On Filing

I got a friend of mine, Douglas, to write this for me more than ten years ago. It’s been sitting in a file. Reading it now it’s as though it was written in another century, which, of course, it was…

Nobody likes Filing. Do they? Surely not. You couldn’t.

Filing is a fundamental source of office jokes, in every office, everywhere in the universe. “I haven’t done my Filing for so long, there’s a bacon-and-dinosaur-egg sandwich halfway down the heap.” “We call our long-term fossil-fuel reserve the Filing.”

It is also the oldest office reproach and scourge. “And when are you going to tackle the Filing?” Worse still: “And when are you going to do my Filing?”

That “And…” gives the game away. It is a warning that the Filing is – as well as an offence in itself – the indefensible charge in a long list of misdemeanours. The Filing is always there as a sin of omission. It is the fly in the ointment of your annual appraisal. It is the function that is never going to be more-than-adequately fulfilled – with an in-built tendency to failure.

It is also a key indicator of office status, marking the fault-lines in the office class wars. Offices split into three classes: those who do someone else’s Filing, those who do their own, and those who have someone to do theirs. Flattening the structure – in modern jargon – simply means that we all do our own. (Ha! Ha! Except the Boss.)

You cannot do Filing and have a key to the Executive Washroom.

Filing says a lot about the efficiency-versus-size quotient of an office. In the good old days, when Bob Cratchit sat at his high desk in a starched collar, there were perhaps offices – though certainly not Mr Scrooge’s – where there were enough clerks to get the filing done, in office hours. Old-fashioned solicitors had japanned deed boxes for clients’ papers. (There was also a lot less paper.)

Nowadays an office with enough people to keep on top of the Filing is almost certainly Over-Staffed, according to current thinking. If it is a commercial organisation, it is surely ripe for a takeover, and efficiency savings under new management. If it is a public office, it must be ruthlessly re-structured and down-sized, before the newspapers find out about such monstrous waste of public resources.

But nowadays – and also however – everyone is too busy doing new business to clear up the old business. And that is in a good office. In most offices, everyone is too busy fighting today’s fires to shift the mounds of paper that yesterday’s crises generated.

The trouble is, those mounds of paper can suddenly burst into flame – metaphorically, if not actually. Something suddenly comes alive, and a piece of paper is Needed. The Authorities arrive with vans, and everything is boxed, and taken away for an Investigation; and no-one knows what was there. No-one even knows what might have been better going into the shredder…

So why do we file? Why should we file? What should we file? What do we get from the misery, and what do we lose by not enduring it. Might we even enjoy it? Untangle those questions, answer them and absorb the answers, and perhaps we learn something.

First off, the simple purpose of it, we file things because we may – or will – need them later. Probably in a hurry. At a very busy time.

So it is the aim of a good filing system to be organised in such a way that we can put our hands on something without remembering exactly where we put it. That means it has to have a coherent and comprehensible structure – which will accord with how the question of where we put something presents itself, as much as how the problem of where we are going to put it presents itself at the moment when we are trying to shift this pile of decomposing wood-pulp off our desks immediately after the Office Nag has finally forced us into doing so…

That use of italics is significant. The great academic discipline which uses italics in this way is philosophy. And Filing is philosophy. Decisions about where to put something in a structure, so that questions match up with previous answers, are essentially philosophical. They are also contingent.

While there are universal principles involved in Filing, each organisation ideally needs its own system. The reason for that is that each organisation is different: not merely a logical structure (if only!), but also a unique organism.

That is why Filing – or, rather, complete control of the filing system – usually and ultimately belongs, in any organisation and if it does at all, to the immensely respected, but formally lowly-graded (although at the very top of all the gradings conceivably available to her) PA to the CEO, who will retire any year now – when she will no longer yield to being beseeched on bended knee to stay on – with a national honour, like the OBE. This will have been obtained for her by the CEO and Chairman, after hours of formal representations – typed by the CEO’s wife, or sometimes (yes) by the putative recipient herself – and much informal lobbying of Ministers at official dinners, whenever any Minister is so unwise as to come within reach of either of them.

Why the concerted attack on the Honours System, on Her behalf? Because She – and her knowledge of the Filing System – represents the essential short-term memory of the organisation. That is how – and why – the CEO (and/or Chairman) can stay in control. She is, to that extent, the organisation: because, through the Filing, and through that Short-Term Memory, She gives it continuous personality, so that it can be known, and stroked, and disciplined, and preserved.

