Keywords

Safety. Quality. Transparency. Accountability. Nice words, great values. However, the management of these values is not always well-received by workers, as safety and quality do not have the same connotations as safety management and quality management. Our research from several projects shows that addressing such values tends to generate requirements that interfere with the core work, or “real work”, as it is often called. In other words, safety management interferes with safe work. It is not surprising that such values are difficult to manage, but it is surprising that we have failed for so long and continue to use the same methods. In this chapter, we start untangling the messy state of safety management by exploring how safety management is influenced by the surrounding sociotechnical system. We describe how the organizational and technological systems encourage a tendency to move safety management away from the sphere of human experience—the sphere in which “real work” is performed and understood—toward more non-sense or bullshit tasks. At the end of this chapter, some actions to mitigate bullshit are suggested.

4.1 Background and Examples

The empirical approach of this chapter is not based on a straightforward research design, but rather the authors’ various empirical experiences. For two decades, we have studied safety management, organizations, and work. We have conducted interviews, surveys, and fieldwork in different public and regulatory entities, as well as industries and private companies within construction, aquaculture, fisheries, and education. Over the years, we have interviewed more than one hundred people in different positions in a range of organizations. While the specific topics of the interviews have differed, a clear majority of the interviewees have been frustrated about extensive management systems, bureaucratized computer systems, or reporting procedures eating away at the time that should have been spent on their “real job” [11, 13, 36, 38]. They described their tasks in an opposite hierarchy as illustrated in Fig. 4.1, where their primary work was hampered by other tasks. Personnel at all levels had tasks they could not see the purpose of doing, with output seemingly disappearing into a “black hole”. Such tasks were typically extensive documentation of simple routine chores, reporting in systems they never saw anyone use, following procedures that gave little sense, or ordering things through computer programs that took more time than going to the physical store. While we also identified many positive outcomes of safety and quality management, and situations where the systems worked according to its intentions, the many negative implications were irrefutable. Operational personnel, managers, and regulators all talked about “all this bullshit or non-sense that we don’t know how to get rid of”.

Fig. 4.1
An illustration represents the funnel structure titled the real work categorizes tasks into primary or core tasks for job accomplishment, secondary tasks including useful management tasks and less productive bullshit tasks.

Empirical descriptions of different types of work tasks

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For example, in a study of energy consultants, the introduction of new digital documentation procedures intended to ensure the compliance of regulations and standards, resulted instead in the consultants having to spend their limited consultation time filling in the digital forms. Due to the time-consuming new procedures, they ended up not having sufficient time with the customers, resulting in unsatisfactory solutions. In some cases, the consultant ended up bypassing the whole system, making an informal deal with the customer [13, 14]. Another example from the construction industry was the introduction of “paper-free building sites”, where builders were supposed to build directly from the digital models, rather than printing out paper drawings. The goal was to avoid expensive errors occurring when builders used different versions of the plans, printed at different points in time. However, at all the “paper-free” building sites we visited, builders used paper drawings, either openly or in hiding. The most prominent reason expressed by the builders was that as the model was never perfect, they had to make changes while building. Furthermore, as the digital interface was not designed to incorporate builders’ feedback, using pencil on paper allowed them to talk back to the drawing without interrupting their workflow [11].

When Graeber [15] introduced the term “bullshit job”, meaning a job not even the person holding it sees the value in, this resonated with the frustration our informants had expressed. However, our studies did not show any jobs that were useless. But almost everyone had certain tasks in their jobs they experienced as useless. Tasks they wondered if anyone could benefit from, including their employers who were demanding they do said tasks. Thus, we became interested in non-sense or bullshit tasks. We explored such tasks and their safety relevance in several Norwegian opinion pieces and oral presentations (e.g., Størkersen and Fyhn [37]). To our surprise, these pieces were republished in tens after tens of branch-journals for various professions, ranging from nursing to diary workers, indicating a widespread frustration with bullshit tasks. Now the time has come to analyze this phenomenon more systematically based on the levels of the sociotechnical system.

