Work As Sludge (Clearing The Pipes)

The concept of “sludge” has been getting a lot of run recently, in part because the book Nudge, which was pretty popular, just got a new revision and it talks often of “sludge.” Here would be a basic understanding:

One way to nudge people to do something is to make it easy to do. Sludge is like its sinister opposite: when institutions try to prevent people from doing something by making it hard to do. Think limiting the number of polling stations and causing big lines as a way to discourage voting. Sure, you can still vote, but good luck actually doing it.

There’s another form, as mentioned in this pretty good article about abandoning 9-to-5 workdays:

Sludge consists of all the off-handed comments and questions that work against shifting to the new culture, such as “Ah, I see you’re working bankers’ hours today?” or “Where were you at 3 p.m.? I tried to reach you.” Thompson and Ressler recommend replying to these types of comments with a simple, “Is there something you need?”

The first funny part of that pull quote is that if you said “Was there something you needed?” to 7 in 10 managers, they’d call HR and have you put on a PIP within 15 minutes. That’s like the ultimate threat to a manager — you calling out their outdated, bullshit notions of how work gets done. You wouldn’t survive. With 3 in 10, they’d be like “Oh no, there wasn’t anything specific I needed then. Carry on.” Then they’d go watch 1990s NBA highlights in their office to regulate their emotions.

Basically, though, from those two quotes you can see that “sludge” is essentially the bullshit clogging the pipes of most organizations. It’s meaningless tasks, pointless roundabouts, and bosses who question tasks (the work to be done) and not outcomes (how the organization will ultimately be successful). That’s all sludge. It’s why work, to some/many, is “shockingly inhumane.”

How does one defeat sludge?

This is a challenge. It would require a self-aware leadership team, or a leadership team that has seen revenue reversals and is open to new ways of thinking about work. In general, I would say the best way to beat sludge is to simplify processes. Put out an open call to every department and ask “What processes or meetings are outdated? What can be killed off?” Get the responses and kill off everything that has a large amount of votes. Redraw some of the processes. Make things easier.

Now, it’s inevitable in these situations that some people control outdated processes, but they still want to have a job, so they will fight like a trapped rat to maintain those processes. I just explained a lot of USA government work, actually. It happens, and it’s very real. Sludge sometimes represents “people’s income,” and “people’s income” is usually something you don’t fuck with.

Beyond that, I just think managers need to refocus on what their job really is, which is less about making trains run and tasks get checked, and more about conversations with people and contextualizing the business between the high levels (execs/Board) and the low levels (customer-facing peons). If conversations were more robust and focused on the bigger picture of how the work gets done and why the work is important, as opposed to task-task-task-box-box-box, I think we’d have less sludge. Shit, I’d hope.

Managers won’t refocus on these things unless you shift their incentives, though. If their incentives are still about pleasing the higher-ups and some vague “delivery” metric, that will consume all their focus. That’s also just reality.

I don’t think sludge can be eliminated in orgs, but I do think we can take some steps to make companies more bearable places to be by tweaking the roles and incentives of different ranks a bit, and advocating for better, faster processes.

To wit: ‘Bout three years ago, had a gig where someone f’ed up a project. It was a one-off, and deserved a meeting, but only one and then move on. A manager accidentally made a meeting recurring. We had the first one, and then we kept showing up for 4, 5, 6 more weeks. By Week 2, everyone was like “Why are we doing this again?” but it was on our calendars, so we showed up and invented things to discuss. We didn’t kill it till Week 9. This is sadly so common in corporate.

Kill meetings like that and you kill some sludge.