The AWA: Fostering mediocrity and suffering

Many moons ago when I worked at an unnamed insurance company, they actually did time motion studies of the workers to figure out how long it “should” take to adjust a hospital claim, for example. They’d send a special engineer down to watch you with a stopwatch and check sheet. “Now tell me what you do when you get a durable medical equipment claim? How many do you see each week? Why did you route that claim for utilization review?”

The more I was treated like a cog, and the less my thinking was valued, the more I performed like the “average” employee - something I was not. I stopped wearing suits and volunteering to be on committees, taking extra classes, etc. I started wearing stretch pants and sweaters and paced myself so that I did exactly the number of things that I needed to do to be “within range.” I volunteered for lay offs when they announced a merger. And when I didn’t get that lay off, I staged even more of “slow down.” Average is easy, but it's boring and soul-killing. Eventually I was released from Bare Minimum Corp. I embarked on 10 years of education - where life can be about more than "average."

I’m really not interested in working in an environment like that ever again. Any system based on achieving minimum performance will consistently produce minimum performance. Take the Animal Welfare Act for example. The Act more or less states that if facilities make cages this big, keep this paper work, file these reports, etc., they are fine. There’s no “excellent,” there’s just “no deficiencies.” When performance targets are lame to begin with, as they are with the Act, we end up a long way from excellence.

We might get consistent results, but it's not assured. What is assured is that we will never get newer, bigger, better results. Consistent crap is crap all the same. The top ten percent of shit is shit. Why set your organization up for a whole lotta "average?" Hoping that it will lead to success or excellence is just foolish.