4.2 The Sociotechnical System Entangling Safety Management

To realize how safety management failed, or is linked to bullshit, one must understand the broad range of expectations, regulations, and actors the organizations try to handle simultaneously [35, 38]. These are a part of the sociotechnical system involved in risk management described by Rasmussen [32], emphasizing the connection between the societal levels from government to work, and the influence from environmental stressors such as the public, market, and technological change. In this chapter, we thus build on Rasmussen's framework to shed light on the road from reasonable regulation to bullshit tasks. This is illustrated in Fig. 4.2 and was also visible in the example from the energy consultants and the construction sites above: Regulations make companies implement measures that may give unintended, troublesome, and even meaningless tasks to the personnel [11, 13, 14].

Fig. 4.2
An illustration depicts the interaction between Government, Regulators, Associations, and Companies in the context of regulations and compliance. It underscores the importance of reasonable regulation, the role of auditors, and the burden of administrative tasks on company core functions.

An illustration of the sociotechnical system involved in safety management, inspired by Rasmussen [32, p. 185], but going from reasonable regulation to bullshit tasks

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4.2.1 Government, Regulations, and Associations

Regulation is a defense against organizational accidents [33, p. 182], as it bridges the gap between public interests and the market. The purpose is to protect employees, customers, and society, among other stakeholders [18].

Most quality and safety management regulation and certification schemes are goal- and function-based, such as the ISO standards for safety, quality, and risk management, as well as national and regional HSE regulations and a range of industry-specific standards. It is typical for organizations to mimic each other’s ideas of management routines, especially when a solution appears to be the natural way of solving a problem [6, 10].

Function-based regulations mostly call for internal control through management systems. The safety management system must fit a company’s specific activities, but also be verified and documented by auditors. These two parts of the regulation—practical systems and verification—are often in conflict, and regulatory traditions lead the verification to trump practical systems [35]. Auditors have been given the power to ensure compliance of safety management and quality management. Verification has been described as a clever touch for regulators to give the companies the responsibility to both self-enforce the regulations, and to internally control and externally demonstrate their accountability [16, 27]. The regulations urge organizations to implement documentable tasks [24], as documentation is an easy basis for checking compliance superficially [19]. However, function-based regulation and system auditing may lead to a “checkbox mentality”, as it does not uncover whether a management system adequately fulfills its intentions [2, 21]. Hence, functional regulations and superficial audits can result in bullshit tasks at the expense of core tasks and of trust [30].

4.2.2 Management and Company

The managers in the various industries—like ship owners, construction managers, HSE advisors, purchasers, and CEOs—want good operations, but also to comply with regulations. Grote [16, 17] and others argue that companies should implement procedures with a balance of stability and flexibility. However, documentation of operations has become the favored approach to demonstrate accountability [20].

Managers are expected to show paper trails to safety regulators, quality management auditors, financial supporters, insurance companies, and a line of stakeholders [4]. Liability law can therefore result in extensive management systems, because management wants to protect itself through detailed descriptions of task operations [22]. This may include complex computer systems that cover documentation and reporting information at the same time as an employee is completing their purchases. For example, a catering order goes to the canteen for making food, to the management for having control over projects, and to the financial department for sending the bill. Or, a medical diagnosis is registered in the patient medical journal, and at the same time feeds into hospital payment, statistics, management, and planning of resources and hospital beds.

When managers design the safety management system with tasks for the operational personnel, they often overestimate what the personnel has time for and the variation in situations they need to handle [40, p. 455], thus implementing more routines and procedures than what is possible to accomplish in practice. Also, as audits and accidents often show weaknesses in the managerial system, it is common to add documentation tasks [1], which can increase the number of steps in a management system or procedure. These managerial measures may create non-sense or bullshit tasks, which seem to be reproduced across organizations and industries.

4.2.3 Work and Staff

From the operational personnel’s side, common safety management is not only producing routines for safety, it also often produces work that may conflict with safety due to the introduction of bullshit tasks. In many industries, safety management systems’ extensive documentation requirements may suppress the attention on and time available for safe work [3, 5, 7, 8, 16, 19, 30]. As this captain contemplates in an interview referred to in Størkersen [35, p. ii]:

I sometimes reflect upon that. We’ve got the papers in order, but is it really better? Do we only produce paper?… The Maritime Authority’s statistics are as bad as before, we run ashore just as much.

