At this time of year many of us look back at the past 12 months, castigate ourselves for not having achieved more and resolve to become more productive. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if individuals are really the biggest obstacles to our own efficiency. It feels as though more and more time is being soaked up by things beyond our control: compliance, “computer says no” systems, and the forces of verbiage.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would enable his grandchildren to work a 15-hour week. Instead, we seem busier than ever. Keynes didn’t reckon on computerised call centre menus telling us at length how our data will be handled, and urging us to try the website, which of course we have, otherwise why would we have picked up the phone to enter the sixth circle of hell?
Nor did he foresee the proliferation of words and jargon which seems to be a 21st-century hallmark. In the UK, the average FTSE 100 annual report now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. In the US, ESG reports from the S&P 500, have grown a fifth longer in three years. Board packs have expanded too: the average one is 226 pages long. Majorities of board directors in both the US and UK have told surveys that the packs have little impact or prove an obstacle to understanding the business.
For 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 a nation, was 10 sentences. Both are shorter than the introductions to most reports on my desk. Here’s a line from one I just picked up: “a lack of absorptive capacity can easily become a critical bottleneck for continuous innovation”. The report is by a consulting firm about — er — productivity.
Sitting in a café in Massachusetts a few months ago I tried not to listen to a woman on a lengthy call about whether her presentation should say “key learning objectives” or “stakeholder outcomes”. Last week in London, I saw a friend who had been asked to give advice to a Whitehall department, only to find that the two-page note she had sent in advance had been converted by officials into what she described as a “word salad” that it took most of the meeting to decipher.
How have we generated a caste of people who write gobbledegook? How will we cope when AI models are trained on it, producing even more gibberish? Management consultants are partly to blame. When I started my career at McKinsey many years ago, we were taught pithy phrases which clarified: “Quick wins” was one. Nowadays, many consultant reports are drowning in prolixity, perhaps to cover up a void in thinking — or justify a higher fee. Yet even those who charge by the hour don’t want to actually read this stuff. A wonderful experiment by an American attorney, Joseph Kimble, found that lawyers dislike complexity just as much as everyone else. When Kimble sent two versions of a court judgment to 700 lawyers, they overwhelmingly preferred the comprehensible version.
“When you write more, people understand less”. Those are the sage words of a UK government design manual which urges officials to write shorter sentences, in plain English. Unfortunately, the message is being lost. Some parts of the public sector are models of efficacy — I have just reported the death of an elderly relative to the “Tell Us Once” service which transmits news of a bereavement across 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 otiose questions, how they will “conceptualise collaborative social value, and what strategies [they] will implement to support clients in maximising social value returns through collaboration with stakeholders”.
Supposedly, one purpose of this document is to encourage small firms to bid for building work. Yet they will be the most stretched in trying to generate responses of sufficient verbosity to meet the criteria.
I am reminded of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by the anthropologist David Graeber, who argued that around a third of modern jobs are pointless, and simply make work for other people. These included “Taskmasters”: middle managers who create work that isn’t needed; and “goons” — lobbyists and marketers who try to sell things that no one needs or wants. Graeber’s thesis had a huge response — many wrote to admit that they themselves had a bullshit job, and were miserable.
Verbosity — or what the former Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge used to call the “anxious parade of knowledge” — makes us miserable. No one wants to be invited to an “ideation session”.
In Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problem of bullshit jobs was solved, on the planet Golgafrincham, by sending all the marketing consultants to colonise a new planet. On Planet Earth, perhaps organisations could start moving all the people who create pointless complexity to roles that are useful. It could lower our blood pressure, save time and even solve labour shortages. As for me, I’m going to make the Plain English Campaign one of my charities for 2025.