Is training really corporate sludge?
Training is a waste of time that turns firms into bureaucratic sludge holes
Most company training is a waste of time that turns firms into bureaucratic sludge holes. That’s roughly the conclusion of today’s episode which is a conversation with Andre Spicer and Mats Alvesson
They have a new book out The Art of Less. Andre has been a guest a few times before – way back in 2018. This podcast is old. In 2018 this podcast was ahead of Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO at the top of the podcast charts. (Andre talking about open plan offices)
The idea that much of what companies do is related to their self identity, what the company aspires to be in the world – with the end result that it doesn’t achieve these things.
Things we discuss:
- ‘The Death of the Corporate Job’
- how ‘initiative-itis’ is dragging down organisations
- how training is corporate sludge that doesn’t achieve its goals
- corporate culture as an act of ‘grandiosity’
Robot-generated Typo-Riddled Transcript
Bruce: Gents, thank you for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.
Mat Alvesson: My name is Matt Alvesson. I’m Swedish. I work part-time at University of Bath, Bayes Business School, also in Sweden.
Andre Spicer: I’m Andre Spicer. I am a professor of organizational behavior. So that means I kind of study things like leadership, organizational culture. But also I am the executive Dean of Bayes Business School, which means that I’m a sort of cat herder in chief here, so I have to sort of manage a lot of knowledge intensive workers, um, and also deal with some of the sludge, which comes with working in a university.
Bruce: Now there’s a post going round online, and it’s been getting some traction the last couple of weeks. It’s called the Death of the Corporate Job, and in it the writer I’ve linked to it in the show notes, the writer talks about sort of wandering through Canary War for 8:00 AM seeing thousands of people who look purposeful coffees in hand. But very quickly, if you chat to the people who are heading that way, they describe a world where they have back-to-back meetings where nothing gets. Decided they’re managing projects that exists primarily to de justify the existence of project managers. One person talks to the, the blog writer and, uh, he says in his job, he enables decision making, whatever that means.
And your book. Seems pretty much to take on that enshittification of work, the fact that work has been consumed with admin and sludge. Have I got that right? Is that the objective of the book?
Andre Spicer: Very much so. I guess one of the things which we were struck with is that many of the people we spoke with, whether it was in police forces, military, corporate jobs, et cetera. Spent a lot of their time saying, well, I spend less and less of my time doing productive work and more and more of my time dealing with projects processes, filling in forms, sitting in meetings which have little point and as a result. Two things. One, they often don’t feel that engaged with their job.
The second thing is that they see stakeholders, whether it’s a, a patient in a hospital or a citizen on the street, or you know, a client. If you’re a corporate person who was increasingly not satisfied with the service, which their company or organisation was providing because they had to spend all of their time doing these other kinds of things.
Bruce: You style a lot of this as corporate sludge. The idea that there’s a lot of stuff that maybe unintentionally arrives and fills work, and if I was gonna sort of interpret it, most corporate sludge starts with positive intentions. It might be the gathering of data so that if anyone asks questions in the future we’re set up to do it or you list one specific area that is guilty to creating corporate sludge, but I wanna return to that quite intensively in a second. So could you just define to me what corporate sludge is to your mind and how work seems to pretty quickly become filled with it. Or and I’d love some of the examples you list, like how when budgets go off, quite often administrative tasks and, and staff go up and I’d just love to get into the specifics of that.
Andre: I think the specifics really bring it to life to give us a buyer’s guide to corporate sludge. So I guess the idea of sludge initially came from there was a guy called Richard Thaer who is a, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and he pointed out that yes, you have these nudges in society, which make things doing the good things easier. So, eating the fruit at lunchtime. But then he pointed out after this nudge idea came out that there’s also sludge, which means, that these are processes et cetera, which make doing the good things harder. You know, serving clients, getting tasks done. Then his coworker Cass Sunstein pointed out there’s a lot of the sludge in consumer and corporate lives. So in consumer lives, you think about canceling a subscription often, it’s super difficult to do that. You have to go through multiple stages and it can take days to, to, to cancel a simple subscription. And also. Say to fill in, um, tax paperwork or those kind of things. Federal paperwork is very difficult so that there’s a sludge in the kind of consumer and citizen facing and then we pointed out that actually in corporations and organisations, there is these unnecessary processes which make things harder than they need to be done. Harder than they need to be to get done. So we sort of outline a whole range of what kind of examples of this. So some are things like rituals, like unnecessary meetings where people routinely go, but there’s no actual point of these unnecessary meetings. So we give an example of one company, I think, which every year it had an, uh, an a weekly C-suite meeting, but every level below that would need to prepare for the meeting. And I think they spent over 300,000 hours every year just preparing for these annual weekly C-suite meeting. So a lot of time was chewed up.