Safety management tasks not directly ensuring safety are also referred to as safety clutter [31]. When there are many safety management tasks, they clutter or saturate the operations for the personnel, thus decreasing system performance [40]. Tasks that are seen as unfitting, seemingly without value, and unnecessarily time-consuming, are perceived as bullshit tasks. They contribute to overloading the capacity of the personnel, who must carefully consider which tasks to do and which procedures to follow. When management systems include many bullshit tasks, operational personnel’s adaptation and competent decision-making may be essential in order to get the core tasks done [25, 40]. This demands the personnel to remove themselves from the tasks that management expects them to perform. In some organizations, both managers and operational personnel jointly experience procedures to be mainly there for liability reasons, meaning that they in practice can be ignored [35]. Many employees are frustrated with computer systems that are difficult to use, because they require new information or checking of multiple boxes to do simple tasks. These systems tend to be characterized by drop-down menus leading the user through the procedures, while also functioning as gates, stopping the process if a certain box is not ticked correctly. This becomes a source of frustration in cases where the menu fails to offer adequate alternatives to the situation, and in practice stops the work until the “problem” is solved [12]. All in all, the safety management tasks are often viewed as external to the core work, constituting two parallel trails of tasks—the real work and safety management—as illustrated in Fig. 4.1. The first is seen as primary tasks and core work, and the latter seen as secondary tasks, including clutter and bullshit tasks [11, 36, 38].

4.3 Managing Through Human-Peripheral Systems

We have seen how seemingly reasonable regulations make companies implement measures that may result in unintended and perceived meaningless tasks for the operative personnel. In the previous sections, we have argued that the sociotechnical system is vital to understanding why safety management can result in bullshit going against safety. Organizations need to comply with a line of regulations and expectations, all requiring management systems, documentation, and system auditing. This gives an entanglement of safety management, internal control, quality management, responsible procurements, and accountability in the organizations’ systems.

While most workers embody their primary tasks, they usually find it more difficult to keep track of the required secondary safety management tasks (see Fig. 4.1), and thus wish for support systems. However, management systems come with more than support. The logic of management systems focuses on the technological aspects, not only as rigid procedures and processes that become even more rigid when digitalized, but also as instrumentality increasingly separated from the sphere of human experience [23, p. 296]. As such, the parallel trail of safety management is not only time-consuming, but also challenges the professional judgment of staff, as it works according to different procedures and logic, calling for other skills than those needed for the core work.

While most agree that professional judgment in some cases necessitates safety procedures adhering to a different logic than the judgment being supported (such as the jet pilot’s pretakeoff checklist), problems can arise when such checklists become systems that determine how a professional should perform their job. Not only because they create bullshit tasks that steal time from the “real job”, but because they force the job to be performed according to procedures adhering to the logic of the management system rather than that of the professional human being. The separation between the two trails of tasks (see Fig. 4.1) increases if the tasks are produced by a system not built according to points of professional judgment in the workflow of the ones doing the job, but rather by a system architecture distant from this sphere of human experience. However, even if the system is designed from a point of view in the real workflow, it tends to lack the flexibility, openness, and ability to prioritize associated with professional human judgment. When the operational personnel are so occupied with safety management tasks that it is difficult to find time to do the core tasks, they find themselves in an ineffective system, where they need to make decisions based on their bounded rationality or in a hurry, and not based on the thorough calculations of management. “Knowing when to bend the rules is one of the hallmarks of an experienced decision maker” [28, p. 76], but improvised decision-making is rarely in anyone's favor if it occurs because of a malfunctioning system. Further, as such systems are created to secure a form of control at a distance for management, they tend to be designed to operate by control rather than trust. Trust necessarily implies risk [34], which is something compliance systems normally are designed to eliminate. The danger, then, is that trust may diminish as a resource, as being given trust tends to be a premise for acting in a trustworthy manner [39]. Again, we can see a step in the separation of human and management system, as trust moves from human to system.

On the other hand, the concept of bullshit tasks taps into the sphere of human experience, expressing frustration emerging from the experience of meaningless tasks cutting into one's real work and time. Even though some of these tasks are regarded as external to the real work, they become real as they conquer the time and attention of the staff. Further, as it tends to be the trails of these tasks that are visible further up in the organization, they tend to gain ontological weight and thus cause a transition in what is regarded as “real”, from the actual work to the representations of it, where the representations end up being perceived as more real than the real work itself [26]. However, seen from the perspective of the frustration giving rise to the term bullshit task, the production of the management systems we have discussed here can be seen as steps along a process where we, as Tim Ingold puts it, become “the authors of our own dehumanization” [23, p. 311].

