Template:M intro work sixteenth law of worker entropy

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: that of having jobsworth contract negotiators clogging up the premium floor-space on the London campus, for example — is replaced by that of outsourcing co-ordinators, offshoring contract service level agreements, software-as-a-service providers and key performance indicators.

It is worse than that, indeed, seeing most change management techniques tend to expand the size of an 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, like humidity — and that over time any system just absorbs tedium. This was widely considered unsatisfactory, however, implying as it did some sort of lexophysical constant of undetectable anti-energy for which there was, by definiton, 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 “loses” energy through heat, light, friction without upsetting the conservation of energy, so a bureaucratic system can gain tedium in a sort of compensating process, through the natural action of all bureaucratic operations. A business process, Biggs hypothesised, naturally and inevitably acquires tedium through subtle and hard-to-measure but experimentally demonstrable increases in the complexity of a given system 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, Büchstein argued in a given system is a square of the number of individuals comprising that system.

This axiom nicely explains the arsehole-jobsworth continuum, but Büchstein stumbled upon it while endeavouring to explain some apparent anomalies with the fundamental law of conservation of tedium under conditions of change management. “How is it,” he wondered, “that we can flawlessly implement our excellent, McKinsey-approved outsourcing, rightshoring, and juniorising program to relocate unglamorous but critical operational functions in low-cost jurisdictions with no modern slavery regulations, or software-as-a-service providers, but the process, which we only changed because it was an expensive and dysfunctional mess, has become even more dysfunctional and much more expensive?” the answer was that while the purpose and output of the system, and indeed its total cost, remained constant, the size, complexity and “agent quotient” of the system had dramatically increased.