For more than a month and a half I worked on a project with a woman I’ve come to think of as Kitty – she’s the one who made the tom cats nervous – and just the other day, for some reason, it occurred to me that if you want a shining example of inefficiencies that are so deeply embedded in the processes and procedures that you can very accurately predict what will happen by identifying the way something should happen and then assuming that the exact opposite will prevail, man, this is it.
Kitty blew thru at least $500,000 – some of which is now in my checking account – so that a few documents could be posted on a corporate web drive and never looked at again. Never looked at again because they are of zero value. They don’t explain anything whatsoever, and what they allege to explain is in no way significant for anyone except a couple of handsomely compensated private sector employees, one of whom thought that writing “Theoretically, I guess you could include this data …” constitutes expert feedback.
The documents were written in a way that intentionally avoids anything definite. Since the reason for the lack of anything definitive was never stated directly, here’s my best guess: Nobody wanted to get busted for not knowing much. There were designers and industry experts and writers and brand strategists and “creatives” and so on and so forth. When Kitty was able to pull herself together enough to schedule a conference call, we all had them on our computers – live meeting, it’s called – so that we could look at documents together – the wrong version of documents more often than not. Then, a torrent of e-mail that sought to confirm that we had all correctly understood what we’d been directed to do during the conference call. Kitty usually ignored those e-mails, but when she did answer them her answers – if they can be called that – ignored or muddied the very simple questions she’d been asked and necessitated more questions. Which was a phenomenal waste of time and money.
And then there was Kitty herself, sitting on top of it all, spending hours reformatting documents in ways that not only didn’t make sense but were actually great examples of the exact opposite of sense. Then she’d go through whatever it was she’d assembled, defending the necessity of having a separate box within the table she created not for each slide but for each line within a slide “so that we can really drill down” and then talking through each of the graphic images she imported into the Word document – which required hours and made the file so huge it bogged down everyone’s e-mail – and how, when it was pointed out to her that the images didn’t match the text, would say, “you know – it’s just a thought.” The meetings held to explain things that should have never, ever been created in the first place were endless.
And this is efficiency in the private sector. Kitty is but one person. There are thousands, many thousands, at her company alone, a company that loves, interestingly enough, to point out how it’s bringing efficiency to many industries, including the public sector. And yet the myth persists. We must get government spending under control, I hear frequently. We must really be aggressive about waste in the public sector. I suppose the anthropologists would call these beliefs of ours something like a cultural truth, or maybe a societal assumption, but as Kitty and the millions like her sit in conference rooms across the land, bogging down everything they get their hands on with a level of inefficiency that’s worthy of a case study while, at the same time, make one crack after another about “the government,” a non-anthropologist like me has a simpler, less sophisticated way of describing it: Lying.