4.4 Stepping Out of Inertia

As we have seen, bullshit tasks are defined by their unproductive appearance, their unwanted and non-meaningful nature, and their nonetheless common presence. Although organizations have made an effort to get rid of them, they are persistent because of traditions in how to comply with regulation, such as audits, documentation, or technology to provide for audits and documentation [9, 14, 31, 38]. This may be the case for management of many values and is particularly apparent in the safety management area. What is evident in organizations is poorly working systems, computer programs, and reporting taking up valuable time. And what is evident across organizations is that a fundamental change needs to come at the policy-making level—in how regulations are made, enforced, and audited. However, it should also be possible to decrease the time spent on bullshit in each organization as it is.

Although organizations obliviously point at regulation and auditors, managers surely must possess some leverage and tools to decrease the number of bullshit tasks. By paying attention to this phenomenon, the number of bullshit tasks experienced in an organization can be reduced. If the personnel and management together identify and analyze the existing bullshit tasks, some of the tasks could thereafter be relabeled, moved away, or completely deleted. Some suggestions:

Relabeling the Task: If some tasks are important, but perceived as non-sense because it is not communicated why they need to be done by exactly the persons associating them with bullshit tasks, they really are not bullshit tasks. For example, certain types of reporting are extremely useful for the people who receive the reports. When reports are made and submitted through computer systems, this can result in the “black-boxing” of both the receiver and the intentions, thus alienating the sender. As was already stated by Karl Marx, it is essential to humans to know the purpose and context of their work [29]. Thus, through educating each other on the value of certain tasks and understanding how they are vital for others, some tasks can be relabeled from bullshit to valuable tasks. However, the relabeling will not be successful if someone tries to relabel a task that really is useless or could be done in a smarter way or by another department.

Moving the Task: Some tasks may be important for the organization, but not necessarily performed by the personnel that identify them as bullshit tasks. Such tasks can be filling in documents or entering information into computer forms. Such tasks could be moved to other places in the organization, or in many cases be automated. Of course, this generates more tasks, and one should be careful not to generate new bullshit tasks.

Removing the Task: The boldest managers may understand that some of their tasks are bullshit, for example defensive documentation in order to satisfy easy audits. These tasks can be removed. However, it may demand some work and preparation, for example communication with and education of regulators and inspectors and internal auditors, to avoid regulative capture and ensuring a shared understanding of what is compliance and what is bullshit. It is vital that external actors do not approve systems or tasks that obviously are implemented for superficial compliance and not to improve operations. This act of removing bullshit tasks in cooperation with auditors is a possibility for companies that really look ahead.

This process most certainly demands a level of maturity of the actors involved. What is necessary, what is only defensive documentation, and what is required in audits will differ within an organization. Finding out which tasks are perceived as bullshit tasks while “really” being useful, may call for discussions and negotiations. Personnel could negotiate when to comply and what is really not important to comply with. These negotiations would need some form of dialogue between those doing the job and the regulators to reveal, on the one side, which audit outputs are necessary for the regulator, and, on the other, how any given audit affects the “real work” and professional judgment of those doing it. In this scenario, the regulator approaches the role of consultant more than that of inspector.

As a conclusion, we want to underline that this chapter is a contribution toward improved management and organizational life. The management methods of organizations today are astray. For years, personnel in different industries have seen that safety management and quality management also result in something that is not safety and quality. In addition to safety and quality, the practice is entangled with bullshit tasks, merely adding chores to already full time-schedules. The same picture may be drawn for transparency, accountability and now also sustainability, and probably many more trendy terms armed with good intentions. We want a world where people can experience doing a good job. Today, a more common experience seems to be that you almost never do a sufficient job, because you have so many tasks, and some of them are not necessary, but they are the ones your management urges you to do.

Our exploration of the road from reasonable regulation to bullshit tasks is a step toward the potential to do a good job. If someone understands how to reduce their bullshit tasks, they are probably on the way toward a more reasonable future.