This fusion business is getting out of hand. It’s affecting my career.
I’ve just changed jobs, you see. I’m now a Technical Writer, which is as neat a fusion of the technical and the artistic as you could hope for. I spend my working time these days gathering information about proposed projects for making life better in the Third World, and writing them up in such a way as to appeal to the sensibilities of Government agencies and trust funds, so as to extract the maximum amount of money from them.
The third component for a Good Job is a Good Team. Possibly not essential for everyone — some I’m still in the honeymoon period, I suppose, but after a month in the new job I’m still amazed and delighted to find myself in such an ideal situation — spending all day reading and writing about issues which interest me passionately.
Appropriate technology training in Indonesia, low-tech soap-making in Malawi, emergency food aid for Laos (hands up all those who knew where Laos is, or even that it existed)
It all causes me to think Western culture has made some basic mistakes about the whole question of work. There are many things which make a job satisfying and enjoyable; money is one of them, but far from the most important. I actually took a salary drop when I left my old job, but I really don’t think I’m going to regret it. So if it’s not just money, what does make a Really Good Job ?
Well, for a start it should be worth doing. I heard a story about a group of unemployed labourers who were taken on by their local council and set digging a hole in the road. When they had dug it, an official came and looked in it, nodded and told them to fill it in and start digging another one. After the third hole, the workers started to get restless. They were being paid, they were off the dole, but they were unfulfilled and unhappy. They complained to their boss; why were they being made fools of ? They wanted a real job, not some stupid keep-the-workers-busy scheme.
The boss explained; the Town Hall had lost the plans for the sewer system, and they needed to find out where the pipes were. So the only thing for it was to dig holes in every street until they struck sewer. The workmen went happily back to their digging, satisfied that they were playing a vital part in the life of their town.
And my job ? Well, drought-stricken peasants in Laos need rice a whole lot more than Britain needs another power station. Just before I left my old job, I was working on a design contract for the CEGB; steam turbines for Fawley B. Only… Fawley B has been postponed indefinitely. It’s most unlikely to be built. The design contract had to be fulfilled’ but I worked on it oppressed by a terrible sense of futility.
Another factor in a Good Job is that it should make the fullest possible use of our capabilities. All of them. Traditional industries are not noted for this. Press-tool shops have no particular use for machinists who breed prizewinning canaries, and design offices don’t know what to do with engineers who write poetry. “Outsider” skills may even be seen as a threat — you are not supposed to know anything the company has not taught you. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be like that, it’s all a question of whether you start with a system and squeeze the people to fit into it, or start with the people you’ve got and the mission you’re trying to accomplish, and evolve a system to suit both,
This carries its own risks; principally the tendency for everyone to end up rushed off their feet. You’re employed as a technical writer, but I hear you know something about computers — how about helping develop our use of PCs ? Oh, so you used to work in Quality Control — you can help analyze our office systems.
People operate happily as lone rangers — but most of us like to be part of a community. For a description of the ideal working group, I recommend a little book called “Corporation Man” (sorry, can’t remember the author’s name). So long as you ignore the sexist bits, it’s about the most penetrating insight into human nature as applied to work I’ve ever found. Basically, the idea is that a functional working group should be not more than about fifteen people — preferably about ten — and they should have complementary rather than identical skills. The group can be part of a larger organisation, along with other such groups, but the organisation as a whole shouldn’t be allowed to grow beyond a thousand people — preferably more like five hundred —because that’s the largest number you can actually get to know as human beings. Any more and it becomes a faceless corporation.
Work is just one area of life where the Compartmentalizers have caused a lot of misery, putting up watertight bulkheads between work and leisure, management (who must be thinkers) and workers (who mustn’t), technical jobs and creative jobs… the list could go on. The reductionist approach has been useful — science couldn’t have got far without it — but it’s also been responsible for a fair bit of mischief. I think what we could do with now is a bit of holistic thinking for a change. We’ve had a couple of centuries of taking the machine to bits and marvelling at its components. Now it’s time to start putting it back together and experiencing the still more marvellous way it functions as an integrated design
