In the Line of Duty

Sunday 2 May 2021

Bad TV, The Simplicity Strategy, and Anthrovision

Happy Sunday. I'll keep it brief because, despite my better judgement, I'm going to turn on the BBC shortly and watch the final episode in a show called 'Line of Duty' which has become compulsively bad like soap opera. The nation is hooked. And so am I.

Perhaps by the time you read this you can watch it again on i-player. There is no presenteeism. just anytime presence, don't you know.
The torrent of words about showing up for work and when and how continues unabated which is both good and bad news for me as I try and make sense of it all for the book of The Nowhere Office.

I'm glued to the replies coming in from people generously contributing their thoughts and was pleased to receive a note from Sir Vince Cable this evening, former Secretary of State for Business, who said - and I will hold back the bulk of what he said for the book - that "the world is becoming more divided with the labour aristocracy working harder and more enthusiastically because creativity and the exercise of authority are satisfying and others are working harder because they have to".

That inequality exists at the heart of work is something I don't want to forget, tempting thought it is to relay the fascinating managerial twists and turns that the first wave of hybrid is wreaking: Thanks to the rain I ended up briefly meeting a contact in government this week not in St James's Park as planned, but in their office in Whitehall, and it was a ghost town. "HR is in every day asking how many people do I think will actually come back in" my meeting companion said, over the tops of a series of empty desks. "I said: Not a lot".

The truth is that handling hybrid is about the most complex challenge for 'the back office' side of work there is: The HR people, the Property people. They have to figure out who is coming back and how and most important, how to be productive as well. This is what makes the story so fascinating.

Back to The Line of Duty. The formula rests on being as complex as a spider's web with an emotional register as simple as possible: Think Goodies and Baddies and you're there. Or how about three little words or half a hexagon: OCG ("Organised Crime Gang". Who knew?).

Line of Duty is the number one watched TV show at the moment. I can't compete, obviously, except that since Strategy & Business published my Lessons in Simplicity article on Friday it's been the number 1 most downloaded article.

Making complexity simple appears to land with viewers and readers.

BOOKS OF THE DAY

On to my books of the day. Gillian Tett's splendid new book was sent to me and it's just brilliant, like all her work. "Anthrovision" is a cracker of a phrase and refers to the way we should start to look less at what we do know and more with curiosity at what we don't.

And I've twinned the reading with a writer who I've become instantly smitten by, Melissa Gregg, Intell's Chief Social Scientist. She brings an acute cultural eye to the world of work and this book is especially interesting, published as it was in 2012 about the white collar workforce in new media and tech industries in Australia.

I hope to persuade both of them to appear on the podcast The Nowhere Office. We're about to 'drop' the next episode featuring a history of the Desk Diary: Lessons for simplicity in there!

I'm on Deadline! Line of Duty Calls!

Contact me with thoughts: julia@thefullyconnected.com