The Kings of Slippery Metrics: Productivity and Efficiency

Almost two decades ago, I was a young engineering “all rounder” full of dreams, working at a family-owned small company where I was part of the R&D team in charge of designing and developing the next generation of company products: color-LED digital billboards and big signs for roads and highways, including those that show the silly sad face when you are over speeding.
Said R&D dept office was located inside the factory where the billboards were manufactured. Office is perhaps too much of a word: it was a mezzanine right above the factory floor, so you could hear the drilling, smell the welding and breathe the heavy-metals from the fumes stemming from the reflow oven.
Because we were in fact part of the factory, the R&D department followed the same rules and customs as the factory workers, including the scheduled 10-minutes breaks in the morning and in the afternoon that were signaled by the sound of a loud bell. Shorts were not allowed due to safety reasons.
In the factory, there was a group of workers in charge of manually inserting through-hole LEDs in the large printed circuit boards (PCBs) before boards would be sent for wave-soldering. Each PCB would have thousands of LEDs, so it was an excruciatingly manual and repetitive task for those involved. The bosses had a system to gauge how many LEDs per hour a worker could insert—enforced by visual inspectors—and such a metric was directly impacting their pay: they would get bonuses if they showed an improvement in their LED/hr performance. The company would post rankings in the kitchen for everyone to see.
At some point, our boss at the R&D dept was requested by higher-ups to come up with similar metrics for his team. That meant us. Who was “us”? An eccentric collection of young programmers, industrial and electronics designers. So, my boss had the task of finding a way of gauging and measuring—factory-style—how all these engineers performed. 

And the man struggled.

There were attempts to measure and report lines of code per day. Another attempt to chronometrate (!) “chair hours”. There were spurious spreadsheets to be filled. In all these bizarre experiments, time would always be the main variable these artificial metrics were pegged to. You could see him preparing intricate plots in his office—actually, a cubicle inside the mezzanine. Sooner than later, he and his supervisors realized the lack of usefulness of the fabricated metrics—it was mostly random noise, not helping to describe or predict anything. The idea of gauging engineering was eventually dropped.

The industrial revolution disseminated the idea that work, regardless its nature, had an inescapable time dependency. From this mindset, the tasks related to assembling a car or designing a car were equally subject to time measurements, and conclusions were drawn from such measurements in order to “improve” them if the numbers were not satisfactory.
Then, as the early twentieth century unfolded witnessing the end of the second industrial revolution, Frederick Winslow Taylor made an infamous appearance.
Taylor worked for many years in heavy manufacturing, where he climbed his way up the job ladder: laborer, shop clerk, gang boss, foreman, and finally chief engineer. During that time, Taylor observed everything around him, and what he saw disturbed him. The way jobs were done varied wildly from person to person. Some people were quite proficient. Others weren’t. So he quit his job and devoted the remainder of his life to stomping out inefficiency in some systematic way. And in doing so, he gave birth to scientific management, also known as Taylorism.
At the core of Taylor’s philosophy was a belief that management had “… laws as exact and clearly defined … as the fundamental principles of engineering …”

See an extract from the introduction section of his “The Principles of Scientific Management”: 

This paper has been written:

First, To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts.

Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man.

Third, To prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. 

And then he goes:

…the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible  productivity of the men and machines of the establishment—that is, when each man and each machine are turning out the largest possible output; because unless your men and your machines are daily turning out more work than others around you, it is clear that competition will prevent your paying higher wages to your workmen than are paid to those of your competitor. And what is true as to the possibility of paying high wages in the case of two companies competing close beside one another is also true as to whole districts of the country and even as to nations which are in competition. In a word, that maximum prosperity can exist only as the result of maximum productivity.

Taylor’s was one of many attempts to apply mechanistic methods to analyze workers using naive mindsets aiming to predict and mathematically model human behavior. A school of thought that finds its roots in the somewhat cute—albeit incredibly, incredibly damaging—envy of physics and the scientific method. Basically: if the behavior of stars and planets can be accurately measured and predicted with a set of elegant equations, then any system’s behavior should be able to be captured in a similar way; including people gathered together for work. After all, planets and brains are still composed of the same type of deterministic matter, isn’t it?

Geez.

It is unsettling that much of today’s work is still affected by such bizarre management ideas stemming from eons ago.

In anything social, like work, the symmetry between measurement, prediction and explanation is destroyed because the future in this kind of activity is genuinely uncertain, and therefore cannot be assessed or predicted with the same degree of certainty as it can be explained in retrospect. When it comes to people and what they do, we have as yet only a very imperfect ability to tell what has happened in our managerial "experiments", much less to ensure their reproducibility or measurability. Some authors, like the Nobel-prize economist Friedrich von Hayek—not my cup of tea, but a man of straight points—labeled this as “scientism”: an approach to brute force natural science methods into distant areas.
What is more, natural sciences put the observer as an external entity from the phenomenon to be observed, detaching them completely. In anything social like work, thinking is part of the reality that the observer has to think about, which makes the relationship circular. In situations that have thinking participants, the participants’ views of the world never perfectly correspond to the actual state of affairs. People can gain knowledge of individual facts, but when it comes to formulating theories or forming an overall view, their perspective is bound to be either biased or inconsistent or both. The complexity of the world in which we live exceeds our capacity to comprehend it. Confronted by the reality of extreme complexity, we are obliged to resort to various methods of simplification: generalizations, metaphors, frameworks, decision rules, and moral precepts, just to mention a few. These mental constructs take on a (subjective) existence of their own, further complicating the situation. Fallible human beings are not merely “scientific observers” but active participants in the system themselves. Even more, such imperfect views can influence the situation to which they relate through the actions of the participants. Whenever we find ourselves on the task of measuring a social arrangement like a team, we are part of the analysis, and our biased perceptions can influence our decisions to alter the scenario in a way that reinforces our own beliefs. Taylor, or any other “observer” for that matter, could never prescribe or mandate what drives productivity or efficiency, because they are part of the whole thing. Part of the problem.
Taylor finishes his text trying to pack what “scientific management” is:

It is no single element, but rather this whole combination, that constitutes scientific management, which may be summarized as:

Science, not rule of thumb.
Harmony, not discord.
Cooperation, not individualism.
Maximum output, in place of restricted output.
The development of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity.

It reads as a list of wishes more than facts. 

The exact link between prosperity and productivity is never elaborated in his book, but you can read the “more is more” mindset between the lines. Produce more to earn more, and let the managers tell you how to do it, you mortal faceless worker.
If we are talking really ‘systemic’ here, we must say that productivity—and prosperity—is ultimately a “global” attribute of the organization. The most productive engineering department ever coupled with an unproductive sales department still equals an unproductive organization. It’s like multiplying by zero. The belief that “if everyone is more productive, the whole becomes more productive” is utter bullshit, because work is compartmentalized and productivity is also a function of the coordination between the different groups and departments. It might be just anecdotal, but I have seen productive engineering teams whose output was nullified by incredibly unproductive management.
Efficiency—understood as how wisely we use resources to create value—is about working smarter. Ideally, the most efficient way of working is doing absolutely nothing. That is, crafting a way of creating economic value with the least amount of involvement and consumption of resources possible, so we can go and enjoy life with friends and family. More efficiency can be achieved with training, with good tools, with lightweight processes, and with managers letting people do without interrupting them every five minutes for minutiae.

When robots will—hopefully soon—take all our repetitive jobs—those jobs that can be measured—work will be more and more intellectual and therefore more difficult to gauge with a voltmeter-like device or a chronometer. Which will finally force any residual Taylorism to take a comfortable seat at the altar of pseudoscience, right next to astrology.