Is training really corporate sludge?

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1:15Mats Alvesson: This is Eat Sleep Work with me. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. Most company training is a waste of time that turns firms into bureaucratic sludge holes. That's roughly the conclusion of today's conversation, which is a discussion with Andre Spicer and Matt Alverson. They've got a new book out called The Art of Less. Andre's been a guest a few times before, actually, way back in 2017. I think he was an episode guest twice. This podcast is well old. In 2017, I want you to envisage this. This podcast was ahead of Stephen Bartlett's diary of a CEO at the top of the podcast charts for business.

1:56Mats Alvesson: I wonder what happened to that guy. This discussion really about how admin, bureaucracy, red tape, sludge overtakes organisations and makes well-meaning leaders find that their companies become administrative nightmares to work in. I guess what underpins a lot of it and what I come to the conclusion at the end is that much of what companies do is related to the self-identity, the self-image that that company aspires to represent in the world. they might this is a topical idea actually that they might have dei training because they want to be a place that's about equality and an opportunity but maybe the frustration is despite having lots of initiatives lots of training they don't actually accomplish those goals they set out to achieve that idea that to some extent these actions become performative rather than achieving the things they're setting out to do.

2:52Mats Alvesson: So we're going to go into, I think, a discussion about how this corporate sludge, how this bureaucracy consumes so many well-meaning organisations, and then get a perspective of how we might set about trying to change these small little initiatives we might set about doing to try and improve the way that organisations look and feel. Andre and Mats have written this new book, Art of Less, and you'll see a link to that in the show notes is also a link to a couple of the articles and things that we discuss along the way. It's sort of an interesting provocation, today's discussion, an interesting challenge that maybe the work we're trying to create isn't the work that we end up with.

3:35Mats Alvesson: And I'd love you to reflect just on that. Here's my discussion with Andre Speiser and Mats Alverson.

3:43Mats Alvesson: Gents, thank you for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do. My name is Mats Alverson. I'm Swedish. I work part-time at University of Bath, the Bayes Business School, also a bit in the University of London in Sweden.

3:58Andre Spicer: I'm Andre Spicer. I'm a professor of organisational behaviour. So that means I kind of study things like leadership, organisational culture. But also I'm the executive dean of Bayes Business School, which means that I'm a sort of cat herder in chief here. So I have to sort of manage a lot of knowledge-intensive workers and also deal with some of the sludge, which comes with working in a university. Now, there's a post going around online

4:24Mats Alvesson: and it's been getting some traction in the last couple of weeks. It's called The Death of the Corporate Job. And in it, the writer, I've linked to it in the show notes, the writer talks about sort of wandering through Canary Wharf at 8am, seeing thousands of people who look purposeful, coffees in hand. But very quickly, if you chat to the people who are heading that way, they describe a world where they have back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. One person talks to the blog writer and he says in his job, he enables decision-making, whatever that means.

5:02Mats Alvesson: And your book seems pretty much to take on that bullshittification of work, the fact that work has been consumed with admin and sludge. Have I got that right? Is that the objective of the book?

5:15Andre Spicer: Very much so. So I guess one of the things which we were struck with is that many of the people we spoke with, whether it was in police forces, military, corporate jobs, etc., spent a lot of their time saying, well, I spend less and less of my time doing productive work and more and more of my time dealing with, you know, projects, processes, filling in forms, you know, sitting in meetings which have little point. and as a result, two things. One, they often don't feel that engaged with their job. The second thing is that they see stakeholders, whether it's a patient in a hospital or a citizen on the street or, you know, a client, if you're a corporate person, who was increasingly not satisfied with the service which their company or organisation was providing because they had to spend all of their time doing these other kinds of things.

6:08Andre Spicer: You start on a lot of this as corporate sludge,

6:11Mats Alvesson: the idea that there's a lot of stuff that maybe unintentionally arrives and fills work and if I was going to sort of interpret it most corporate sludge starts with positive intentions you know it might be the gathering of data so that if anyone asks questions in the future we're set up to do it or you you list one specific area that is guilty of creating corporate sludge but I want to return to that quite intensively in a second. So could you just define to me what corporate sludge is to your mind and how work seems to pretty quickly become filled with it? And I'd love some of the examples. You list like how when budgets go off, quite often administrative tasks and staff go up.

7:00Mats Alvesson: And I'd just love to get into the specifics of that. I think the specifics really bring it to life. Give us a buyer's guide to corporate sludge.

