It’s Sunday, the day of rest, the second day of the weekly rat race reprieve. So it is perhaps unwise- or simply just insensitive- for me to talk today about official and corporate incompetence. To talk about the contemporary phenomenon of what cynics call tickbox. I’m not looking to sour your Sunday back porch coffee and pipe routine, or your semi-comatose post bottomless brunch lie-down and reading time. I don’t want to spoil your upcoming nap. But I fear I must. Because tickbox is seemingly everywhere once you begin to tune into it, yet people don’t seem to talk about it much. They moan about it of course- and rightly so- but they don’t truly talk about it.
The truth will set you free, as the man once said. And my concern within both these essays, and with my life in general, is to nudge the willing closer towards a leisurely and fulfilling existence of ample time, freedom and contemplation. But with freedom comes responsibility. And part of that responsibility- for both self and others- involves having a firm and clear-eyes grasp of just what it is that you are up against. And what you are up against, in many instances, is tickbox.
Utopias and Call Centres
‘For me, tickbox is a noun as well as an adjective. It has a mind of it’s own and seems determined to make every decision. This would clearly be nonsense, we’re it not for the fact that those who run the world appear to be determined to automate decisions along the rules they have set. Those who believe in this post bureaucratic vision are in power across the world, leading in my view to the kind of widespread disaffection that is currently turning the world inside out’
David Boyle
I used to quite like the idea of an automated future, back when I was young enough to be enchanted by utopia. On the face of it is seems nice: we create evermore sophisticated tech and robotics and we get those machines to do the dirty work while we sip highballs in a hammock and contemplate and appreciate the finer things in life.
Greater thinkers and artists than I have been seduced by this possibility, because rhetorical and creative talent are sadly largely unprotective against naivety and its cousin gullibility.
You could argue- while dreaming of that hammock- that the greatest civilisations of antiquity were propped up by a slave class and so perhaps the trick is not to ignore this but to simply devise mechanical, non-human slaves that can unthinkingly do both the backbreaking and the tedious work that is needed for society to function. There’s a fairly compelling logic to this.
This utopia is the implicit end goal of much of what comes out of Silicon Valley. And it’s promises are certainly seductive.
However, I have my doubts about such visions. I have my doubts because I have encountered firsthand the contemporary scourge of tickbox- this phenomenon whereby systems are created where boxes must be ticked, where forms must be filled out, where perimeters are strictly delineated into yes and no choices.
Tickbox is what makes customer service such a frequently frustrating experience, it’s what makes health services so ruinously expensive, it’s what makes dealing with public services and utility companies a dread inducing prospect . It’s what makes lodging a complaint with someone such a Kafkaesque absurdity, an experience that would almost be darkly funny where it not such a frustrating and monumental time-suck.
Boxed In
To free humans of work you have to create a system. (Whether people want to be freed of this work or not is a question seldom asked. People are certainly not consulted before their workplace is downsized or their whole industry is disrupted by some app).
And to create a system you have to have numbers. You need data points and metrics. Key Performance Indicators. And therein lies the problem, because numbers rarely measure what matters. They are at best a clunky and incomplete shorthand or simulacra of what matters and more often than not they flat out miss the mark entirely.
So we may laugh when we learn of how Victorian statisticians measured the morality of children by tabulating the number of hymns that they knew by heart. But are the numbers we collate today really any better? Do they actually tell us anything worth knowing? And more importantly- Do they actually help the people they are designed to help?
For example, your local doctor will be under duress to meet all kinds of targets and performance indicators regarding prescriptions filled, patients seen in x time frame, number of referrals made, practice budgets adhered to and on and on and on. But do any of these things in anyway actually help improve the health of you as a patient?
The answer is surely no. What they do is they indirectly mean that you end up listening to Muzak as you wait to be put through to someone who can actually answer your seemingly straightforward question. They mean that you languish on a waiting list and potentially end up with prescriptions and procedures that may not have been necessary (or found to be desirable) were you able to talk to someone as a human for a sufficient length of time.