Platforms is the second one. So, many companies have hundreds of different apps and they and employees will spend hours every week just switching between the different apps and learning the different apps which they need to get their work done. In large scale organisations often you have thousands of different projects, which they haven’t kept track of, which they’ve launched all of these projects and no one really knows why they are there.
Andre Spicer: Initiative-itis is one way of thinking about it. You also have people so often and roles, people’s roles, so. When you kind of launch new expand into certain areas, you say, oh, we need an expert in, in this area, in that area, in the other area. So there are many forms that sludge can come in.
Andre Spicer: There’s a sort of long list of them, and we were fascinated that many of these things seem to expand over time. And eat up a lot of people’s time.
Bruce: And could you give me some sense of the scale of it? I, there was, I think there was an example of somewhere in Sweden that had added extra budget and half of the work had gone on administrators or in police. It was seemingly like anytime they were getting more resource, it was just going into sort of creating more layers of. Admin, is there anything that can make that concrete?
Mat Alvesson: I think that you, I think about the, the, the Swedish police force where they had doubled the resources, but the number of very serious crimes that they was supposed to prioritize those being solved has not really improved at all.
The numbers have not improved at all. So despite resources, the productive outcome has not improved. And one explanation for this is presumably then all resources, the 10 in going into administration. So they counted the number of, of policy documents and that, uh, amounted to 589. So some police officers, they, to the fight, fight against serious organized administration as a key, uh, task. And, and, um. Of course, all this is well intended. We need a lot of hr, we need to work with diversity, uh, gender equality, sustainability issues, security, safety, career financial control, uh, competence development, blah, blah, blah. So, so there’s a lot of things that appear to be very. Reasonable or valuable, but amount.
Andre Spicer: So some other examples which we identified was one in the military sector where the number of battles, or soldiers on the ground or ships had gone down quite significantly but the number of high ranking colonels and offices and so forth go up. The same we saw in the healthcare sector where often the government would put in a lot of money. And, and I think this was in the Swedish healthcare sector and it was mainly kind of administration, it, all those kind of things went up, but the number of medical and and nurses stayed stable. The final example is, um, we looked at, there was one, one study which was done on, I think it was in Germany. Basically the people who issued driver’s licenses and sort of registrations for cars in Germany. They did an experiment where they sort of wanted to increase the speed of, of issuing these things. So they put significantly more resources in. They doubled the number of people I think it was, but there was no change in the, the amount of time it took to issue these licenses. So it seemed to suggest, this is called Parkinson’s Law, where sort of work expands or contracts to fill the space, which you give it.
Bruce: One of the things that certainly made me shudder, because I recognised it, you said that the majority of company training, the majority of internal training is sludge. And that’s really. Eye-opening because I guess there’s an interesting case study we could do and explore there. So you give a vivid example of in academia training for people who do oversight in PhDs. And people said that this had zero value actually it was insult to the people who qualified for it and for everyone else it had no value. And the notion that most internal training is sludge and superfluous might superficially be like a really jarring thing. People listening to this might go, no, but my training’s good. But actually the, maybe one of the biggest ways that DEI has been knocked down in the last 12 months with very little battle is that anyone who’s gone and investigated whether DEI training has worked or had any material impact, has found it hasn’t had any impact. It’s not worked at all in organisations, so the skittle of DEI has been knocked over really cleanly because you can’t demonstrate any loss from doing it. So firstly I’d love to identify how most internal training is sludge and secondly, maybe you can take us on the case study of how. Good intentions often don’t achieve their goal because training is sludge.
