Elliot Morris

What follows is an accounting of the different categories of what I call “Bullshit Debt”, and the effects they are having on your organization. Enjoy.

Vision Bullshit

At Corpo Corp. We have a new vision (having changed it four times in as many months). To improve synergy. To bring the science of creation and the the art of construction together under a single product identity. All our employees are laser focused on this clear mission.

Symptoms: No one can tell you the point of what they do day to day in business terms. Customers or revenue is rarely mentioned. Leaders spend more time managing each-other than their reports, and are forced to speak in cryptic half-truths when they address the rest of the organization. Project planning feels more like treaty negotiation than problem solving. The idea that you can finish any particular project is considered a radical one. Every decision takes an age and must be centrally managed.

Effects: Your employees stop listening to leadership, believing that all direction they are given is bullshit that isn’t worth the effort trying to make sense of. Employees nod and smile and continue to go about their day as before, occasionally doing the bare minimum to signal responsiveness to direction, but not actually engaging. You continue to be baffled why simple directives cannot be accomplished.

Technical Bullshit

Our software utilizes a dependency injection meta-framework that cross-compiles to each of our target SKU’s, ensuring best practice across all of our forty-five microservice repositories. All teams run our personal flavour of XP-Scrumban which any day now will soon show massive increases in story point delivery.

Symptoms: Engineering teams report progress in terms of patterns adopted, PR’s merged, story points delivered. Velocity is simultaneously the most important thing and yet completely ignored. Agilists are prominent figures in your organization. A pseudo religious faith in incrementalism.

Effects: You are completely unable to discern if your engineering teams are doing anything worth doing. Net negative performers are amplified, dragging adjacent teams down with them. Teams, unable to conceptualize connecting their technical tasks to final value, cannot self-direct. Churn becomes hyper-normalized. Inexperienced engineers do not grow, and if they do not get out in time, become net-negative performers themselves.

HR Bullshit

Please attend the upcoming mandatory training (for the 10th time), which will explain to you why using slurs is a no-no and why you shouldn’t commit sexual-assault on company time. Also be sure to register for our weekly bake-your-face-onto-a-cupcake competition! The winner gets a £5 voucher to HMV!

Symptoms: Constant “training”. Overly saccharine messaging from HR with an over-focus on communication skills. Cliques. Managers unable to communicate with their teams in anything but trust-destroying corpo-speak. Straight answers are few and far between.

Effects: Actually important compliance requirements become impossible to discern. Massive resentment builds as employees realize the company is trying to shift responsibility onto workers should an incident occur, rather than actually caring about social issues. People avoid engaging with HR in any way if they can at all help it. People start to conceptualize the company as the enemy. Managers become disillusioned that they can influence their team in any way that isn’t a potential HR violation, killing trust, and allowing net negative performers to thrive.

Capitalism Bullshit

Just put the fries in the bag my dude. You’re being paid to do what you’re told, nothing more.

Symptoms: Silent, almost brain-dead employees. Inherent distrust of leadership, especially owners, to an antagonistic degree. Undercurrent of glee when things go badly for the company, especially if it hurts owners personally. Absolutely no responsibility taken by anyone for anything. A literal belief that nothing anyone does at work matters to the slightest degree. A pervasive, fatalistic belief that we are all on borrowed time.

Effects: Employees actively prevent each other from performing well. Instructions are followed minimally before employees enter a holding pattern they need to be managed out of. Unionization, riots, revolution, war. The literal end of society.