7:08Andre Spicer: So I guess the idea of sludge initially came from, there was a guy called Richard Thaler, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist. And he pointed out that, yes, you have these nudges in society, which make things doing the good things easier. So, you know, eating the fruit at lunchtime. But then he pointed out after this nudge idea came out that there's also sludge, which means that these are processes, etc, which make doing the good things harder. So, So, you know, serving clients, getting tasks done. And then his co-worker Cass Sunstein pointed out there's a lot of the sludge in consumer and corporate lives.

7:47Andre Spicer: So in consumer lives, you think about cancelling a subscription. Often it's super difficult to do that. You have to go through multiple stages and it can take days to cancel a simple subscription. And also, say, to fill in tax paperwork or those kind of things, federal paperwork is very difficult. So that is a sludge in the kind of consumer and citizen facing. And then we pointed out that actually in corporations and organisations there is these unnecessary processes which make things harder than they need to be done, harder than they need to be to get done. So we sort of outline a whole range of kind of examples of this.

8:28Andre Spicer: So some are things like rituals, like unnecessary meetings where people routinely go, but there's no actual point of these unnecessary meetings. So we give an example of one company, I think, which every year had had a weekly C-suite meeting, but every level below that would need to prepare for the meeting. And I think they spent over 300 ,000 hours every year just preparing for these weekly C-suite meetings. So a lot of time was chewed up. Platforms is the second one. So many companies have hundreds of different apps and employees will spend hours every week just switching between the different apps and learning the different apps which they need to get their work done.

9:15Andre Spicer: You have projects. So in large scale organisations, often you have thousands of different projects which they haven't kept track of, which they've launched all of these projects and no one really knows why they are there. Initiativitis is one way of thinking about it. But you also have people, so often, and roles, people's roles. So when you kind of launch new, expand into certain areas, you say, oh, we need an expert in this area, in that area, in the other area. So there are many forms that sludge can come in. There's a sort of long list of them. And we were fascinated that many of these things seem to expand over time and eat up a lot of people's time.

9:57Mats Alvesson: And could you give me some sense of the scale of it? I think there was an example of somewhere in Sweden that had added extra budget and half of the work had gone on administrators or in police. It was just, it was seeming like any time we were getting more resource, it was just going into sort of creating more layers of admin. Is there anything that can make that concrete? I think that you think about the Swedish police force where they had doubled the resources, but the number of very serious crimes that they were supposed to prioritize, those being sold, has not really improved at all. The numbers have not improved at all.

10:39Mats Alvesson: So despite twice the resources, the productive outcome has not improved. And one explanation for this is presumably then all resources and attention going into administration. So they counted the number of policy documents, and that amounted to 589. So some police officers referred to the fight against serious organized administration as a key task. And, of course, this is well intended. We need a lot of HR. We need to work with diversity, gender equality, sustainability issues, security, safety, career, financial control, competence development, blah, blah, blah. So there are a lot of things that appear to be very reasonable or valuable, but the amount.

11:37Andre Spicer: So some other examples which we identified was one in the military sector where the number of, you know, actual soldiers on the ground or, you know, ships or whichever had gone down quite significantly, but the number of high-ranking colonels and officers and so forth go up. The same we saw in the healthcare sector, where often the government would put in a lot of money, and I think this was in the Swedish healthcare sector, and it was mainly kind of administration, IT, all those kind of things went up, but the number of medical and nurses stayed stable. The final example is we looked at, there was one study which was done on, I think it was the German, basically people who issued driver's licenses and sort of registrations for cars in Germany.

12:28Andre Spicer: They did an experiment where they sort of wanted to increase the speed of issuing these things. So they put significantly more resources in and they doubled the number of people, I think it was. But there was no change in the amount of time it took to issue these licenses. So it seemed to suggest this is called Parkinson's law, where sort of work expands or contracts to fill the space which you give it.

12:51Mats Alvesson: One of the things that certainly made me shudder was the way, because I recognised it, you said that the majority of company training, the majority of internal training is sludge. And that's really eye-opening because I guess there's an interesting case study we could do and explore there. So you give a vivid example of, in academia, PhD training for people who do oversight in PhDs. And people said that this had zero value. Actually, it was insult to the people who qualified for it and for everyone else. It had no value. And the notion that most internal training is sludge and superfluous might superficially be like a really jarring thing.

