Make-Work

Humans are remarkably good at creating make-work especially when in a hurry. Ironically, this is tends to lead to reduced progress despite the massive expenditure of effort. I think it akin to splashing around when drowning. Not only does this not help one stay afloat, it also tends to lead to the sort of tiredness that ensures a swifter drowning.

A good example of make-work is company meetings. There are times when a meeting of minds is critical to agreeing upon a mutually beneficial course of action. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to turn a productive meeting into make-work by calling meetings at the slightest hint of disagreement. Meeting spam ultimately results in massive expenditure of effort to little effect: considering the time spent ruminating, one might well have simply made progress towards the intended solution. Something like a drowning person thrashing about.

Sadly, the make-work can look disturbingly real, and superstition sets in. That is, successes in implementation can be attributed to the presence of meetings while failures are attributed to the absence of them. As we know, that's actually a typical failure of empiricism and makes for rather poor decision making.

Perhaps a better way would be the analysis of a problem and breaking it down into its constituent parts, then assigning each part to the respective subject matter experts for further analysis. Discussions should never be limited to meetings, and should be free flowing instead.

Considering the general problem of make-work, a lot of the problems seem to be avoidable by careful analysis rather than the choice of blindly doing anything random instead. Doing so would result in the kinds of strange behavior I see on a regular basis.