Employee: "I have finished my projects, what’s next?"

Manager: "Make a spread-sheet and track something."

Employee: "Track what?"

Manager: "I think you’ll find it doesn’t matter."

(Scott Adams, "Dilbert", 2007)

The Dilbert cartoon strip quoted above got me thinking about how much of our time is spent conducting "unsustainable" tasks in our workplaces. Within the university, in particular, and most companies and agencies where EH&S professionals work, time-wasting bureaucratic tasks are rampant. The most egregious example that almost everyone can relate to is meetings, meetings, and more meetings— for every reason from the mundane to the most trivial—but, a great percentage of meetings are a drain on productivity and even a morale downer that can not be measured in real dollars wasted at the bottom line.

Dilbert raises a very real-world issue—in workplaces and bureaucracies (like University complexes) across the US— where we are frequently asked to perform ridiculous tasks just to provide "management" with new data they can use to cut our funding—what’s up with that?

Oh sure, they may call it information needed to help them reorganize everything into a more efficient hierarchy but, seasoned professionals recognize the symptoms, the minute a newly minted "manager" arrives and starts pontificating like those "nattering naybobs of negativitiy…" that former Veep Spiro Agnew talked about in the late ‘60’s—-

In bureaucracies, that’s called "management" and the people that get to "manage" usually want to start in a new management position by reorganizing something—just to show the underlings that the new boss is in town and—well, mostly, just because s/he can! Such edicts usually involve countless hours of our time and meaningless forms to fill out that take faculty and staff time and generates absolutely nothing of value except more "data" that never gets used. Bureaucracy for the sake of being bureaucratic—or, maybe it’s the other way around? No matter—the end result is the same: morale goes down along with productivity.

One department chair I know calls it "administrivia" and, in total, it takes a lot of time that otherwise would be devoted to students and course preparation. In an industrial setting, the worker-bee hours wasted results in the same loss of morale and productivity, yet newly minted "bosses" forget all about how they were disgruntled by such administrivia before they made the "team." Somehow, they justify wasting our time, and continue perpetuating the myth that ‘busy people are happy people.’

Recently, I have been thinking about all this in the context of sustainability. It occurs to me that, in our collective efforts to create an awareness about greening the future and reducing our carbon footprint, our whole mission to implement environmental sustainability initiatives is beginning to look a lot like we were trained at the Dilbert School of Management. In academia, we are caught up in the administrivia of proving that our research needs more research (i.e. conducting studies to justify more studies) and all we need to accomplish is acquisition of more data—-any data because, in Dilbert’s School, data acquisition IS the goal!

Scientists who become "managers" are ill-equipped to argue that their research findings have value except for other scientists who mostly are studying the very same things. Now, make this successful researcher a "manager" and you’ve just caused a perfectly productive professional to reach his level of incompetence—most have no experience in "managing" anything (except projects) so what do they do? Call meetings, ask for productivity reports, seek "data" about performance indicators (i.e. fill out the forms and reduce the data to a single paragraph summary statement) and, in short, deal with familiar "forms" so it appears "management" is really happening!

Dilbert reminds us, however, that what we need to do is take a fresh look at what our responsibilities are, for helping reduce our fossil fuel dependency and making things work in the real world; not just to perform studies for the sake of advancing the theoretical worth of concepts that will be left to the private sector to implement.

Unfortunately, the Dilbert management mentality thrives in academia and workplaces everywhere and that means it is unlikely to change. Just as unfortunately, if we don’t recognize the unsustainable Dilbert management style lurking in the shadows soon, we are guaranteeing a bleak future for our children’s, children’s, children.