Sixteenth law of worker entropy

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The JC’s sixteenth law of worker entropy, also known as the “law of conservation of tedium” states that:

The total amount of tedium in an isolated system remains constant. Tedium can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another, or transferred from one system to another.

This is why all change management is doomed to fail, as one kind of tedium —having contract negotiators clogging up the premium floor-space on the London campus, for example — is replaced by another —engaging outsourcing co-ordinators, offshoring service level agreements, software-as-a-service providers and implementing key performance indicators to then monitor them.

The total tedium gets worse, in fact, seeing as these change management techniques tend to expand the size of the isolated system, therefore increasing the available tedium. This fact, when Büchstein discovered it in the lab in 1943, finally explained the apparently paradoxical fact that tedium seems, all other things being equal, to increase over time.

Hitherto, it has been assumed that tedium must be a kind of anti-energy that just sort of hangs about in the atmosphere rusting things, like humidity — and that over time any system just absorbs it. This was widely considered unsatisfactory, however, implying as it did some sort of lexophysical constant of undetectable anti-energy for which there was no evidence. The first move towards a more sophisticated view came when, at a business day convention in 1930, lexophysicist J. M. F. Biggs proposed that, just as a physical system appears to “lose” energy through heat, light, friction without upsetting the fundamental law of conservation of energy, so a bureaucratic system gains tedium in a sort of compensating process, through the natural action of all bureaucratic operations, adding heat, friction, aggravation, resentment and ennui though incrementally spreading, without thereby upsetting the law of conservation of tedium.

A business process, Biggs hypothesised, naturally and inevitably acquires tedium through subtle and hard-to-measure but experimentally demonstrable increases in its size and complexity as bureaucrats act upon it.

It was not until twenty years that later Austrian polymath Otto Büchstein demonstrated that, just as Biggs had supposed, the law of conservation of tedium holds, but is more profoundly affected than had previously been thought, by the size of the system. The amount of tedium in a given system, Büchstein argued, is a square of the number of individuals comprising that system.

This has since become recognised as the seventeenth law of worker entropy.

See also

• Laws of worker entropy