Workstream lead
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Office anthropology™
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Workstream lead
/wɜːkstriːm/ /liːd/ (n.)
engaged, usually as an independent contractor, to prod permanent employees through a mandated “business change” programme, whereby outwardly useful staff are systematically distracted from whatever it is they can usually expect to contribute to the firm’s collective wellbeing, and obliged instead to undertake some Sisyphean task or other in the service of a vague aspirational journey the firm has unwisely embarked upon or, worse, some horribly specific compulsory regime its regulators have imposed upon it. The latter we call a “regulatory change programme”.
In either case, one employee will be instructed to strip paint off a bucket, so the bucket can be given to another employee to paint properly, so a third one can strip paint from it again. And so on, all under the watchful glare of a workstream lead, being one with no appreciable skill beyond matchless tolerance for tedium and a fathomless appetite for all-hands conference calls, action logs, dashboards and RAG statuses.
On change management
The very title “workstream lead” is self-directed puffery from the quill of a change manager. Of all the hornèd handmaidens of The Man, pity most this fellow.
No task is more Sisyphean, no cause more hopeless, no ambition more wretched, no sense of self-worth more forlorn than that of a consultant brought in to persuade old lags to embark upon a transformational journey none of them have the slightest interest in taking.
After six months of workstreams, weekly stakeholder check-ins, all-hands conference calls, key performance indicators, state-of-the-art governance metrics, deliverables and business cases galore — all presented with the unremitting youthful expectation that one can really change in the world for the better, to have sit there empty-handed in front of the COO and be utterly unable to explain why you haven’t produced a single useful thing, when there is a perfect, clinching and water-tight explanation — that every one of these tasks was utterly, profoundly idiotic and had no chance of generating anything beyond resentment and confusion — must be the most soul-destroying experience.