Four-eye check

Office anthropology™ Go Premium 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 Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

An accident waiting to happen.

You have a process that is so mind-numbingly dreary — sequencing interest payments on billion dollar revolving credit facilities, for example — that the posse of Bratislavan school-leavers you have engaged for the purpose cannot be depended on to carry it out without occasionally ticking the wrong box, whacking the wrong mole, or wiring an eight-figure principal repayment to the wrong distressed creditor.

What to do? Easy: engage another squad of Balkan undergraduates for the even more soul-gouging chore of checking the output of the first lot.

Because that will definitely work, right?

The JC has moaned elsewhere about our modernist confusion over the fundamental division of labour between the meatware and the machines. If you want a job being done quickly, cheaply and reliably, and it’s important, get a machine to do it. If it is worth investing in not just one low-paid call centre worker to carry out the task, but two, it is certainly worth investing in a machine that can do the work without checking it.

Decision Grid: when to use humans and when to use machines.

	Easy	Hard
Frequent	Machine. Humans will take too long, cost too much and screw it up.	Redesign process. Either separate “easy and frequent” from “hard and rare”, hire lots of subject matter experts or don’t do the business.
Rare	Human. Not worth programming a computer.	Human. No point programming a computer.