13:37Mats Alvesson: People listening to this might go, no, but my training's good. But actually, maybe one of the biggest ways that DEI has been knocked down in the last 12 months with very little battle is that anyone who's gone and investigated whether DEI training has worked or had any material impact has found it hasn't had any impact. It's not worked at all in organisations. So the skittle of DEI has been knocked over really cleanly because you can't demonstrate any loss from doing it. So firstly, I'd love to identify how most internal training is sludge. And secondly, maybe you can take us on the case study of how good intentions often don't achieve their goal because training is sludge.

14:26Andre Spicer: Maybe I'll take the first point around corporate training. So corporate training from a distance is extremely important. And if you look at a country like the UK, we know that we need to upskill people, improve their skills in all sorts of ways. So that should lead you to invest in corporate training in all sorts of areas. But then if you then look at many of the training initiatives which are put in place, often they're less driven by that let's improve skills and more driven by let's avoid a legal case or let's show that we're doing the right thing externally. So then they put in place a relatively, you know, kind of industry standard, which is often quite standardised and straightforward training.

15:09Andre Spicer: And often that's treated as something you just need to do. Many people don't pay as much attention as they probably should do. And as a result, it doesn't have much effect. So as you mentioned, Bruce, there's fantastic work which has been done on looking at DEI. So if you assume that there's a good goal, which is let's improve diversity in your organisation, then you look at the various measures that companies have put in place to achieve it. The most popular measure tends to be DEI training. Now, what the research, as you pointed out, tends to find is that that's probably one of the least effective mechanisms.

15:45Andre Spicer: And it's not that it just has zero effect. In some cases, if you're negatively disposed towards DEI training in the first place, so you have negative prize towards it, it can have a bit of a backlash effect. And we actually describe a case which was, I think it was looking at Canadian oil companies where they rolled out some DEI training because they wanted to be seen as more diverse. They basically took a standardised offer which came from the US, which was mainly focused on the racial diversity issues you might find in the US, but it had no eye to the two main issues that you might find in Canada, one being the relationship with First Nations people, the second one being the Quebecois French-speaking and English-speaking population.

16:34Andre Spicer: And as a result, this diversity training fell flat and actually made matters worse, both for the First Nations people who work for the company and also for the Quebecois Francophone-speaking people. So often it can be a way that you can signal that something is happening but without actually making any significant change and taking up people's time while doing it.

16:56Mats Alvesson: The problem is that education and training, it appears good. We are kind of rational. We are responsible. We are a knowledge-intensive firm. We offer competence, and the competence is improving if we devote a lot of time to training at that. The problem is that the symbolism here, the automation effect, is sometimes tied to everybody going through this. And it should also appear to be quite impressive and nice looking. But that means that you have mandatory standardized training, often coming from top down, imposed on people. And that means that, well, in many cases, there's lots of variation in terms of interest, abilities, needs, local circumstances, etc.

17:48Mats Alvesson: But this mandatory standardized training from the top, it goes high on symbolism in relationship to the outside world. but it works typically very poorly internally because there are so many variations in terms of people's interests and abilities and the local work, specific local work situation. So then it means that it's often just a matter of sludge more than something else. In general, I think that education then, it is important sometimes that people are really motivated, it's situationally located. it is very relevant given the specific situation but but with all regulations that should be standardized that should look okay in terms of legalities blah blah blah it should have a nice effect in terms of how it looked like that you have a lot of this leading more to sludge than to any specific substantive positive effects it's interesting isn't it because one of the additional ways that we see sludge is that uh louise casey when she was doing her report into the abduction of Sarah Everard by a member of the London Metropolitan Police, said that when she was sort of going through the post-mortem of this, the wash-up of this, that she sat down with their then Prime Minister and he just reeled off initiative after initiative to her, almost by the very nature that by declaring an initiative, and actually it's the sort of stock in trade, isn't it, of politicians, by declaring an initiative, somehow we've put a pin in the idea that something is important and therefore we've somehow given ourselves the hoodoo, the spell to wish it away.

19:31Mats Alvesson: And she described it as initiativitis where there were lots of initiatives, but the end result is that someone had lost their life. And I guess training to some extent is another example of the same thing. We want to signal who we are in the world. Our identity is we care about these things. Our corporate identity is that we care about this, we're trying to wash away this. But the end result is that we create this initiative, the end result is not achieved, but we've kind of got a sticker that says that we tried our best. And so what you might conclude is that sludge, this red tape, this bureaucracy is actually the output of good intentions.