Andre Spicer: Maybe I’ll take the first point around corporate training. So corporate training from a distance is extremely important. And if you look at a country like the uk, we know that we need to upskill people, improve their skills in all sorts of ways so that should lead you to to invest in corporate training in all sorts of areas. But then if you then look at many of the training initiatives which are put in place, often they’re less driven by that, let’s improve skills and more driven by let’s avoid a legal case or let’s show that we are doing the right thing externally.
Andre Spicer: So then they put in place, uh, relatively you know, kind of industry standard, which is often quite standardized and straightforward training. And often, um, that’s treated as, as something you just need to do. Many people don’t pay as much attention as they probably should do. Uh, and as a result it doesn’t have much effect.
Andre Spicer: So, as you mentioned, Bruce, there’s fantastic work which has been done on looking at DEI. So if you assume that there’s a good goal, which is let’s improve diversity in your organisation then you look at the various measures that companies have put in place to achieve it. The most popular measure tends to be DEI training. Now what the research, as you pointed out, tends to find is that that’s probably one of the least effective mechanisms. And it’s not that it just has zero effect in some cases, if you are if you are negatively disposed towards DEI training in the first place, so you have negative. Priors towards it, it can have a bit of a backlash effect and we actually describe a case which was, I think it was looking at Canadian oil companies where they rolled out some DEI training because they wanted to be seen as more diverse. They basically took a standardised offer, which came from from the us which was mainly focused on the racial diversity issues you might find in the US but it had no eye to the two main issues that you might find in Canada. One being the relationship with First Nations people, the second one being the Quebecois, French speaking and English speaking population. And as a result, this diversity training fell flat and actually made matters worse, both for the First Nations people who work for the company and also for the Quebecois, Francophone speaking people. So often it can be a way that’s you can signal something is happening but without actually making any significant change and taking up people’s time while doing it.
Mat Alvesson: The problem is that education and training it, it appears good. We are kind of rational, we are responsible. We are knowledge intensive firm. We offer competence and, and a competence is approving. If we devote a lot of time to training, et cetera. The problem is that the symbol is the legitimation effect is sometimes tied to everybody going through this. So, and it should also appear to be quite, uh, impressive and nice looking, but that means that you have mandatory standard training. Or often coming from top down imposed on people. And that means that in, in many cases there are lots of variation in terms of interest, uh, abilities, needs, local circumstances, et cetera. But this mandatory standardised training from the top. It’s course high on symbolists, um, in relationship to the outside world, but it works typically very poorly internally because there are so many variations in terms of people’s interest and abilities and, um, the local work, specific local work situation. So, so then it means that it’s, it’s often, uh, just a matter of sludge more than something else. In general, I think that education then it, it’s important sometimes the people are really motivated. It’s situation located, located. It is very relevant giving the specific situation, but, but with all regulations that should be standardised. It should look okay in terms of legalities, blah, blah, blah. It should have a nice effect in terms of how it looked like. Then you have a lot of these leading motor slides. Then to end the specific substantive positive.
Bruce: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because one of the additional ways that we see sludge is that, uh, Louise Casey, when she was doing her report into the abduction of Sarah Everard by a member of the London Metropolitan Police, said that when she was sort of going through the postmortem of this, the washup of this that she sat down with their then prime minister and he just reeled off initiative after initiative to her almost by the very nature, that by declaring an initiative and actually it’s the sort of the stock in trade isn’t it, of politicians, by declaring an initiative, somehow we’ve put a pin in the idea that something is important and therefore. We’ve somehow given ourself the the hoodoo, the, the spout to wish it away. And she described it as initiative-itis, where there were lots of initiatives, but the end result is that someone had lost their life. And I guess training to some extent is, is another example of the same thing. We want to signal who we are in the world our identity is we care about these things. Our corporate identity is that we care about this. We’re trying to wash away this, but the end result is. We create this initiative, the end result is not achieved, but we’ve got a sticker that says that we tried our best and so what you might conclude is that sludge this. Red tape. This bureaucracy is actually the output of good intentions. And I just wonder then if we are to wash that away and, and to say, okay, let’s focus on the outcomes. How do we overcome that initiative items? How do we overcome the idea that everything is a training course, that no one pays attention to? Like the, the truth of. Training courses is, most of ’em now are delivered online and no one pays attention to them. And you know, there’s a complete disconnect between what we’re trying to accomplish and what we’re actually accomplishing. What’s the solution to all of this?
