Never get between someone and their coffee ☕

How outrage distracts from opportunities

This week, the managing director of a US$5.4bn mining organisation, earning more than US$4m per year, declared to investors:

“I want to keep them [employees] captive all day long… I don’t want them leaving the building… I don’t want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee.”

Oh right, I should have mentioned; he can consider this caffeine crackdown because he has already banned working from home.

Seeing red

His comments have created outrage, and he is being roasted. The photos of him walking into the office with a coffee - I assume the beans are from Cote d'Irony - are a delightful touch.

I expect some positive impact from this reaction. The slap back says, you have crossed a line, get back to the other side. It hits the zeitgeist for a brief moment, and other leaders place new warning markers in their minds to save their future selves.

But I also believe this outrage distracts from an opportunity.

Watch where the river flows

It is cathartic to unload frustration about the state of modern work on the Espresso Eliminator. But how much will it change things? The outrage is a vocal rejection of his perspective, but amounts to no more than standing in front of him and saying, “How you think is wrong and instead you should think like me.” The chances of an epiphany and change of perspective is slim to none. It is swimming upstream. It is non-progress.

Instead, the opportunity exists in looking at where the river flows. Though articulated with all the tact of a braces-snapping industrialist caricature, the Java Jailer is saying, I want maximum productivity, and is (with system ignorance) latching onto the things that are in his immediate view and look unproductive, you know, like working from home and getting a coffee. Oh, and also the logistics of caring for young children; the onsite creche that charges employees just ~10% market rate is a less self-immolating example of his productivity-pursuing actions.

So, this is a system that is showing it will change to maximise productivity. This is where the river flows. This is an opportunity to shape system-tolerable change that creates joyous work. It puts in stark relief why system awareness is so important - when you make the root cause issues of the junk in your system of work super clear, you give management visible things to latch on to and action. Now instead of banning the coffee run, they are addressing the root causes of junk like role duplication and relentless interruptions. After all, the productivity gains are far better: the potential gain from reducing the junk in our systems of work has been estimated at US$10 trillion each year¹. That should be music to the ears of the Grind Grinch. That is watching where the river flows and leveraging it to create system-tolerable change. It is the creation of joyous work that is so tolerable to the status quo system, it is not even noticed until it is experienced.

Let’s not allow cathartic outrage to distract us from the opportunity.

And I’m out of coffee puns.

- John

1. Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini, Humanocracy