20:15Mats Alvesson: And And I just wonder then if we are to wash that away and to say, okay, let's focus on the outcomes. How do we overcome that initiative? How do we overcome the idea that everything is a training course that no one pays attention to? The truth of training courses is most of them now are delivered online and no one pays attention to them. And, you know, there's a complete disconnect between what we're trying to accomplish and what we're actually accomplishing. What's the solution to all of this?

20:42Andre Spicer: To build on your first point, which was the point about sort of no one paying attention, we looked at some, there was a study recently done on Microsoft Teams meetings. And it sort of, it tracked what are people doing while they're on Teams meetings? Are they just paying attention to the Teams meeting or are they doing other things? And I've found that something like 46 % of people on a Teams meeting are doing some other task while they're on a Teams meeting. So attention is split. and the other thing which you raise is the fact that these things are done out of good intentions and we say absolutely and the problem you get is these this kind of overload of good intentions so it's not just trying to improve diversity but it's also trying to make things more sustainable and trying to make things more fair and foster free speech and make things more competitive and efficient and all of these different initiatives kind of add up and they they kind of crowd out people's attention.

21:36Andre Spicer: So as a result, they end up not focusing and trying to sort of push on one initiative, which might be important to one area that might be important. They sort of end up scattering attention across multiple initiatives. And then as a result, it often kind of crowds out core work. So it's very much kind of driven by good intention. So then the question is, what do you do about it? And I think in one of the aspects in the book, we began to explore this question about people have often developed their own techniques in the workplace over time to work out what you do about it. One of those techniques is basically ignorance.

22:15Andre Spicer: I'm just going to ignore this stuff, basically. And people are remarkably good at being ignorant in organisations. So, many people, there was one study which showed a significant number, I think something like 25 % of people who were sort of middle managers had no idea what the company strategy was. There was a significant number of people in a company which was studied who didn't even know what the CEO's name was. So many of these things just simply wash over people. They get ignored. So ignorance is one reaction. A second reaction is kind of, I guess, a bit more strategic kind of engagement.

22:56Andre Spicer: So you might engage selectively with a initiative. So you look at the initiative and say, okay, what do I really need to comply with? And you watch good teams. And what often team leaders will do is to teach newcomers very clearly, these are the things you need to pay attention to coming down from the top. And these are the things which you can overlook or or kind of selectively comply with. So you get the selective compliance. Sometimes that's symbolic where you just sort of put on the badge and show you've complied and move on and get on with your work. But the other one we saw that you sometimes find in function is kind of preemptive sludging.

23:35Andre Spicer: So you build a sort of a moat of sludge around your function so other functions can't kind of get in and begin to sort of mess with your program and attack it. So I think that any of your listeners has probably sort of used some of these tactics before or at least seen other people in their organisation using some of those tactics. Yeah, I mean, quite a cynical perspective though, isn't it?

23:56Mats Alvesson: Because effectively you're saying that the coping strategy for Sludge is just kind of ignoring it and getting on with it rather than us trying to create an honest version of what our work actually is. It's a bit like sort of performative obedience is the only enduring company culture is kind of the perspective.

24:18Andre Spicer: Well, I guess what we say is those are sort of the techniques which people often use. And then we sort of say what could be used and what some organisations actually do use, which we sort of look at, the two sort of metaphors we use is one is talking about maybe companies need to think about themselves as taking inspiration from the sanitary industry and thinking about sort of inputs, throughputs and outputs. So top of the pipe, middle of the pipe and end of the pipe solutions, which we can talk about a little bit more. And the other one, which we say, is that maybe sometimes leaders, instead of seeing themselves as fantastic visionaries, which sometimes is important, particularly when you're trying to plan in the long term.

25:02Andre Spicer: But other times leaders might need to think about themselves as more like administrative plumbers who are sort of there to get rid of blockages along the way.

25:10Mats Alvesson: You can do this more hidden resistance or manage to find your way around all this. But you can also have a much more offensive or positive case against this. And that is to create a culture of voice where people are then getting used to and encouraged or cultivate the courage to speak up against stuff. so all the time then try to state your opinion we don't find this particularly not necessary, not particularly productive or at least we could do this if time and resources allow us to do this because we have some slack in relationship to the productive core work we're supposed to do so speaking up more clearly and then also encourage which managers and others all the time have a very clear motivation for when we should do something.