Andre Spicer: To build on your first point, which was the point about sort of no one paying attention. We looked at some, there was a study recently done on Microsoft Teams meetings, uh, and it sort of, it tracked what are people doing while they’re on teams meetings? Are they just paying attention to the teams meeting or are they doing other things? And they found that something like 40% of people on a teams meeting are doing some other task while they’re on a teams meeting. So attention is split. And the other thing which you raise is the fact that, these things are done out of good intentions, and we say absolutely, and the the problem you get is these, this kind of overload of good intention. So it’s not just trying to improve diversity, but it’s also trying to make things more sustainable and trying to make things more fair and foster free speech, and make things more competitive and efficient and all of these different initiatives. Kind of add up and they kind of crowd out people’s attention. So as a result they end up not focusing and trying to sort of push on one initiative which might be important to one area that might be important. They sort of end up scattering attention across multiple initiatives and then as a result, it often kind of crowds out out core work. So. It’s very much kind of driven by good intention. So then the question is, what do you do about it? And I think one in one of the aspects in the book, we began to explore this question about people have often developed their own techniques in the workplace over time to work out what you do about it.
One of those techniques is basically ignorance. I’m just going to ignore this stuff basically. And people are remarkably good at being ignorant in, in organisation, so, many people. There was one study which showed a significant number, I think it was something like 25% of, of people who were sort of middle managers had no idea what their company strategy was. There was a significant number of people in, in, in a company which was studied, who didn’t even know what the CEO’s name was. So many of these things just simply wash over people. They, they get ignored. So. Ignorance is one reaction. A second reaction is kind of, I guess a bit more strategic kind of engagement.
Andre Spicer: So you, you might engage selectively with a initiative. So you, you look at the initiative and say, okay, what do I really need to comply with? Uh, and you watch good teams and what often team leaders will do. Is to teach newcomers very clearly. These are the things you need to pay attention to coming down from the top. And these are the things which you can overlook or kind of selectively comply with. So you get the selective compliance. Sometimes that’s symbolic, where you just sort of put on the badge and show you’ve complied and move on and get on with your work. But the other one we saw that you sometimes find in function is kind of preemptive sludging.
So you build a sort of a moat of sludge around your function, so other functions can’t kind of get in and begin to sort of mess with your program and attack it. So I think that any any of your listeners. Probably sort of used some of these tactics before, or at least seen other people in their organisation using some of those tactics.
Bruce:Yeah, it’s quite a cynical perspective though, isn’t it? ’cause effectively you’re saying that the coping strategy for sludge is just kind of ignoring it and, and getting on with it rather than us trying to create an honest version of what our work actually is. The it’s a bit like sort of performative obedience is the only enduring company culture is kind of the perspective.
Andre Spicer: I guess what we say is those are, those are sort of the techniques which people often use. And then we sort of say what could be used and what some organisations actually do use, which we sort of look at. We, the two sort of metaphors we use is one is talking about maybe, uh, maybe companies need to think about themselves as taking inspiration from the, the sanitary industry and thinking about sort of inputs, throughputs and outputs. So it top of the pipe, middle of the pipe and end of the pipe solutions which we can talk about a little bit more. And the other one which we say is that maybe sometimes leaders instead of seeing themselves as fantastic visionaries, which sometimes is important, particularly when you are trying to plan in the long term.
Andre Spicer: But other times leaders might need to think about themselves as more like administrative plumbers who are sort of there to, to get rid of blockages along the way.
Mat Alvesson: You can do the, these more hidden resistance or manage to find your way around all this. But you can also have a much more offensive or positive case against this, and that is to. Getting used to and encouraged or, or cultivate the, the, the courage to speak up against stuff. So all the time. Then try to to, to state your opinion. We don’t find this particularly ne, not necessary, not particularly productive. Or at least we could do this if time and resources allow us to do, allow us to do this because we have some slack, uh, in relationship to the productive core work we’re supposed to do. So speaking up more clearly and then also, uh, encourage managers and others all the time have a very clear motivation. For one, we should do something.
