by Lael Ewy
The relegation of “respectable” work
to that which involves siting at a desk and staring at a screen all
day manifests both the rollback of organized labor and the creeping
restoration of a previous, aristocratic order.
I'll let others explain the deep
sociological ramifications of this, and just focus on what it means
in terms of loss.
With physical labor once again shoved
back to the shameful order of peasants and beasts, we're faced with a
population devoid of not just common sense and health-promoting
physical activity, but also unable to reason in some very practical
and emotionally healthy ways. In other words, our current way of
working makes us fat, stupid, lazy, and insane.
To put this in perspective, I'm going
to present life lessons and integrative principles I've learned from
working on a variety of old cars, most of them Swedish, and, because
I am poor, most of them in questionable states of repair.
Lesson 1. While it's good to have a
plan, and it's important to have a basic understanding and a decent
set of tools, it's seldom necessary to have a bunch of damn meetings
before you get started.
The immensely satisfying part of
working on cars is that you can pretty much just jump right in. You
might want to look at a Chilton's manual or watch a YouTube video
from someone who has done it before, but endless machinations
designed to gather input and be inclusive of all major stakeholders
are entirely unnecessary. The only thing keeping you from putting a
socket on a bolt-head is you and your willingness to do the work.
When we have to go out of our way to
create agendas, find time on everybody's schedule, send invites,
conduct meetings, and then conduct follow-up meetings to divvy up
work, ensure workflow and accountability, and determine and then
measure output, outcomes, and progress toward goals, we not only
waste time and energy, we give the often false impression that
everybody needs to be involved at all times. This makes people feel
excluded when they're not involved, even if being involved would be
pointless and even more wasteful of everybody's energy and time.
Lesson 2. You know when what you did
works and when it doesn't work.
As we move toward more and more
ambiguous job descriptions and more and more ambiguous work, we have
also ginned up more and more silly measures of outputs, inputs,
outcomes, through-put, progress, and so forth. Instead of freeing us
from the tyranny of metrics and Tayloristic regimentation, our
current work has made us obsessed with them. The mechanic needs no
arbitrary metrics: the car either runs when it didn't before, or it
doesn't. The leak is either fixed, or it ain't.
Now, there may be various degrees of
ambiguity: does it run better than it did before, but still
not great? Is the noise louder, softer, or different—and if
different, how? But all of these move toward the clearly desired end
state, and all of them are explainable. You don't need a theory of
management, a strategic plan, a mission statement, or a logic model.
You don't need to take into account internal or external politics,
ambitions, or personalities. You just need to account for—and be
accountable to--how the car runs and drives. Which leads us to
Lesson 3. Working on cars enhances
critical thinking.
The auto mechanic is in a constant
state of diagnostic analysis. This analysis has to consider the car's
various systems, and, importantly, how those systems interact with
each other and with their environment. This type of thinking trains
the mind to think of things in those interactive terms. It also makes
the often simplistic approaches of some executives and specialists
seem utterly childlike.
The kind of critical thinking required
of the auto mechanic also allows for cutting through crap quickly and
efficiently. While it considers complex, multivariant systemic
thinking, the point of that thinking is to rule out probable causes
of problems. This makes the mechanic less prone to accept
explanations based on biases, wild conjectures, or favored
improbabilities. Properly applied, no one trained to think like a
mechanic would be drawn in by management gurus and their idiotic
trends.
Lesson 4. Being a mechanic teaches
you to learn as you go.
Even though Haynes and Chilton's claim
to be “based on a complete tear down and rebuild” of the cars
they cover, they're always missing a few important pieces of
information, some vital step. They also seldom cover all mid-year
design changes, and can't cover previous modifications and the weird
effects of time and wear.
The auto mechanic, then, must be a
bricoleur, using what she's got to do the work in front of her.
Many of the more intolerable practices
of the modern workplace arise from that fact of uncertainty
intersecting the demands of efficiency and profitability. Reality
requires experimentation, but almost everybody's job (the top tier of
executives, perhaps, excepted), requires “proven success.”
The auto mechanic goes in with this knowledge of the systems at work and some basic understanding of the
way things are typically manufactured and engineered. She then goes
from there, observing the physical properties of the car and its
parts, and she uses those observations to deal with the repair as it
unfolds before her. This leads to
Lesson 5. The auto mechanic uses her
senses.
This lesson may seem pointless. I mean,
we all use our senses, right? You're using your sense of sight to
read this right now, or your sense of hearing if you're using a
screen reader. But here's the deal: almost all of the work we do
these days relies on maybe one or two of our senses, particularly
hearing and sight. The screen-bound world, the world full of meetings
and webinars, video-conferencing and spreadsheet-filling, exercises
hearing and sight at the expense of all others.
