Fools and Horses: The Folly of "More With Less"

Let’s say you own horses. You’re a stable master. Or a stabler. Or a groom, if you prefer, even though it slightly offends the analogy I'm going to employ. You be you.

You can even pretend you’re a medieval groom if you want. That shadowy layer of timeworn mystique helps some people empathize with the scenario.

You’ve got a bunch of horses. When people ride those horses, you get paid.

Generally, the more they are ridden, the more money you make.

The limit of your revenue, assuming strong demand for rides, is the capacity of the horses. Each horse has a point where too much riding will break them.

Before reaching their physical breaking point, they will suffer in less obvious ways, and their overall health and well-being will be impacted. You may notice subtle performance issues.

But they will keep riding, and you will keep making money.

As the horses become more worn down, you face a choice. You can buy more horses, which cuts into your profit and could mean a horse idles occasionally during gullies of demand. Or you can push your horses a bit harder.

You convince yourself that even though they are suffering, they still have more to give. And so you keep pushing them.

When I ask managers and executives to put themselves in this scenario and probe whether they would do the same, they universally say variations of the same thing:

“No way. It’s unethical and abusive.”

Only if I jab and parry a little do they reach the business risks of breaking the horses. Or the absurdity of killing their own value creation.

The heart of their response is simple morality. Because we can universally understand and agree that riding a horse too hard is just wrong.

And yet, there’s a lot of evidence that managers and executives are routinely doing this. They’re just inflicting misery on a human rather than equine workforce.

The evidence of a widespread burnout problem in private enterprise isn’t just convincing, it’s overwhelming.

For example:

• Qualtrics found that 79% of workers across 26 countries felt “at or beyond workload capacity” in 2020.
• A survey of 15,000 workers across 15 countries by McKinsey Health found that a quarter of employees had burnout symptoms.
• 76% of respondents in a Mental Health America and FlexJobs study agreed that workplace stress degrades their mental health, and 75% experienced burnout.

There’s a lot more. You can bet your bollocks to a barn dance something isn’t right.

And increasingly, there is a debate raging about this.

On one side, corporatists, their mouthpieces, unwitting accomplices, and the self-actuating culture they've created, which has captured prominent business publications.

From which we hear variations of one basic argument:

"Horse, you have to stop being ridden so hard. Set limits. Eat better. Sleep more. Exercise better. Meditate. How are your self-care rituals? Nay when your boss doesn’t respect boundaries. Get out of the victim mentality. This is something you need to own, horse.”

This is meant to sound like it cares, supports, and encourages.

But the implication is actually vicious.

It's labeling burned out people whiners and telling them to stop feeling sorry for themselves. It’s pretending they have agency they don’t have, then bashing them for not exercising it.

So let me articulate the other side of the argument, which can be summarized thusly:

What a complete load of horseshit.

Workers below the most senior levels in major employment domains have no voice or power to limit or even influence the workloads placed upon them. Even the people we imagine to be “senior leaders” are really just mid-level managers with zero authority to decide their own workloads or the resources to tackle them.

The horse analogy is again useful to illustrate.

Horses have very few rights. In fact, they have about as many protections against inhumane treatment as workers have against abusive work practices.

They can't talk back. They can nay and whinny and they’ll be ignored or told to quiet down. Same for workers.

They're graded on how they look and how fast they run rather than their intrinsic qualities or work ethic. Same for workers.

They are reliant on their keepers unless they want to take their chances in the wild. Same for workers.

They get threatened and coerced when they don't run fast enough. And when they become too much trouble, they are disposed of. Same for workers.

It’s absurd to acknowledge a burnout problem exists but pretend workers are creating it by choosing to serially overwork themselves.

Experience tells me employees do exactly two things.

1. What they are obligated to do, and
2. What is in their interest to do even if not explicitly required.

[Note: the exception that proves this rule is observable in superior work cultures, where employees give discretionary effort for the sake of doing so. It’s rare, but wonderful when it happens.]

When you give someone 60 hours of work to do in a 40 hour week, they will stretch to cover. They'll do this because they are obligated.

Even if you tell them they’re not expected to overwork, they will nonetheless stretch to cover everything you’ve put on their plate. They will do this because it’s in their interest. To keep themselves secure in their role, keep the boss happy and impressed, stay in the frame for promotion, and to keep the cross-hairs of performance management off their backs, they will deliver it all.

To boot, the boundary separating option from obligation is not usually clear. What I’ve noticed is that organizations tend to create massive obligations and then pretend they didn’t.

And then pretend to care, talk about it, run projects, have calls, do workshops, and ultimately do nothing to address it.

Here’s an example from my own journey in Amazon's fulfillment operation.

For five consecutive years, in my neck of the network, we repeatedly flogged the dead horse of manager overload while taking no action to address it. Each year, there were re-hashed iterations of a project about it, with different approaches and definitions, but always defaulting into inaction.

The project was a time study which sought to identify and quantify the work requirements of frontline managers.

Year after year, the evidence showed that the network was obligating frontline managers to a workload well in excess of their contracts. If they were to lay down tools at 40 hours, they would have seen to the physical safety and basic engagement of their teams, but had no time for anything else.

Not execution. Not quality assurance. Not customer experience. Not escalations. Not innovation. Not cost control or productivity initiatives. Not sustainability. Not side projects. Not learning or self-enrichment. Not mentorship of their teams. Not periodic growth in administrative requirements with the ebbs and flows of seasonality. Not casual conversations with colleagues. Not fun activities to engage the workforce. And certainly not idle time to simply reflect and think about the business (which is where a lot of innovation actually comes from).

Everyone agreed on that definition of the problem.

And nothing was done about it.

We just watched haplessly while the network re-packaged it and rolled it out again the next year like it was something new.

Why? Because to fix the problem, Amazon needed to do one of two things:

1. Do less. Which you don’t choose to do in a growth environment, be it a real growth environment or a pretend one.
2. Buy more horses. Which executives and their financiers refused to do. In fact, the genius move they come up with was to reduce manager headcount, stretching remaining staff even more.

So the problem stayed in a doom loop for five years in a company that got legendary by fixing things in five minutes or five hours.

When I started hearing "more with less," I knew we were never going to fix it. Because I’d heard that before. From other decrepit stablers.

See the epic, soul crushing, comically abusive shit show that was the Iraq war for another example of refusing to face the reality of adequate staffing.

In that case, defense executives cynically transferred the costs of staff shortages onto the shoulders of the workforce. The result was burnout of the entire US military, with longer deployments and shorter rest cycles than ever in its history.

In refusing to acknowledge you cannot do more with less without hurting someone, the US government made itself culpable for more suicides, destroyed families, destroyed marriages, and broken lives than we will ever see admitted.

So this idea that people have a choice to be burned out is nonsense. When they do less, companies assume they are lazy or unambitious or distracted. They get labeled slackers. They get managed out.

That’s reality, distinct from the fantasy world people are living in when they pretend individual self-management is the answer to systemic burnout.

The issue is actually damned simple, and you can understand it through horse math.

When you do more work, you need more horses.

Telling yourself anything different is engaging in fantasy, but the consequences will be real for the horses. When you know this and do it anyway, it’s not a business decision. It’s just wrong.

And eventually, when you succeed in breaking your own team, your whole business will break with them.

This article was originally featured at The Radar. Subscribe for free to get TC's updates direct to your inbox.