Bruce: Thinking, realistically, looking at everything you say you say a couple of things that you know, really indelible for me. 71% of people don’t read company emails about strategy and only 28% of middle managers and execs could list three of their companies strategic priorities. And the only conclusion that I can end up making is that actually the only way to operate here is to devolve as much decision making to the lowest level possible, to devolve anything about direction and strategic direction.
Bruce: So that is, it’s imparted. By empowered local managers and that you train local managers as much as possible. So anything about, we want to have a DEI profile, it’s devolved to people who then can speak face to their teams, and it’s all for me, the only thing that seems to be in. An accurate application of what you’re saying is devolution of much power as possible. You know, you give the example of some motorbike training in Sweden, which I think the police were trying to get, and the admin of getting this training was so much that it would only be implemented after it was actually useful and, way round that just seems to be cut out all the middlemen and cut out all the middle processes. That might, from a corporate perspective, from a governance perspective, make organisations a bit worried about the vulnerabilities it creates. But it feels to me like a manifesto for full devolution of power in is, is that where you ended up concluding yourself?
Andre Spicer: So I guess there’s some different responses to this so one response is to say that if you look at a lot of the research and evidence, uh, it’s not that we. I don’t want any administration actually for quite some time kind of adding administrative systems into large, which, which requires some degree of centralised control. Into large, complex organisations like local authorities, healthcare universities, it actually makes them more effective on multiple measures for some time. But then you reach the point of optimal administration and then people often think, well, we’ve had more of it, so adding more is going to make things better. But then actually it gets into a too much of a good thing effect where it begins to decline and get worse, and it enters what we call the kind of sludge pit. You move from optimal admin to this sort of sludge pit. So. I think simply saying no systems is, is you need systems and administrative processes in large scale organisations. Then the question is how, how are they played out and how much space do you give for localised judgment and, and questioning which, which I think is necessary.
Andre Spicer: Maybe Matts could sort of expand on that second point.
Mat Alvesson: Organizations that they’re called for centralisation and standardisation and coordinated coordination. So decentralization is not the solution to all problem. It tends to have their own difficulties. Of course. Uh, it is to a problem. If you take DIA for example, it’s to a problem here who has the problem and it’s very seldom it’s a uniform problem in a very large organization.
Mat Alvesson: And what are. Conditions and what is the relevant solution to this particular problem if we have one? And that means that you have to, to look more careful at specific situations rather than saying, ah, here we have a very large company. Everybody should be doing DIA or we should have new policies, so we should have experts running around and giving speeches or whatever in a relatively standard.
Mat Alvesson: So, so rather than going for the centralised solution or even a very. Very strict, decentralised, you need to have some complication about what are the problems, what are reasonable. So I guess I just sort
Andre Spicer: of, um, just to sort of nail that point, just to say, both in heavily centralised and also in very decentralised organisations, you can get the sludge production. So from heavily centralised organisations, you get this very central standardised solutions from decentralised organisations. What often happens is that. Each individual center launches their own sludge, basically. So this function and that function, the other function think, okay, here’s something we think is very important, and then they spread it onto other, other parts of the organization and attempts to sort of, you know, extend their, um, their empire sometimes.
Andre Spicer: So. There’s a danger there on either side. Uh, the really fascinating example of that is this Holocracy, uh, where, which was aiming for this kind of radically decentralized organization. But if you look into it, these holocratic constitutions were extremely long and complicated documents with all of this new language and following the rules and regulations was often very confusing for people.
Andre Spicer: And it sort of seemed to add sludge when it was trying to get rid of it.
Bruce: There, there was one thing in the book I wanted to touch on, which was slightly separate from the overall conversation, and it was about the grandiosity of corporate cultures, about how quite often companies try to differentiate themselves by suggesting that their company culture is special, and that’s often quite a performative thing for the.
Bruce: Senior leaders there that, you know, like they attempting to separate it and, and I love you, just, it’s not directly related to what we’re talking about here, but I’d, I’d just love a perspective on this sort of grandiosity of trying to celebrate the marginal difference of cultures and how organizations can fall into the tropic, because I ended up concluding that, you know, the, the role then of corporate culture should be just to try and create an efficient, highly functioning organization rather than try.
Bruce: Peacock, how you are different to other companies out there. Could you give us the, the way that we should be thinking about that from your perspective?