A mechanic must be tuned into the
smells of leaking coolant or burning oil. She sometimes has to resort
to only her sense of touch when freeing a fastener than she can't
actually see or when loosening a screw that requires finesse instead
of brute force. The mechanic's world is, in some ways, more full,
closer to the world in which humans evolved. But perhaps the
sociologically healthiest thing a mechanic learns, and perhaps the
most frustrating, is
Lesson 6. Smart people and experts
can sometimes be wrong.
To be sure, the contemporary automobile
is a marvel of engineering: its engine and transmission will
generally work flawlessly for many millions of revolutions and
several hundred-thousand miles. Its sophisticated fuel delivery
system creates more power per unit of gasoline than could even have
been dreamt of 40 years ago.
But every mechanic still runs into
piss-poor designs, maddening overcomplexity, and occasional stupidity
baked into every car. All mechanics spend some part of their time
re-engineering or bypassing what the experts screwed up. This takes
the form of everything from eliminating useless and glitchy circuits
to rerouting entire induction systems to sometimes just putting in
quality fasteners in place of crappy ones.
When the media call upon “experts”
whose predictions are just plain wrong or whose entire fields are
paradigmatically astray, we seldom even question the blind faith it
requires to call them up and waste air time on their silly
bloviations.
Knowing that the experts can sometimes
be wrong is psychologically satisfying, but it also ought to put us
on guard: our own sense of expertise should always be in question.
Our own certainty can be our own worst enemy. Through the time a
mechanic spends fixing what the factory broke, he also becomes aware
of relying too much on his assumptions and his experience. He's
always aware of the fact that, this time, the problem might be
different. This time, what acts like a blown head-gasket is actually
a failing turbo. This time, the oiling-system that never fails, in
fact, actually did.
The accolades our petty, human
institutions bestow upon us don't mean jack in the real world--which
has an annoying habit of not giving a rip about theory and the way
things “ought” to work. The conventional wisdom is just that: it
is based on convention, not necessarily the way things really are.
This idea leads to
Lesson 7. It's not always about you.
The extreme focus in the modern
workplace on “performance” and evaluation arises from the
aforementioned ambiguity of the work we do. With fairly fluid
definitions of failure and success and with so much of business
success due to the vicissitudes of the market and not necessarily the
quality of the work, we have little to go on when it comes to
promotion, hiring, and bonuses. The policies of the workplace try to
impress upon us the objectivity of their assessments. But we all know
better.
That's why so much of the literature of
getting ahead has to do with how you present yourself, market
yourself internally, and package the value of what you do. It turns
us all into salesmen, and it turns the focus on what we do from the
actual work to how the work looks for us. It makes our
“customers” those who fill the power structures of the workplace,
not the people who are on the receiving end of what we do.
The professional mechanic certainly has
to serve the owner of the car. But her first order of business
is the vehicle itself, and the car doesn't care about you. You
can be the best salesman in the world, the most affable, the best
team-player, but if you haven't properly diagnosed the problem and
adequately repaired it, it won't work anyway. The car isn't being
cruel; it has no ability to not like you. It doesn't care if you're
ugly or fair, if you've got big boobs or a winning smile. The car
doesn't care if you learned at Harvard or at the School of Busted
Knuckles. It's not interested in your résumé. The
car doesn't care if you're having a bad day or if you're feeling
good. It just is what it is; it's broke as it's broke. No matter how
frustrated you get, no matter how confident you feel, it's not about
you.
It's about the car.
While
lesson 6 might be the most sociologically healthy thing being a
mechanic teaches you, lesson 7 is the most emotionally
healthy. The idea that it's not about you, it's about the work that
needs to be done, lets a person practice the necessary detachment to
get through a situation, and it also suggests a certain useful
moral/ethical position: if we spent less time on blame, less time on
sorting out who deserved what, and more time on what needs to be
done, we'd all be more likely to work together, to listen to the
suggestions of others, and to be quicker to recognize others' needs,
abilities, and contributions. I'm not fool enough to think such a
lesson would completely do away with office politics, but it may go a
long way toward refocusing on what needs to be done and on what needs
to happen for the work to be done well. And just maybe, such a
position would let executives see that those on the front lines are
not mere numbers to be outsourced and de-waged whenever possible, but
real people who provide real value, and who may just know a good deal
more about the work than the executives do. If we take this lesson to
heart, then the amount it costs to compensate people well won't be
seen as about the executive, as about his or her justification of a
bonus by reducing payroll costs, but about the needs of the work if
it is to be done well.
I'm
not suggesting, of course, that everyone go out and become a
mechanic, but rather that some of the lessons of working on old cars,
Swedish or not, might help people get back in touch with what they've
lost as work drifts farther and farther from the physical world.