26:11Mats Alvesson: Thinking holistically, looking at everything you say, you say a couple of things that are really indelible for me. 71 % of people don't read company emails about strategy and initiatives. Only 28 % of middle managers and execs could list three of their company's strategic priorities. And the only conclusion that I can end up making is that actually the only way to operate here is to devolve as much decision making to the lowest level possible. To devolve anything about direction and strategic direction so that it's imparted by empowered local managers and that you train local managers as much as possible.

26:52Mats Alvesson: so anything about you know we want to have a dei profile it's devolved to people who then can speak face to face their teams and it's all for me the only thing that seems to be in an accurate application of what you're saying is devolution of much power as possible you know and you give the example of some motorbike training in sweden which i think the police were trying to get and the admin of getting this training was so much that it would only be implemented after it was actually useful. And, you know, a way around that just seems to be cut out all the middlemen and cut out all the middle processes.

27:27Mats Alvesson: That might, from a corporate perspective, from a governance perspective, make organisations a bit worried about the vulnerabilities it creates. But it feels to me like a manifesto for full devolution of power. And is that where you ended up concluding yourself?

27:42Andre Spicer: So I guess there's some different responses to this. So one response is to say that if you look at a lot of the research and evidence, it's not that we don't want any administration. Actually, for quite some time, kind of adding administrative systems into large, which requires some degree of centralised control, into large complex organisations like local authorities, healthcare, universities, it actually makes them more effective on multiple measures for some time. But then you reach the point of optimal administration and then people often think, well, we've had more of it, so adding more is going to make things better.

28:17Andre Spicer: but then actually it gets into a too much of a good thing effect where it begins to decline and get worse and it enters what we call the kind of sludge pit. You move from optimal admin to this sort of sludge pit. So I think simply saying no systems is you need systems and administrative processes and large-scale organisations. Then the question is how are they played out and how much space do you give for localised judgement and questioning, which I think is necessary Maybe Matt could sort of expand on that second point.

28:51Mats Alvesson: Organizations, they call for centralization and standardization and coordination. So decentralization is not a solution to all problems. It tends to have their own difficulties, of course. Is there a problem? If we take DIA, for example. Is there a problem here? Who has the problem? And it's very seldom a uniform problem in a very large organization. and what are the local conditions and what is a relevant solution to this particular problem if we have one. And that means that you have to look more carefully at specific situations rather than saying, ah, here we have a very large company, everybody should be doing DIA or we should have new policies or we should have experts running around and giving speeches or whatever in a relatively standardized way.

29:40Mats Alvesson: So rather than going for the centralized solution or even very strict decentralized, you need to have some communication about what are the problems, what are reasonable.

29:53Andre Spicer: So I guess I'd just sort of nail that point, just to say both in heavily centralized and also in very decentralized organizations, you can get the sludge production. So from heavily centralized organizations, you get this very central standardized solutions. from decentralised organisations, what often happens is that each individual centre launches their own sludge, basically. So this function and that function, the other function think, okay, here's something we think is very important. And then they spread it onto other parts of the organisation and attempts to sort of, you know, extend their empires sometimes.

30:32Andre Spicer: So there's a danger there on either side. A really fascinating example of that is this holacracy which was aiming for this kind of radically decentralised organisation. But if you look into it, these holocratic constitutions were extremely long and complicated documents with all of this new language and following the rules and regulations was often very, very confusing for people and it sort of seemed to add sludge when it was trying to get rid of it.

30:59Mats Alvesson: There was one thing in the book I wanted to touch on which was slightly separate from the overall conversation and it was about the grandiosity of corporate cultures, about how quite often companies try to differentiate themselves by suggesting that their company culture is special. And that's often quite a performative thing for the senior leaders there, that, you know, like they're attempting to separate it. And I love you just, it's not directly related to what we're talking about here, but I just love a perspective on this sort of grandiosity of trying to celebrate the marginal difference of cultures and how organisations can fall into the traffic.

31:36Mats Alvesson: I ended up concluding that the role then of corporate culture should be just to try and create an efficient, highly functioning organisation, rather than try and peacock how you're different to other companies out there. Could you give us the way that we should be thinking about that from your perspective? I guess that a major driver behind slides is people's want to appear grandiose, to look really impressive, and then both in terms of one's own eyes, like an identity project, but also then to project an image of yourself to the external world that makes you appear to be fantastic and excellent and much better than others, et cetera.

