearly, I’d say “I want to achieve A, which depends on factors that I can see, and factors that escape me. Because I am aware of (most) of the direct steps required so that A is built, I feel confident that my endeavor will succeed. There is some uncertainty from the invisible factors I am not yet aware of, which I’ll try to qualify.” (Just to clarify, my function has been for the last couple of years in the field of oxymorons, namely business intelligence and data analysis)
And most importantly, because what I set out to build isn’t my idea entirely, but I am merely the vessel through which the ancient overlords of business try to hedge their bets by throwing chicken bones and reading innards reading dashboards and requesting analysis after analysis, the compromise aspect gains even more relevance.
From the get-go, I assume that communication is flawed. All communication. Because it’s hard enough to think clearly about something, and I am aware of the vast distance between the thoughts that I have and the words I end up saying (words are limited in their power as they need to be ordered in a reasonable sequence we call speech, while ideas float freely and grab greedily from all corners of your brain), I make the assumption that anything I hear is going to, by necessity, be a pale reflection of what is truly being attempted to say. And because the message itself wasn’t clear, and my decoding is biased, and I’m aware of my bias but not of yours, I ask my seemingly stupid questions (eg: “when you say website, what do you mean by it?”. “What is a landing page for you?”. “Could you give me a step-by-step explanation on what a person needs to do to become a customer here at XYZ?”).
I jot down all of these questions and their answers, and I arm myself with optimism in the face of uncertainty, before marching out into the unknown. As I’m about to head into the darkness of research, I look back and double-check. “This is what I understood you were asking. And this is what I think I can do in that direction. Would that work?”. After a nod of approval from the hungry ones, I start work in earnest.
Poetics aside, what I want to convey is that no creation I’ve done in a professional context was born ENTIRELY out of my own needs or desires, but has always been shaped by the need or direction of a third party. I would argue that surgeons don’t perform operations out of nowhere because of their desire to do so, but because there is a clear need for them. And that’s compromise already.
So I’ve hopefully established that once I’ve created something, it was done with a known distance from the desired/ ideal object, and the finished result. And being cognizant of that distance doesn’t mean being accepting of it. In fact, I tend to default to a failure on my side when I spot these distances, instead of reviewing if the expectation of reality was not too far-fetched. That might be a good place to dig into in the future, but for now, I can attest that pride is hard to build when you take the flawed nature of any endeavor as a core principle.
Now, assuming my product (logic, dashboard, analysis, shiny button to export to Excel to be forgotten by all and join the pantheon of lost deities we invented and discarded as we emerged from our ur-cave) is created, flawed as it may be, but still useful enough to move the needle, a new phenomenon appears: The rest of the fucking owl.
My work doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and in its vast majority any analytical work exists as a secondary layer once a productive endeavor exists. First the Abrahamic God made the world in 6 days, then a consultant came along and said there were some inefficiencies in the process that, if addressed, would lead to a faster world building with no extra cost in materials. The consultant didn’t stay long enough to see if Earth 2.0 was in fact built, or if it was achieved in a shorter time.
My work, my little cog, goes into an engine. And because my sugar receptors and reward mechanisms have been attuned to the the critical eye of “improvement”, I notice fast enough that I’m not the only one that compromised with reality. The engine is built by hundreds of parts that approximate as much as possible the ideal shape, but don’t do it. We don’t live in the world of ideas, but in Reality. And Reality has fun seeing us compromise with it, seeping through the holes of our understanding, the edge cases we didn’t consider, and pointing them out. If Reality spoke, it would yell triumphantly “You left a tiny crack here!”.
So my imperfect work, which comes from an imperfect request, achieved through an imperfect process, goes on to join the rest of the imperfect creations. And where we declared proudly that this quarter we would do 20 (20 what? It doesn’t really matter), we ended up achieving 16. And I get asked if I’m proud of my work. And when I shake my head, because we were aiming at 20, the voice of business tells me that it is no longer time to look back now, we should be focusing on solutions for the future instead of spending time complaining. It doesn’t matter that optimization requires observation, and observation requires a critical eye and a presence of mind to retain what was intended and compare it with what was achieved.
I am not the producer, nor the driving force of my effort. And as such, my negotiation with reality happens some steps later. Maybe I am missing out some crucial information there.
In the end, I think there is danger in a culture of promoting “constant pride at work”. I fuck up, on average, as much as the next guy. And in some cases, I learn from my mistakes. I’d argue discovering the source and solution for my mistakes is one of the few sources of pride I derive from work. And this is a highly personal pride. It doesn’t get reflected in a single cog. I won’t point out towards a dashboard being shown in a meeting and say “I raised that boy!”. Maybe there is a larger discussion to be had about the level of compromise each of us puts into work. I already know that I’ve lost the battle to just let my job be a source of income that lets me live the rest of my life. I know that I care about the usefulness of my time, and that I wore the work-sona costume for long enough to feel it represents a part of me.
I guess, after all, most of life is compromise.
