In the 1990s I worked with two other people on a prestigious Australian magazine. The publication ran to eighty-four pages, appeared monthly, and went to press on time. The lead time from brief to printed copy was four weeks.
The budget was modest. The three of us wrote, edited, sourced images, managed relationships with contributors, handled production, and communicated with the printer. The work was the work. There was no intermediary layer between the people doing it and the thing being done.
The magazine was part of an international group. The American counterpart publication ran to the same eighty-four pages, appeared monthly, and also went to press on time. Their team numbered forty. Their lead time was three months. Their budget was substantially larger. The output was the same magazine, in the same format, covering the same subject matter, at the same frequency.
They frequently requested our content for use in their edition.
I noted this at the time without fully articulating what I was observing. What I was observing was not that the American team was less capable or less committed. I have no reason to think either. What I was observing was that the system surrounding the work had expanded to a size that bore no proportional relationship to the work itself, and that the expansion had not produced a corresponding increase in output or quality. The forty people were not producing forty times the content of the three. They were producing the same content inside a structure that required considerably more coordination, more meetings, more sign-off, more process, more time. The process was real work. It consumed real hours from real people. It did not produce more magazine.
Some years later, during the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics, a colleague encountered a candidate for a content production role. The role required the production of content. The candidate had an extensive CV, a long employment history, and a title that included the word content. In conversation it became clear that the candidate had never written anything in a professional capacity. The career had been spent in meetings about content—planning content, reviewing content, approving content, coordinating the people who produced content, reporting on content strategy to stakeholders who then reported to other stakeholders.
The candidate was not a writer. The candidate was a system that had grown around writing.
The title retained the function. The practice had lost it. The work had become the management of the work, and the management of the work had become sufficiently consuming that the work itself had dropped away. The person remained in the content field. The field no longer required them to produce content. It required them to manage the process by which other people produced content, and to attend the meetings at which that process was discussed, and to generate the reports in which the discussion was summarised for the benefit of people who attended different meetings.
This is not a failure of the individual. The individual had responded rationally to the system they inhabited. The system rewarded process management. The system could measure meetings attended, sign-offs completed, stakeholders managed, timelines tracked. The system could not easily measure the quality of the writing that eventually emerged from the process, or whether the process had improved that quality, or whether the quality would have been the same or better if the process had been simpler and the writer had been closer to the work. The measurable things were rewarded. The less measurable things receded.
The candidate had been optimising for the right things, inside a system that was measuring the wrong ones.
In the late 1980s, State Rail was experiencing what the organisation described as performance challenges. Trains ran late. Communication with passengers was unreliable. The relationship between the service and the people who depended on it had deteriorated to the point where frustration was the default condition of the commuter.
The response was structural. Frontline staff numbers fell. Management layers increased. The people closest to the trains, the platforms, the passengers—the people whose presence and competence directly determined whether the service functioned—were reduced. The people responsible for overseeing, coordinating, reporting on, and managing the people responsible for overseeing, coordinating, and reporting were increased. The cost of running the organisation went up. The performance of the trains went down.
One detail from this period has stayed with me for its precision as an illustration of what happens when a system loses contact with its own function. Train crew, at the end of a route, were sometimes flown back to their origin station and bused to their next departure, rather than working the return journey on the train they had just brought in. The operational logic that produced this arrangement was internal to the system—rosters, union agreements, management structures, the accumulated weight of administrative decisions that had been made sequentially, each one rational within the context of the previous one, producing in combination an outcome that was neither rational nor functional. The train needed a crew. The crew was on a plane.
The system was working correctly. The trains were not.
The pattern across these three examples is not coincidence. It is a tendency that appears wherever a system grows around a function over time. The function stays constant—produce the magazine, write the content, run the trains. The system expands to support the function, then to coordinate the support, then to manage the coordination, then to oversee the management. Each layer is added for a reason. The reason is usually real. The coordination genuinely needs to happen. The management genuinely serves a purpose. The oversight is not invented. At each stage, the addition is justified by the scale or complexity of the operation, and the justification is correct.
What changes is the centre of gravity. In the early stage, the centre of gravity is the work. The system exists to enable the work. The three people on the Australian magazine have no buffer between themselves and the output. The work is what they do and the output is what they produce and the relationship between the two is direct and immediate. When something goes wrong, the people who can fix it are the people who are doing it.
As the system grows, the centre of gravity shifts. The work is still nominally the purpose, but the system’s daily activity is increasingly the management of the work rather than the work itself. Meetings are called to discuss the work. Reports summarise the status of the work. Sign-off processes ensure that the work meets the standards the system has established for the work. Timelines track the progress of the work through the stages the system has defined for it. The work moves through the system. The system generates activity around the movement of the work. The activity is substantial, measurable, and rewarded.
The work is still happening, somewhere in the system. It is no longer at the centre.
The system does not intend this. That is the important clarification. The forty people on the American magazine were not conspiring to surround the work with unnecessary process. They were each doing their jobs, which the system had defined, and the jobs were real, and the people doing them were competent. The candidate with the content title was not pretending to a function they had abandoned. They were performing the function the system had developed around the original function, and performing it well enough to sustain a long career. The managers at State Rail who reduced frontline staff and added oversight layers were making decisions that the system’s own metrics supported.
Each person acted rationally within the system they inhabited. The system itself had drifted from the work it existed to enable. The drift was not the result of any single decision. It was the accumulated result of many small decisions, each one adding something that seemed useful and cost less than it appeared to cost, because the cost was not subtracted from the budget—it was subtracted from the proximity of the system to its own function.
Proximity to function is not a line item. It does not appear in the reports the system generates to measure itself. The system measures meetings, timelines, headcount, sign-offs, coordination events, management spans. These things are visible and countable. The distance between the system and the work it performs is neither visible nor countable. It becomes apparent only when something breaks—when the train needs a crew and the crew is on a plane, when the content role requires writing and the candidate has not written anything for years, when the magazine is late and thirty-seven of the forty people on the team have no direct capacity to make it not late.
At that point the distance is visible. The system responds by adding a process to prevent the recurrence of the break. The process adds another layer. The layer increases the distance. The distance becomes invisible again.
The Australian magazine produced its eighty-four pages with three people. The American counterpart produced the same eighty-four pages with forty. Both met their deadlines. One of them needed the other’s content.
The function was the same. The system was not.
At some point the system stopped serving the function and started serving itself. The service was real, the activity was genuine, the people within it were competent and rational and working hard.
The work was still being done, at the centre of the system, by the people closest to it.
The system had grown around them until they were no longer at the centre.
The system measured its own activity and called that the work.