Mat Alvesson: Well, I guess that a major driver behind slides is people’s want to appear, grant use to, to, to look really impressive. Uh, and then but both in terms of.
Mat Alvesson: One in, in one’s own eyes, like an identity project, but also then to project an image yourself to an external world that makes you appear to to be fantastic and excellent and much better than others, et cetera. And this creates, I to, to same extent this is, is kind of necessary. So some identity boasting and, and some image.
Mat Alvesson: Or impression management to the external role is necessary. But often people in an organizations, they have their own fantasies that, that people take this extremely seriously and they’re also interested and they have these positive effects. Uh, so, um, but it’s often not the case because. External world is not that bloody interested in, in, in what goes on or their vision statements or the fantastic, uh, efforts then to improve gender ratios on, on middle level managers or whatever.
Mat Alvesson: So, but a lot of grandiosity motives tend to fuel sludge. And then organizations, they’re full of people working with communication with fantastic HR initiatives, et cetera. And they all look good. And people feel may feel good about all this, but it tends to add more to sludge. And for people outside those directly involved in all this, it’s quite frustrating and irritating in many situations.
Mat Alvesson: Um, but sludge and grandiosity, they tend to often be bad fellows.
Andre Spicer: I was just speaking with a, a professor who is an expert in mergers and acquisitions and he, he sort of worked across a right wide range of industries and he pointed out that whenever you go to a company in an industry or an industry, they all say we are unique.
Andre Spicer: So he is kind of come to almost this formulation that the only universal rule seems to be everyone thinks that they’re unique when they’re, when they’re not necessarily so I think sometimes the, the solution around that is to begin to realize. Number one, a lot. A lot of the time audiences, external audiences don’t care about these certifications or these kind of grandiose stories.
Andre Spicer: We, we care, sometimes we care in organizations about it because that gives us a sense of purpose and specialness and meaning. But a lot of the time the external world doesn’t necessarily care as much as we might think. The second thing is that sometimes actually being a bit more honest about. What you’re doing and your purpose in your, in your place in the world can be kind of liberating, right?
Andre Spicer: So instead of, uh, there are many institutions that say we want to be world class and fantastic at world levels that might make us feel good. But actually when you are there to serve, say, a regional market and a very specific thing, doing a good enough job. That’s enough. And putting, putting these kind of grandiose ambitions aside and focusing on what you actually do can be liberating both the time, effort, and also sort of fantasy resources.
Andre Spicer: I guess
Bruce: when we’re thinking about this should there be a structure to how we think about sort of trying to eliminate sledge making these changes in enacting a reduction in our own organizations?
Andre Spicer: So often, uh, sludge you can think about as like a pipeline. So there are sort of beginning of the pipe solutions which you can put in place.
Andre Spicer: So this is stopping sludgy things from getting into organizations. So de sludged organizations are often very good at spotting. This is an initiative which might sound nice, but let’s park that for now. The second one is kind of middle of the pipe solution. So it’s really kind of the idea of actually making through making sure that things flow.
Andre Spicer: Through an organization efficiently and effectively. So it’s simple things like knowing the number of initiatives you actually have going on in an organization and which stage they’re at. It’s also things like, um, being able to stop things. So many organ, some organizations have been introduced to kind of one in one out rule.
Andre Spicer: So the idea is that if you want to start something. You need to actually stop them, something to create capacity for it. And then the final bit is kind of end of pipe solutions. So making sure that you don’t just sort of spew out sludge onto your, uh, you know, your users, your clients or your stakeholders, but you’re actually, um, spent sending out things which are well structured and useful to people in the wider environment, um, is really important. And you find that organisations, which. Are able to do that effectively, uh, can significantly improve things.
Bruce: Yeah, I’ve really liked the sort of the Huggy Rao comment of the rule of half just trying to half the amount of stuff you do. And actually I can relate to that when I, uh, the most recent big job that I had we did an audit of the amount of times people spent in meetings came out about 26, 27 hours and we just said, let’s try and halve it.