32:21Mats Alvesson: And this creates, to some extent, this is kind of necessary. So some identity boasting and some image or impression management to the external world is necessary. But often people in an organization have their own fantasies that people take this extremely seriously and they are so interested in having these positive effects. But it's often not the case because the external world is not that bloody interested in what goes on, their vision statements So there are fantastic efforts then to improve gender ratios on middle-level managers or whatever. But a lot of grandiosity motives tend to fuel sludge.

33:12Mats Alvesson: And then organizations, they are full of people working with communication, with fantastic HR initiatives, etc. And they all look good and people may feel good about all this, but it tends to add more to sludge. And for people outside those directly involved in all this, it's quite frustrating and irritating in many situations. But sludge and grandiosity, they tend to often be bedfellows.

33:40Andre Spicer: I was just speaking with a professor who is an expert in mergers and acquisitions, and he sort of worked across a wide range of industries. and he pointed out that whenever you go to a company in an industry or an industry, they all say, we are unique. So he's kind of come to almost this formulation that the only universal rule seems to be everyone thinks that they're unique when they're not necessarily so. So I think sometimes the solution around that is to begin to realise, number one, a lot of the time audiences, external audiences don't care about these certifications or these kind of grandiose stories.

34:18Andre Spicer: We care sometimes. We care in organisations about it because that gives us a sense of purpose and specialness and meaning. But a lot of the time, the external world doesn't necessarily care as much as we might think. The second thing is that sometimes actually being a bit more honest about what you're doing and your purpose and your place in the world can be kind of liberating, right? So, instead of there are many institutions that say we want to be world-class and fantastic world levels, that might make us feel good. But actually, when you're there to serve, say, a regional market and a very specific thing, doing a good enough job, that's enough.

34:57Andre Spicer: And putting these kind of grandiose ambitions aside and focusing on what you actually do can be liberating both of time, effort, and also sort of fantasy resources, I guess.

35:07Mats Alvesson: When we're thinking about this, should there be a structure to how we think about sort of trying to eliminate sludge, making these changes, enacting a reduction in our own organisations?

35:19Andre Spicer: So often sludge, you can think about it as like a pipeline. So there are sort of beginning of the pipe solutions which you can put in place. So this is stopping sludgy things from getting into organisations. So desludged organisations are often very good at spotting, this is an initiative which might sound nice, but let's park that for now. The second one is kind of middle of the pipe solution. So it's really kind of the idea of actually making sure that things flow through an organisation efficiently and effectively. So it's simple things like knowing the number of initiatives you actually have going on in an organisation and which stage they're at.

35:57Andre Spicer: It's also things like being able to stop things. So some organizations have introduced a kind of one-in-one-out rule. So the idea is that if you want to start something, you need to actually stop something to create capacity for it. And then the final bit is kind of end-of-pipe solutions. So making sure that you don't just sort of spew out sludge onto your users, your clients or your stakeholders, but you're actually sending out things which are sort of well-structured and useful to people in the wider environment is really important. And you find that organisations which are able to do that effectively can significantly improve things.

36:40Mats Alvesson: Yeah, I've really liked the sort of the huggy row comment of the rule of half, just trying to half the amount of stuff you do. And actually, I can relate to that. The most recent big job that I had, we did an audit of the amount of times people spent in meetings, came out about 26, 27 hours. And we just said, let's try and half it. And we didn't get anywhere near half, but we got it down by a third. And let me tell you, when you save eight hours a week of people in meetings, that has a meaningful impact on how they feel that they're doing their job. So just that goal of sort of trying to achieve something that feels possible, simple, trying to halve stuff seems like a sort of a desirable aspiration.

37:25Mats Alvesson: And it was a meaningful step in the right direction.

37:28Andre Spicer: Yeah, and you can apply that not just to meetings and length of emails, but things like initiatives, policies, strategies, projects, numbers of platforms you use, levels of experts you engage externally. All of these things you can say, let's try and reduce those a little bit and focus on what's really important.

37:48Mats Alvesson: Yeah, and I talked with one person who was working in a bank and they had a new CEO and he gave a talk. Most of it was full of cliches and not particularly valuable. But they said one thing. If you are in a meeting and you feel that this is a waste of time, you don't learn anything, you don't add anything, leave it.

