Miss Burst vs. Miss Busy: Working Enough vs. Working at Capacity

There’s a mini-discusion on burst vs. busy work styles going on. The definitions are something like this:

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity.

…

Bursters see that opportunities to take 2,000 steps forward in one hyperleap are more likely to happen through connections with people outside the company.

Put another way:

There are people who work steadily and there are those who work in bursts

Now, I have a forked idea-train off this:

1. Everything is OK, if the idea is about frequency of output.
2. The Boss is Not Happy, if the idea is about who can do the “most” work in a given period.

Who Are We Talking About? The Boss

Now, the below is from the perspective of The Boss. The Boss wants to make sure the worker isn’t slacking off and “stealing time” from work.

The perspective of the worker is to work as little as possible (or “just enough” to be all “the glass is half-full”) and get paid as much as possible. Sure, the ideal worker wants to feel good about their effort/reward ratio, but they want that ratio to be as close to 1:1 as possible: otherwise the worker should be getting paid more if they’re doing more work than “expected.”

Frequency – Everything is OK

Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you. (*)

In this case, “bursters” are actually as busy as much as other workers, but they provide “output” less frequently than “busy-iers.” That is, Miss Burst might spend 2 days preparing for those 2,000 steps forward, but she had to spend all of those 2 days. Miss Burst couldn’t have just spend 1 day, two hours, or suddenly tripped down some productivity worm-hole.

So, if we take Miss Burst and Miss Busy, they’ll both do the same “amount” and “quality” of work in a given work week. Miss Burst will just deliver ever two days, coming out of her office, or even coming into the office, but she’ll deliver a chunk that’s of equal worth to the company as Miss Busy will. Miss Busy will be in the office, 8-5 with an hour lunch break, and only two 15 minute breaks, answers her email, sends off a status report every day, all that stuff. (Or, you know, in-between those two: just relax, the two are just extreme cases for the purpose of discussion.)

Once The Boss understands that Miss Burst is actually working towards those 2,000 steps during those two days, everything is fine from The Bosses’ perspective: they’re getting the same “output” from each employee.

(If you’re starting to chafe at the idea of “getting output” from someone, you’re thinking faster than I can write, hold up, friend!)

Lost Productivity – Problems

“Thank you for the free software, Mother! We will destroy the running dogs of Wall Street now!” (*)

If Miss Burst, on the other hand, can deliver her 2,000 steps in just one day and then spends the 2nd day shopping for underwear, The Boss is going to be less happy. From the worker’s perspective, this is cool: The Boss asked for 2,000 steps, I gave it to The Boss, now I can do something else.

Miss Burst thinks in term of projects and fixed capacity: she “owes” The Boss 2,000 steps every 2 days. The Boss, however, thinks in terms of owning all of Miss Burst’s potential productivity during working hours.

The sort of management point here is that The Boss is not interested in getting only a fixed amount of work out of each worker. The Boss is interested in squeezing out as much work as possible from each worker.

We could get all wrapped up in the long-term viability of this situation (it sucks!), but the US economy runs on short-term sprints of 3 months: the running dogs of Wall Street have no time for long-term thinking. (Besides, can’t we just hire a fresh someone else when Miss Worker goes cinder?)

So, taking on the mind-set of The Boss: if each worker — Miss Burst and Miss Busy — is expected to deliver 2,000 foot steps every week, and it takes Miss Burst just 2 days to deliver 2,000 foot steps, I’ll expect her to take the 3 other days in the work-week to deliver me at least 2,000 more foot steps. Maybe I should give her a raise or a bonus if the quarter goes well.

Put another way: if the Boss sees that you’re an efficient/good enough worker to have time to go buy underwear, The Boss is going to think “why aren’t they using that time to make The Company more money?”

Again, the mismatch in expectations between Miss Burst and The Boss is that The Boss believes that The Company owns all of Miss Burst’s time during the work week, if not 24/7.

What to Do? The Good Case

The point of this ongoing conversation is to connivence the world that Miss Burst and her work style (mine as well) are a-OK and acceptable. In both cases above, Miss Burst is wired to work in a burst-manner: trying to get her (or the rest of us bursters) to work in a Miss Busy way will result in us doing even less work. Sure, you could “fix” Miss Burst (or Miss Busy, going the other way), but that’d take time. Why not just can her and hire someone who’s already “fixed”?

So, if it’s the case that it’s just work style, and that Miss Burst is producing the maximum output that she can in those two days, well, then it’s just a matter of showing The Boss this and explaining it to them. (I say “just” in a sort of joking way.)

Everything is fine and fixed in this case, we’re done. But what about the other case?

What to Do? The Bad Case

But, if it’s the case that Miss Burst does not only have a different work style but can also actually do more, then there’s an almost impossible task of changing the world-view of The Boss. Namely, that The Boss is paying Miss Burst like they would a consultant, rather than an employee. (More likely to happen is The Peter Principal, but that’s another conversation.)

And that, to me, is the crux of the problem of Miss Burst as a “knowledge worker”. Now, knowledge work is a sort of judgmental term. What does that make all other worker? Stupid workers? “Information worker” is slightly better (vs. “uninformed worker”?), but I’m distracting myself…

If you’re going to deliver me, The Boss, a fixed set of steps, no matter what the time takes, I’d rather pay you as a consultant. Then, do whatever you want with that extra day: re-do your entire sock drawer(s), for all care.

But, if I’m going to pay you as a full-time employee, give you an office, pay your and your whole families’ health insurance, give you deference over contractors when we have to lay-off people, send you to yearly Come-to-Jesus meetings, and otherwise expect you to be what we used to call a “Company Man,” by God, re-do your sock drawer on your own damn time.

Clearly, I see employment options like the above as a “game.” Not a fun game, but a game in the sense of one player winning over the other according to that player’s goals. If my goals are “steady employment” and a friendly machine in the “break room” to make me coffee, I’ll be an employee. If my goals are setting my own schedule, but delivering the promised work just as an employee would, I’ll choose the consulting angle and make my own coffee.

The Leopard’s Spots

That is, as Anne’s diction put it, the current paradigm: consultant vs. employee. The shift is to either make everyone an consultant (tompeters! would! flip! out!) or have The Boss happy with putting consultants on the payroll.

I’m not sure how you make the argument of “putting consultants on the payroll” as the bulk of current corporate culture is geared away from it. One of my old favorites, The Goal tries hard to make a case for similar change, though in manufacturing terms (and they also use foils instead of PowerPoint).

If a company can make the leap of faith that this new way is better and will make the company more money, maybe you could actually do some mind-judo and sell The New Way as a competitive advantage. But that only works when the market is up or Management is “just crazy enough to try it.” There’s probably something to learn from Toyota vs. Detroit, but Lean may not be the ally we’re looking for here.

In truth, I suspect the answer is that “full-time employment” for “knowledge workers” is probably a bit out-of-whack for this century. Information technology killed the cubical star. IT has sort of beat out all the chaff in the ranks of the information workers: now there’s just room for the hyper-productive and the rock-stars. And those people, friends, do better as consultants: why would they want to work in companies? Why be a Bodhisattva when you can have your enlightenment and pay your bills with it too?

Maybe full-time info workers are like behind-the-firewall, packaged software and consultants are like SaaS. In that metaphor hole, as The Boss, which would you rather have?

Technorati Tags: burst, busy, management, work