Bruce: We didn’t get anywhere near half, but we got it down by a third. And let me tell you, you know, when you save eight hours a week of people in meetings, that has a meaningful impact on how they feel that they’re doing their job. So just that goal of sort of trying to achieve something that feels possible, you know, simple. Yeah. Trying to halve stuff seems like a sort of a desirable aspiration and it was a meaningful step in the right direction.
Andre Spicer: Yeah, and you can apply that not just to meetings and length of emails, but things like initiatives, policies, strategies, projects, numbers of platforms you use um, levels of experts you engage externally.
Andre Spicer: All of these things you can say, let’s try and reduce those a little bit and, uh, focus on what’s really important.
Mat Alvesson: Yeah, and I talked with one person. He was, uh, working in a bank and they had a new, uh, CEO and he gave a talk there. Most of it was full local cliches and not particularly valuable, but he said one thing. If you are in a meeting and you feel that this is waste of time, you don’t learn anything, you don’t add anything, leave it. So that was, uh, an instruction and from, or, or, or, um, suggestion and from the CEO and I think that why couldn’t that be the norm? That people sit in meetings just because they’re polite. Others are, are, are doing this, we used to do this, blah, blah, blah.
Bruce: I tell you why, it’s because the first thing that will happen is that people in the next meeting will say, I tell you what, those Gen Z kids, they don’t do what we used to do. We used to have to sit in meetings and they get up and leave, and it’s a double-edged sword that like beware of simple answers to complicated problems. I think these layers to things that are more. Unfortunately, there are more imbued with status and we don’t want young workers to demonstrate any trapping of status themselves that we haven’t gifted to them.
Mat Alvesson: . Yeah, I think there’s a lot of symbolism and other things involved in all this, so the norms are sometimes difficult to change. But still, I will say that in intervention like that, on the margin. Could mean that people are a bit more careful about how they spend their time. And sometimes meetings can be not just waste of time, that it can be quite frustrating. You feel very stressed if you have other important things to do. And it becomes a bit more legitimate to say that, okay, this is a nice meeting, but I don’t feel that I can kind of contribute so much or it concerns me so much. So. So then you have more of an opening for people to reduce meeting time. Partly based on people’s own initiatives. So I think that a lot of things can be, be done in this region. And one thing is then that all the time ask people to produce a motives. Why should we do this? Why should we fill in this form? Why should we participate in this training? I’m happy to do this if there’s a motivation. But if you can’t see the reason for this, always ask for a motive. I just wanted to
Bruce: finish. Andre, you are a. You’re a boss, whether, whether you’ve got a title of Dean of a college or whatever, you know, in the grand scheme of things, you’re, you’re someone who’s responsible for leading an organisation, and I won’t hold you accountable for what you’ve done so far, but having sort of spent time looking at this now, how would you set about, you talk a lot about academia is one of the areas that’s really afflicted by sludge.
Bruce: How would you set about building a plan for going forward for removing the sludge inside your own organisation?
Andre Spicer: It’s a, it’s a difficult one as most of the listeners here. If they were posed the same question, they would have their own plans that they would like to implement tomorrow. Uh, but all of us have o other stakeholders, whether it’s, uh, upwards, downwards to the side.
Andre Spicer: Who might have other ideas. And, and many of them would think, well, my thing is most important and, and you know, we really need to do this, et cetera. So I guess the first thing is just acknowledging the difficulties. And I guess any of my colleagues who’d be listening to this would say, well, you know, I think about that time, Andre, where you force me to follow this policy or do that certification and so on. So. I admit, I’m human. It’s the first thing to say and I think it’s important, important for leaders to do that. The second thing, then you can kind of go through the list of a list of stuff we point out as, as aspect of sludge. So, um, some might be kind of ex lengthy meetings, which aren’t aren’t necessary or lengthy emails. Something that any leader can actually do is implement a policy where they shorten the amount of time they spend on meetings, or they shorten the amount of communication which, which they give, which, which might be deemed unnecessary. You can also simplify policies. Uh, you can potentially simplify the strategies which you give instead of 57 different initiatives.
Andre Spicer: You can say for this, this couple of years, we’ll work on three things and really try to move the dial on it. You can also, um, try and simplify people structures as well. So I think the, these are some of the things which, which can be done the difference, but different difference between sort of one’s plans and ideas.And the actual ability to do that can sometimes be rather. Rather large, let’s say.
