This is an auto-generated email

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown Resistance is useless. The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Is there anything grimmer, in a high-modern working life strewn with grimnities, than the autogenerated email reply? It is so disempowering, so passive-aggressive, so ignorant of every basic principle of a life well-lived, full of rich professional experience — a life to which our dark overlords pledge public, undying commitment — that you would think no thoughtful modern business administrator would dream of using it.

But modern business administrators are thoughtful in the way modern yachts are dairy-free.

If we take it as a given that the optimal outcome to a newly-implemented process is 100% compliance without hesitation, repetition or deviation, let alone (God forbid!) complaint, then it is no more than sensible product design to ensure your loud-hailer can go everywhere yet come from nowhere and, once supplicants have clocked its clangorous tone — in the comprehensively auditable ecosystem of a Microsoft Exchange server, they can hardly miss it, even if they do actually, you know, miss it — they have no choice but to bend their weary footsteps to its urgings, however preposterous the outcome of that action might be.

But years of miserable life-experience tells us not take that as a given. Even well-designed processes rust over time — and those that envision the meatware playing “Simon Says” with an automated compliance system are not well-designed, let us be clear — and those responsible for them need the occasional prompt to get out the wire brush and Dettol to ensure the whole thing remains fit for purpose.

This prompt usually comes from those obliged to follow the process complaining about it. Interests are, theoretically aligned: the meatware resents having its time wasted; middle managers don’t enjoy being whined at, so the feedback loop balances itself into a kind of vaguely tiresome equilibrium. Every now and then middle management will overhaul the process to make it less of a pain — for everyone.

The unmonitored, auto-generated email breaks that feedback loop. Now the user doesn’t know who sent the email, who owns the system, or whom to whine at. She may try to work it out, perhaps by searching fruitlessly on the intranet but the wave of ire will eventually crest, subside and she will go back to her other tediae, the matter unresolved. The responsible middle manager — if there is one, and we cannot now even be certain of that: for all we know, the system may be generating its own Kafkaesque processes — remains blissfully unaware of the wastefulness of her process. Indeed, unshackled from the responsibility of keeping this one serviceably un-stupid, she is free to create more wasteful processes, watched over by more unmonitored accounts, and can report a full slate of green indicators on her RAG dashboard at the monthly opco stakeholder check-in.

Even less edifying is the auto-generated email that does not just warn you about something, or chide you for something, but actively gives you work to do.

Thus, your RAG status is green across the board; compliance is assured, and internal audit must look ex machina for the fault in our stars and finds it, instead, in our mortal human hearts.

See also

• You’ve been assigned a task!
• Email
• Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations