Some Thoughts on Meaningful Work, Responsiveness, and Impact
Some Thoughts on Meaningful Work, Responsiveness, and Impact
Plus a survey asking if you find meaning and impact in your work.
A few days ago I read
‘s thoughtful article on responsiveness, impact, and what makes for a fulfilling job versus one that will lead to inevitable burnout and despair. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.
It turns out, we humans crave responsiveness — a way to show that we have impact and influence in our world, that there’s a purpose to our lives. We want to know that our actions will matter, even if it’s only to a small, local degree. When someone feels like they have no impact, no control, or purpose, they can quickly fall into despair and ask themselves “what’s the point?” Viktor Frankl observed in Man’s Search for Meaning “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
Emmett Shear describes this phenomena in the context of pointless, no-impact work as the phenomena of “broken steering”:
also touched on this subject in his recent post “People Won’t Work!”.Broken steering is a metaphor for that feeling at work where your actions seem to have no impact. Turn the wheel, car still goes straight. This is rare in blue collar work: the car got assembled, now you have car. It is common in knowledge work: you sent some email, so what?
Broken steering destroys motivation because it breaks the core feedback loop which makes work rewarding. When you throw a rock in a pond and it makes a splash, there is a little feeling of power in the impact on the world. Take away the splash and the intrinsic reward dies.
Knowledge workers are especially prone to face the pointless work problem because much of what we’re paid to do is “to sit around for the future potential crisis”. To hurry up and wait. Many of us (especially us neurotic Type As) have been conditioned to feel shitty just sitting there waiting, so we generate pointless busywork to fill the time — “symbolic representations of the thing” in the form documents, policies, project plans, contract drafting & review, endless meetings, etc.
Inevitably, we become so focused on this non-impact work, that we fail to have time or energy to tackle meaty, impactful, thing-fixing tasks. Or worse, we’re not allowed or even made aware of the thing-fixing tasks, because we’re overloaded with pointless busywork from others. We become, as Sasha says, “the useless extension of someone else’s uselessness.”
Compliance and legal work are inherently squishy and lumpy fields. Unlike some jobs, we don’t have a defined set of tasks we need to do (e.g., putting the wheels on a car, putting a roof on a house, making a meal, delivering a letter, or fixing a broken pipe). Laws and regulations change constantly. Our clients throw new curveballs at us and demand answers daily. Some new crisis presents itself. I wrote about this in Beyond Privacy Theatre, or Why our Laws Mean We Can't Have Nice Things in the context of being a DPO:
The world of data protection has largely fallen into this symbolic representation trap. This is made manifest … [by] the endless sea of privacy policies and notices that nobody reads, the non-negotiable e-book length data processing addendums, the cookie notice popups that never remember your preferences, the ‘risk assessments’ that don’t meaningfully evaluate risk, or the security white papers which might as well be marshmallow fluff. It's all so many words, with so little substance. …
This gets compounded further when you consider that with each new law, a slightly different incantation must be uttered to really demonstrate that processing is being done on the up-and-up. And woe betide to any organization that forgets to include a jurisdiction’s specific magic words or new spin on the thing the other guy said …
This is why more and more of my time as a consultant and external DPO is spent not in improving a company’s data protection practices (fixing the thing), but in writing my own 'fancy reports', and reading and making sense of everybody else's. It’s a vicious, miserable, and mostly pointless exercise, and it’s getting worse. We’re moving ever more into a world where privacy and data protection programs and efforts exist so that as Mowshowitz notes:
Am I Just Hopelessly Cynical?
Yesterday, I decided to ask my devoted followers (especially those in #compliance (#dataprotection #security #risk #KYC etc) if they shared my cynicism regarding compliance and impact. I currently have two surveys running — one on Twitter and one on Mastodon (BlueSky doesn’t offer a survey option, and LinkedIn was borked) — and I would love to see more engagement. I plan to post the results when the survey is up in a few days.
If you’d prefer to vote here instead please do:
P.S.: Shoutout to
who was also discussing this subject and who shared a few sources I hadn’t seen!As always, please leave a comment on this post, Substack Notes or the Twitter/BSky/Mastodon posts I linked to. And please share this post if you found it valuable or interesting. When you share, you spread cat joy into the world.