And if the Chairman and the CEO don’t get her a gong, they’ll never find anyone as good, and as dedicated, to replace her. Simple – if complex – economics. Especially in a world where CEOs and Chairmen come and go in a revolving door of executive mobility.

That is the point of Filing. Memory is Power. Why do computers have Random-Access-Memory? Because it is the thing that turns them from counting machines into (still relatively inefficient) simulacra of the Human Brain. Before computers, there was only Filing.

And Filing still reigns supreme.

This brings us onto the paperless office.

Fine. Say most things come in electronically. Say the system never goes down. Say any piece of paper that does come in can be scanned in as much time as it takes to open an envelope. Still the decisions remain.

Important to keep, or to discard? (Filing in the appropriate – the circular – receptacle?) Where to keep it, if it is to be kept? It is just as frustrating to hammer a keyboard in vain, looking for something lost in cyberspace, as it is to rifle through filing cabinets.

The decision of Where To File is philosophical – or, more precisely, casuistical. That is – to look beyond the vulgar dictionary distrust of casuistry – it involves the resolving of problems by the application of principles to particular instances. Filing is of the essence of casuistry. And vice versa.

Such fine judgments depend on the deepest possible understanding of the organisation concerned, and its stated principles and purposes. For databases must be set up. This involves the conceptualisation of what the organisation does, and what it does and does not need to record, whether for internal or external (legal and regulatory) purposes.

And then, when that Herculean labour has been accomplished, Filing demands that an individual decision is taken with regard to each piece of material entering the office. First, whether to keep it. Secondly, and if so, where to File it. Or thirdly, sometimes, desperately: whether it represents a need for a whole new category in The System.

That last calls the whole philosophical basis of the enterprise into question. So it is often ducked. And the Thing may be shoved into the nearest file – electronic or actual – that seems plausible. That is, it is misfiled. Whereas actually the Thing – and the difficulty of Filing It – may in fact represent the very first indication of a need for the organisation to change, to meet a new world outside…

Now do you see the need – and the challenge of – Filing?

Or where should we File this?

On lunch

6 million workers in the UK do not take lunch breaks according to a study by BUPA, a health insurance company. 34% say this is because of pressure from managers, while 50% say it’s due to excessive workloads.

48% also say that without lunch their productivity drops around 3.00 pm, which leads to 40-minutes lost work worth around £50 million per day in lost productivity.

So time to roll this essay out once again…

Lunch. Let’s do lunch. Let’s skip lunch. Lunch is for wimps. It is fourteen years since Gordon Gekko made that last infamous announcement and yet ‘lunch’ is still a dirty word.

We need to eat; but we seem also to need to justify the time spent doing it. Sometimes we sit alone at our computer while we wolf a sandwich (extra points if purchased from an entrepreneur with a basket actually in the office). Sometimes we snatch a bite while we rush round doing the domestic errands that will allow us to stay later that night. Sometimes we miss lunch altogether: we jog to burn up calories (the absolute opposite); or we go to the gym to work out (work up?) aggression before plunging back into the dog eat dog marketplace. Anything, anything but simply having lunch and enjoying it.

Why? When, indeed, eating in the middle of the day is a natural and healthy moment to do so – sustaining energy, allowing digestion and feeding conversation.

It is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, broadly speaking. Further south, societies have a stronger tradition of eating, and then resting, in the middle of the day. The day starts earlier, is broken by some hours in the afternoon, and then goes on later into the evening. The anthropological explanation of this is climatic: it is the heat which dictates, not the digestion. Except that, now that Anglo-Saxon capitalism is dominant, in city after European city the habit is beginning to die, as desks must be staffed until Tokyo has gone to bed and New York has woken up. Global capitalism has overridden variations in the global climate.

This new capitalism is lean, mean and very hungry. Back in the bad old days, when socialist sensitivities were keen, business lunches possibly earned a bad name. Fat cat capitalists sat late into the afternoon over brandy and cigars, while their workers toiled in satanic mills, only emerging late in the afternoon with pale, hungry faces and emaciated limbs.

But now bosses are thinner than shop-floor workers – they can afford more expensive gyms – and brandy and cigars. Business entertaining goes on, but water is the order of the ambitious lunchtime drinker, and the lunch – notoriously never free – must be justified by a concrete deal, a bottom line, a result.