Such things simply don’t happen, in spite of the genuine hard work of staff in all kinds of professions. They don’t happen because work has largely degenerated into the ticking of boxes while everything that actually matters in life exists in this nebulous and unaccounted for gap that exists between the nuance-destroying tickboxes labelled ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
Breaking the Boxes
The joke of it is, is that tickbox came about in various bureaucratic and administrative structures as a way of making things easier and more understandable. And by implication cheaper and more efficient.
And the only things that were lost in the process were humanity, dignity, nuance, empathy, the taking of pride in ones work. Which I’m sure some soulless fat cats would say is a small price to pay, but even in the coldest monetary and productivity terms this move to a centralised, one-size-fits-all ways of doing things has proven to be disastrous.
You simply can’t engineer away human initiative and the ability to deal with situations on the fly using discernment, no matter how fancy your new in-house computer system claims to be.
It seems to me that at root the people who champion such system are afraid of human decision making. They are afraid of the workers having some control over how they manage their caseload, their customers, their client base. They might take more time in a call with someone in distress than is deemed efficient. They might become generous and start doling out the odd freebie to a regular patron. They might start thinking for themselves. And that simply wouldn’t do.
So it’s ironic that automation and systems- once lauded as the means of freeing the humble worker- have become the means of his enslavement. The boxes that confine us are tickboxes.
Virtually every employee I have ever met who has spend years on the ‘shop floor’ of their profession- myself included- can see a better way of handling things, smarter, cheaper, more efficient, more humane.
But the institutions and the politicians so enamoured with the dehumanising false promise of tickbox stop such ground-floor innovations from coming into being.
It’s like they always say when it comes to systems of measuring and controlling things: garbage in, garbage out.
Excellent piece, TJB, which basically summarizes how all of US healthcare system is choking in the python grip of electronic medical records. I also loathe all the ways that tickbox is stealthily infiltrating our lives. These middlemen are relentless. They are everywhere. Yet, the "stakeholders" demand the metrics. To wit:
1. Why now, with all my kids' toys, do they have to recharge via USB, not a standard plug into the wall? I am not an in the basement, tinfoil antenna, bunker loving conspiracy theorist. I like straight shooting, look you in the eye, make a human connection, live life existence. No frills. No fluff. However, I now need a smarthphone/tablet/computer to charge a toy. Someone (the Internet of Things) is usurping my once direct connection. And my attention will be yet again compromised, because I had to touch the USB grantor. Not oil, not water, not your eyeballs, but your attention, is the commodity of the 21st century. And the USB is a siphon.
2. In the US, there are legion commercials for direct drug advertising to patients.Yes, legion as in Biblical locusts, but at least the locusts were kind enough to be an obvious threat. We know this happens because for every $1 Big Pharma spends on these ads, they sell $12 in pills, but I digress. What is even more insidious is how on all these commercials, the physician is never depicted talking directly to the patient. Rather, she is holding a tablet, and then smiling and showing happy news on the tablet-grrr-always on the tablet- to the patient. You can't shake my hand and communicate without an intermediary. The intervention is the tickbox, and it is pernicious. Ticked off about the tickbox.
Brilliant piece, Tom! Tickboxes together with the tyranny of numbers are the worst combo you can imagine. And it's sad they are everywhere - from corporate bureaucracy to personal development. From what I experienced, they are often a result of either 1) pseudo optimisation 2) lazy automation 3) strict regulations. To me, only the latter makes sense. In some areas of our life, however, protocols are helpful (or even necessary) but, as you wrote, they are often perceived not as guidance but as ground-truth and the thing that was designed to help turns against us. Sadly, people think that outsourcing thinking to a to-do list is enough to get things done and the beauty of winging and spontaneity gets lost in endless rows and columns of tickboxes.
Luckily for me, I'm free of tickboxes on my daily job. We are pretty flexible in terms of the frameworks we use and stuff. There are some tasks that require doing things step by step and checking some crucial (scientifically) metrics but there's always room for discussion.
I'd say what's bad is "tickbox-driven" thinking, but "tickbox-informed" isn't. Human memory is imperfect and well-designed protocols can save one a lot of mental energy.
Cheers