Open Editor's Digest for free
Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At this time of year, many of us look back at the past 12 months, criticize ourselves for not achieving more, and resolve to become more productive. However, I'm beginning to wonder if people are really the biggest obstacles to our efficiency. It's as if more and more time is being absorbed by things beyond our control: compliance, “computer says no” systems, and the powers of verbosity.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would enable his grandchildren to work 15 hours a week. Instead, we seem to be busier than ever. Keynes did not consider that computerized call center menus tell us at length how to handle our data, urging us to try the site, which of course we have, otherwise why would we pick up the phone to enter the sixth circle of hell?
Nor did he anticipate the proliferation of words and terms that seem to be the defining feature of the 21st century. In the UK, the average FTSE 100 annual report now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the US, S&P 500 ESG reporting has increased by a fifth in three years. The board packs have expanded as well: they average 226 pages in length. A majority of board directors in both the US and UK told pollsters that this package had little or no impact on understanding the business.
By contrast, I suggest reading Watson and Crick's 1953 paper describing the molecular structure of DNA. It is only a few pages long. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which moved the nation, was 10 sentences long. Both are shorter than the introductions to most of the reports on my desk. Here's a line from a quote I just picked up: “Lack of absorptive capacity can easily become a critical bottleneck to sustained innovation.” The report from a consulting company about — eh — productivity.
Sitting in a café in Massachusetts a few months ago, I tried not to overhear a woman on a long call about whether her presentation should mention “key learning objectives” or “stakeholder outcomes.” Last week in London, I saw a friend who had been asked to advise a Whitehall department, only to find that the two-page memo she had previously sent had been turned by officials into what she described as “word salad.” It took most of the meeting to decipher it.
How did we create a class of people who write gobbledegook? How will we deal with this when AI models are trained on it, resulting in more chatter? Management consultants are partly to blame. When I started my career at McKinsey many years ago, we were taught pithy phrases: “quick wins” were one of them. Nowadays, many consultant reports are laden with verbiage, perhaps to cover up a void in thinking – or to justify higher fees. However, even those who charge by the hour don't want to actually read this stuff. A fascinating experiment conducted by American lawyer Joseph Kimble found that lawyers hate complexity as much as anyone else. When Kimble sent two copies of the court's ruling to 700 lawyers, they overwhelmingly favored the understandable version.
“When you write more, people understand less.” These are the words of wisdom in the UK government's design guide which urges officials to write shorter sentences, in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is lost. Some parts of the public sector are models of effectiveness – I have just reported the death of an elderly relative “Tell us once” service. Which relays news of bereavement through the system – but others are bastions of jargon. A framework agreement for architects wishing to bid for building contracts with three London councils asks potential applicants, among other questions, how “they will conceptualize collaborative social value, and what strategies (they will implement) to support clients in maximizing social value returns from… Through cooperation with stakeholders.
Presumably one of the purposes of this document is to encourage small businesses to bid for construction work. However, they will be the most exhausted trying to generate responses with sufficient verbiage to meet the criteria.
I remember Nonsense functions: a theoryWritten by anthropologist David Graeber, who claims that about a third of modern jobs are meaningless and simply create jobs for other people. These include “task managers”: middle managers who create unwanted work; And the “fools” – lobbyists and marketers trying to sell things no one needs or wants. Graeber's thesis received a great response, with many writing to admit that they themselves were working a crappy job and were miserable.
Elaboration – or what former Chief Justice Igor Judge used to call “anxious display of knowledge” – makes us miserable. No one wants to be invited to a “thinking session.”
In the novel by Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyThe problem of petty jobs on the planet Golgavrinsham was solved by sending all marketing consultants to colonize a new planet. On planet Earth, perhaps organizations could start moving all the people who create pointless complexity into useful roles. It can lower our blood pressure, save time, and even solve the problem of labor shortage. As for me, I will be making the Plain English Campaign one of my charities for 2025.