Meals are significant social moments in all cultures. Meals have always attracted rituals and meanings. They used to be far more simply and recognisably significant in our own culture. The directors would have lunch in their own dining room, and would invite others to join them. Banks, shops and offices would close for lunch. Lunch was important. And it was important throughout the week. Sunday lunch involved all the family sitting down. Christmas dinner still does. In America there is Thanksgiving. In church there is the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion, The Lord’s Supper … meals are where we find much that is significant about how we live, what is changing, what is enduring.

Lunch is an interface. Lunch is where work meets people (where colleagues became friends before the days of motivational workshops and team bonding courses). Lunch is where people talk and people think. It is where the new economy meets a very ancient set of rituals and customs. How we approach lunch says a lot about our attitude to work, and work’s attitude towards us.

Lunch has been on a long downhill trek – from luncheon to something, which we snatch, shamefaced, alone. So what have we gained by downgrading lunch? What have we lost?

“I’m going for lunch.” Yes, but are you going for lunch to eat; or are you going to do the things that you do instead of lunching? In one sense the latter could be said to be fraudulent because this hiatus in the working day is there in order that the natural human need to eat should be met. But on the other hand we don’t want to eat. So we have turned lunch into something else, something broader – time out during the working day. And so employers negotiate about how long ‘lunch’ – and other breaks – should be.
Is the time taken at the employee’s expense, or the employer’s? If it is just used by the employee at will, then cannot employers reasonably argue that it should not count towards the working day? If it is used to eat, because an eight- or ten-hour stretch without food involves significant loss of efficiency towards the end, then cannot an employee regard that as benefiting the organisation? Lunch, in those circumstances, becomes a necessary concomitant of employing people at all – and the employer’s business.

This is lunch as a battleground. It suggests a workplace that is a battlefield. Investment banks are the new sweatshops, as much as the new call centres – only with bigger bonuses. So that’s all right then? In a free market and a free society people are able to choose what they do with the time when they could be eating. That canteen, lunch-break culture was so paternalistic, so patronising. Yet now market pressures seem to work only one way. They have eaten up lunch for the keen employee. Modern business culture has become as food-friendly as a plague of locusts.

Historically, many communities dedicated to a common end have distrusted meals. Under the Rule of St Benedict monks eat in silence, listening to readings from improving texts. (When do the readers eat? But then, when do waiters have lunch?)

The trouble is, eating is so charged. Rows over the family table. Class war fought with serried ranks of cutlery and fish servers. Meals are the traditional moment to betray your enemy under the guise of friendship: the invitation to break bread speaks of peace, but treachery often strikes. Dante puts traitors to their guests into the very lowest Hell.
It is a busy place.

And yet, we should nevertheless try to reclaim lunch for the new economy. Because, what is wrong with eating? Can’t we simply enjoy that necessary break in the working day, make a virtue out of the necessity, feed ourselves, replenish ourselves, come back to give it back to our work? A solitary sandwich maybe efficient but is it effective?

Everyone should think about lunch more. Employers should value employees as people who need to eat. Employees should value employers as people for whose sake – among others – they eat. And maybe the ritual meal, the nourishing meal, the creative meal, food not as a weakness but as collaboration, can come back into business. So, re-build the subsidised canteen, bring back the dinner ladies!

Perhaps, even, we could invite Dionysos back to the lunch table, to oil our ideas, give us a little courage to make that intuitive leap, speak up to the boss, help us to dare outline that off-the-wall idea. Of course, it would be dangerous, but it’s food for thought.

History repeats

Love this…

“In Tunisia, protesters escalated calls for the restoration of the country’s suspended constitution. Meanwhile, Egyptians rose in revolt as strikes across the country brought daily life to a half. In Libya, provincial leaders worked feverishly to strengthen their newly independent republic. It was 1919.”

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011.

Random thought on the 13.30 to Newcastle

Today I read something Oliver Sacks wrote many years ago about a man with a severe case of amnesia. His memory was 30-seconds long. Sacks said the patient was “isolated in a single moment of being with a moat of lacuna or forgetting all round him…he is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment”. It may be a bit of a stretch but this remark reminds me of our present condition. We see and hear everything from around the world within an instant of it happening but we are generally unable to retain even a hint of these events for anything much more than a week. We are aghast at what happened last year but then instantly move on to be shocked by new horrors. We seem to be completely incapable of preserving new memories and are then bewildered at new events, despite the fact that they have happened before. I think this is what’s fuelling our present sense of anxiety and bewilderment.

Why is anger all the rage?

