Justice – Week 6
Where I reflect on justice in the workplace, shapeshifters, and rewarding creative work
Good principles of organisation design look for patterns of causality -– who makes what things happen – and assign benefits accordingly. Or at least they try to, though this is rarely straightforward.
A group of Victorian public servants has been challenging a proposal to cut down 3000 public service jobs. Instead, they suggested reducing the executive head count, which almost tripled in the past decade. Salary differentials would keep more people employed, and benefit the public overall. The question is, of course, who does the work? Which in turn requires defining what the work precisely consists in.
We’re surprisingly bad at articulating it.
For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a project that crystallises a long-term interest in liminal roles. In any human group, there’s a larger number of things that fall between the cracks. Alignment, culture building, shock absorption, continuous improvement, and a range of coordination efforts. All this requires practical, emotional and cognitive labour. Yet most of it stretches between the realms of ‘not my mandate’ and ‘manic pixie fairy business’. Therefore, it relies on people to go beyond the letter of their job description, and get that in-between work done against the grain.
I call those people shapeshifters.
I was discussing the proposal with a close friend who works as an organisation design consultant. He nodded in recognition. In fact, he’s been formalising precisely that type of role for one of his clients. ‘It does get done’, he says, ‘but all of it is on a volunteer basis’. He’s advocating for it to be translated into KPIs. Naming what goes unseen is wise – it makes it more likely that it won’t go missing suddenly when we need it most. It’s a matter of justice as well.
**
A friend invited me to join their organisation as in-house editor, with possible ongoing involvement. It’s a beautiful project, and something I would love to see part of my stable portfolio. Of course, we need to start with a trial run. I had a call with the head of comms to clarify details. We defined a – loose – initial scope of work, and I had to quote a budget.
This is never easy. I’ve been mainly working with initiatives that exist against the odds, and where nobody works at market rates. My approach has been to propose the same discount as the average person in that organisation would accept. Except all this is elusive. Whatever initial rate I name will remain as an anchor.
I like to blur the lines further by naming a range. In that instance, an amusing conversation followed. I found myself insisting on the lower end of my range while the head of comms kept pushing for the top end – in a dance reminiscent of friends fighting over the bill after a meal.
This was a negotiation over fairness anchored in mutual care, which included not only price but commitment. By pushing down, I stated my desire to be part of the team and therefore on the same footing. By pushing up, I believe, they stated implicit caution. This was a trial run on contract. My pay would later align on the organisation’s average if I was brought in on a more permanent basis. For now, that extra was a way to clarify that there was no firm promise made. It was just that I should be rewarded for that uncertainty. And acting fairly now would ensure that we would both desire working together in the future.
**
In a conversation with another friend, we found ourselves exploring the relative value of two different kinds of work. Some of us do what we call functional work. That’s teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and most people in most organisations. Their work has a clear use case: they keep the world as we know it going.
With this comes a paradox. If I’m a teacher and I don’t show up to class, there will be short-term pain. But precisely because that work is clearly needed, each individual is replaceable by design. No matter how good I am as a teacher, doctor or lawyer, someone else can step in, they will catch up after a while, and the system goes on churning. More: the system is built precisely for that replacement to happen.
Creative work is different. It’s not held by anything much. If I don’t write that book – or bring that idea to life as a business or a product – nobody will notice except perhaps my closest friends or relatives, and my banker. Except if I don’t do it, it will never exist. And even if I do everything within my control, it might never find an audience or a market, and get nowhere.
How should those two kinds of work be rewarded then? Justice demands that we find common measure between categories, so they can be weighed in the same balance. In this case, my friend offered a parable from a children’s book she read.
A group of country mice were preparing for winter. They were busy gathering grain, digging tunnels, or foraging for cheese in the nearby farmhouse. Meanwhile, one of them would spend the whole day standing outside and watching the world pass by, the movements of the sky, the flights of the birds, and the bees buzzing around.
After a while, other mice came to him and said ‘hey, we have a lot to do before winter. Why do you stand here doing nothing? Won’t you do something useful for once?’ But the contemplative mouse said ‘I can’t, I’m very busy. There is so much in the world to witness and observe.’ He was assertive enough that the rest of the mice gave up on him.
When winter came, the mice had plenty in store, and were able to feast through the long dark season. Except spring came late that year, and the ground was still covered in snow when there was hardly any food left in the stores. The mice were shivering with cold and hunger. Some gave in to despair, others raged against each other. Then they turned on to the lazy mouse who spent all summer in idle contemplation: ‘if only you’d been doing something useful then, we would have enough to get through.’ But the contemplative mouse said ‘I did. Now is the moment my gathering will come to good’. He stood up among the mice, and started retelling all he witnesses in the summer months. The movements of the skies, the flight of the birds, and the bees buzzing around. He told tales of the fields, of the forest, and of the clouds. He was so sharp, so vivid, so joyful in his storytelling, that the mice were enraptured, transported to those happy times of plenty. They forgot about their cold and hunger until the seasons finally turned. That contemplative mouse, through the power of storytelling, had kept them all alive through the harshest period of the year.
Most of the world’s miseries stem from the fact that man can’t say alone in a room with nothing to do. If we tie all our value ties to functional work, then we might get more things done for sure. But if our sense of self requires that we be constantly busy out there in the world, do we have the resources to make that happen. We might well find ourselves exhausting the planet only so we won’t have to sit in a room with nothing to do. Creative work entices us to virtual realms, where we can distract ourselves without draining the material resources around us. Stories absorb our excess capacity, and while we’re engaged in that fantasy world, the earth can lay fallow and regenerate.