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40:21Mats Alvesson: don't do what we used to do. We used to have to sit in meetings and they get up and leave. And it's a double-edged sword that like beware of simple answers to complicated problems. I think these layers to things that are more, unfortunately, they're more imbued with status and we don't want young workers to demonstrate any trapping of status themselves that we haven't gifted to them. Yeah, no, I think that there's a lot of symbolism and other things involved and all this. So the norms are sometimes difficult to change. But still, I would say that an intervention like that on the margin could mean that people are a bit more careful about how they spend their time.

41:00Mats Alvesson: And sometimes meetings can be not just a waste of time, but it can be quite frustrating. You feel very stressed if you have other important things to do. And it becomes a bit more legitimate to say that, OK, this is a nice meeting, but I don't feel that I can kind of contribute so much or it concerns me so much. So then you have more of an opening for people to reduce meeting time, partly based on people's own initiatives. So I think that a lot of things can be done in this region. One thing is then that all the time ask people to produce emotes. Why should we do this? Why should we fill in this form?

41:45Mats Alvesson: Why should we participate in this training? I'm happy to do this if there's a motivation, but if you can't see the reason for this, always ask for a motive. I just wanted to finish. André, you're a boss, whether you've got a title of dean of a college or whatever, in the grand scheme of things, you're someone who's responsible for leading an organisation. And I won't hold you accountable for what you've done so far, but having sort of spent time looking at this now, How would you set about, you talk a lot about academia as one of the areas that's really afflicted by sludge. How would you set about building a plan for going forward for removing the sludge inside your own organisation?

42:28Andre Spicer: It's a difficult one. As most of the listeners here, if they were posed the same question, they would have their own plans that they would like to implement tomorrow. But all of us have other stakeholders, whether it's upwards, downwards, to the side, who might have other ideas. And many of them would think, well, my thing is most important and, you know, we really need to do this, et cetera. So I guess the first thing is just acknowledging the difficulties. And I guess any of my colleagues who'd be listening to this would say, well, you know, I think about that time, Andre, where you forced me to follow this policy or do that certification and so on.

43:05Andre Spicer: So I admit I'm human, is the first thing to say. And I think it's important for leaders to do that. The second thing, then you can kind of go through the list of stuff we point out as aspect of sludge. So some might be kind of lengthy meetings which aren't necessary or lengthy emails. That's something that any leader can actually do is implement a policy where they shorten the amount of time they spend on meetings or they shorten the amount of communication which they give, which might be deemed unnecessary. You can also simplify policies. You can kind of potentially simplify the strategies which you give instead of 57 different initiatives.

43:49Andre Spicer: You can say for this couple of years, we'll work on three things and really try to move the dial on it. You can also try and simplify people's structures as well. So I think these are some of the things which can be done. The difference between sort of one's plans and ideas and the actual ability to do that can sometimes be rather large, let's say.

44:17Mats Alvesson: Thank you to both of them. Yeah, I think that idea at the end that sort of we should set about trying to create that sort of rule of halves, halving the amount of admin, halving the amount of bureaucracy, maybe thinking of different ways to try and impart knowledge into people. Interesting provocation. Be interested in your perspective on that and maybe whether you've got any thoughts on how you can bring it to bear in your jobs. I'm really taken with that idea that corporate culture quite often is consumed with grandiosity, trying to project who we are in the world, trying to be famous for something rather than necessarily accomplishing something.

44:55All in all, good provocation.

44:57Mats Alvesson: Links to everything we discussed in the show notes. As ever, I love people getting in touch and sharing their perspective. There's always quite a good discussion on these things in my inbox. So love to hear more from you. I've been Bruce Daisley. Appreciate you listening. See you next time.

45:40Andre Spicer: We'll be right back. get the best deals on the latest innovations. All the newness is all on sale right now during the LiveWell sale. On the drop by GNC. Parles-tu français? Hablas espanol? Parli italiano? If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases

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46:07Andre Spicer: and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now

46:18Mats Alvesson: at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hey, it's Howie Mandel, and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do It gaming team take on Gilly De King and wallow 267's million dollars gaming in an epic Global Gaming League video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi-platinum artist Travi McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Nioh right now at GlobalGamingLeague.com. That's GlobalGamingLeague.com. Everybody games.