Why is everyone so angry? Why is grim survivalism the current zeitgeist? To quote a leader in the Financial Times a while back, it might be that “The nice decade (for non-inflationary continuous expansion) may be behind us”.

In other words we are entering a nasty period where western economic anxiety is becoming a catalyst for all kinds of attitudinal and behavioural shifts. For example, the real issue might not be peoples’ anger per se but the increasing number of people and events that provoke this anger. This can range from traffic jams and bad customer service to falling house prices, increasing food and energy costs or someone getting shot in the head in north London.

You can see this anger already in the form of ‘Wrath Lit’ on the shelves of your local bookstore. But is the world really getting more angry or is it simply that mobile communications and social media are making more of us aware of incidences of anger?

Put slightly differently, the way to create an epidemic of something like anger is simply to use the word in politics or the media. Another explanation for the rage trend is that in many societies anger is a badge of honour. It is seen as a virtue. It is the individual being true to themselves and expressing their feelings.

The Future of Post Offices and Postal Services

First it was office mail. Then it was music and photography. Then it was newspapers and books. Now it’s public libraries and post office services. The digital revolution has rapidly created a number of new industries, but it is also slowly destroying – or at the very least challenging the conventions of – a number of very old ones.

Historically, population growth, rising incomes, globalization and the increasing number of individual households and businesses meant more and more people communicating with each other. In short, more people meant more people thinking about things and buying stuff that needed to be delivered from one place to another.

However, more recently, the growth of digitalization, virtualization and mobile communications means that we have witnessed a significant shift away from the physical delivery of paper-based items such as bills, payments, statements, letters, postcards and greeting cards. And it looks as though this shift will accelerate, with magazines, newspapers, movies, games and books all becoming members of a weightless economy, which does not require physical distribution, warehousing or delivery.

But the challenge isn’t restricted to declining volumes of physical mail. The postal industry is also facing rapidly rising transportation costs, regulated pricing, strong unions and the impact of new competitors that are much less restricted by legacy costs such as pensions.

Not looking good is it? But I’m a firm believer that where there’s a big problem there’s also a large opportunity waiting in the wings. Post offices and postal delivery services come from a public service tradition that fits nicely with emergent trends like localism. The Post Office may not be loved, but it’s still largely trusted by its local community.

If everyday life continues to speed up and becomes more virtual and less personal then ‘glocal’ organizations like the post office can bring a certain level of calm – even humanity – to communications. Moreover, the more that communications shift to digital formats and the easier it becomes to send communications without an intermediary the more we will value the cut-through of highly tactile nature of paper based communications.

And let’s not forget either that the predicted death of post offices is dependent upon a number of critical assumptions, all of which can easily be challenged. For example, it is widely assumed that the shift to digital communications is unstoppable. This is indeed the most likely scenario. But it is possible to imagine other worlds where things start to move in the opposite direction.

What if, for example, spam, data security or identity theft become such a problem that people revert to the security of paper based communication and physical delivery for important things? What if the use of email was proven to be more damaging to the environment than paper or what if the sheer volume of internet traffic meant that speeds slow down to the point where people stop using it? Or what if government concerns over censorship mean that a free global internet is eventually replaced by a series of highly regulated national intranets?

Whatever happens nothing is likely to happen overnight, so in the meantime here are a five ways to deliver a first class postal service.

1. Emphasise that post offices are part of the local community and forge relationships with other local community providers (e.g. public libraries), even sharing physical spaces with some to reduce costs.

2. Post offices need to grow non-mail revenues, especially insurance & financial services.

3. Make post offices physical fronts for e-services and provide print on demand for all government forms. Consider relocating some of the services relating to passports, driving licences, car registration and income tax into larger post offices.

4. Turn post offices into business support centres for SMEs and sell a range of office related products ranging from stationery to computer equipment.

5. Instead of focussing on ‘sending services’ why not create revenue streams relating to ‘receiving services’? For example, extend the idea of the PO Box to larger boxes or lockers where online goods can be received and stored. These boxes could even be chilled for food delivery.

World’s smallest computer

The prediction that computers will one day become so small and so cheap that we’ll sprinkle them on almost everything is not taken very seriously by some people. However, news that researchers at the University of Michigan (US) have created a computer measuring one cubic millimetre may change a few minds. The dot-sized machine contains a microprocessor, pressure sensor, battery, solar cell and wireless radio that enables it to transmit data to other dot sized devices.