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Episode 50: Bullsh!t Jobs
23 Plays24 days ago
Is insurance pricing totally bullshit? This week, Catrin and Jeremy talk about pointless tasks, villainous goons and whether meetings are a waste of time while reviewing David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview of 'Bullshit Jobs'
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the PriceWriter podcast with Katrin Townsend and me, Jeremy Keating. Join us as we explore and discuss the world of insurance related books, offering our insights and recommendations.
00:00:22
Speaker
This week, we're just going to say it like it is, but there is a little bit of parental guidance around the name of this book. So if you listen to the podcast with little news around, firstly, congratulations, you do definitely win at parenting. But secondly, we'll be using some unusually strong language today, so...
00:00:39
Speaker
Quite the intro, Katrin, what is the book we're reading?
Types of Bullshit Jobs
00:00:43
Speaker
This week, we're talking about bullshit jobs by David Graeber. And David talks about five different kinds of bullshit jobs. So there are the duck tapers.
00:00:55
Speaker
These are people hired to fix problems that shouldn't really exist in the first place. Then there are flunkies, which are one my favorite words I didn't even realize, but I love this word, flunkies.
00:01:08
Speaker
These are roles that exist purely to make someone else look or feel important. And I know that in my career, I've seen people who I'm like, you're just trying to accumulate people just for the sake of having people, right? You don't actually have something to do. So that's a flunky.
00:01:27
Speaker
Then there are goons, another very strong and spiny villainous. What? I feel like a villain has a goon, but there go. Honey, this is a bullshit job as well. These are jobs that only exist because other people have them.
00:01:43
Speaker
And he gives some examples like telemarketers, but also some people who just want someone so that people who come into the office go, God, this must be an important office because you have that set up, you know, that would be a goon.
00:01:59
Speaker
The fourth type is a BOK ticker. Hope some people didn't feel too called out then, but these are roles that create the appearance of progress, compliance or action, but without actually producing anything meaningful.
00:02:15
Speaker
And then he also talks the fifth kind, which are taskmasters. And these are people who you either supervise people who don't need supervising, just additional management for the sake of it, or...
00:02:27
Speaker
oh all about the
00:02:35
Speaker
can also be managers who create unnecessary work to justify their own role. Okay. All right. mean Yeah. im I'm running mentally through lists of people who I may or may not work hypothetically within the past and fitting them into some boxes.
00:02:53
Speaker
But what's the April concept in but the book?
Why Do Bullshit Jobs Exist?
00:02:56
Speaker
The concept is that why do these bullshit jobs exist when capitalism kind of suggests that they shouldn't? And a lot of companies like to think they're efficient and lean and all that. So why do so many people?
00:03:10
Speaker
And he says, look, that's 35 to 40% of people say they themselves have a bullshit job. Okay. Wow. And he's like, why do so many people feel that their job is totally meaningless and vacuous?
Do Pricing Professionals Have Bullshit Jobs?
00:03:24
Speaker
Do we think pricing professional can ever fit into this category? Okay, so I don't think being a pricing professional is a bullshit job. Yes, you can. Absolutely not. And I don't think David Graber does either. He mentions actories in the first chapter as an example of a non-bullshit job.
00:03:42
Speaker
And he also mentions catastrophe risk analysts in a later chapter. It's slightly random, but love it. And again, not a bullshit job. So that's a good news. But Jeremy, do you think that, you know, maybe there's an accusation in there that potentially, I mean, the one that really jumped out for me in pricing was that we do tend to fix things.
00:04:05
Speaker
that actually ah should be potentially properly fixed by an expert data engineer or whatever. We're often given issues and said, can you fix this? And we go, yeah, sure. Like we're good to go Is that just an example of us being
Pricing Professionals as Duct Tapers
00:04:18
Speaker
duct tapers? So do you think there's an aspect of that in our job?
00:04:21
Speaker
I think we do end up fixing problems that shouldn't exist, but they often exist because it's quite hard to get them fixed any other way. If you imagine the trade-off between actually getting IT to fix something and just doing ourselves, it's often more work to get IT t to fix it.
00:04:39
Speaker
And the reason the problems exist in the first place is because people didn't actually envisage the work we'd be doing when these systems went live. So I think actually not in that realm.
00:04:50
Speaker
However, i can think of quite a few times where hypothetically, imagine you've worked in pricing for a couple of years in an en large insurer. And then you discover that there's a head of pricing at group level that has no one that works for them at all. That's never interacted with anyone from your pricing department.
00:05:09
Speaker
And you're just like, what did they do all day? So I think occasionally i can think of some times where there have been jobs where I've wondered what people did.
00:05:20
Speaker
I would defend that though, because I did go and work at group level and discover that i actually do a lot of very important useful work goes on at group level. That said. I would say that there's sometimes a variable box ticking.
00:05:34
Speaker
I think sometimes group feels that they need to discover what's going on in the pricing team. And in order to make, and they can't just get them talk to you for a bit. They have to make a 200 line questionnaire to send to you. It then takes you a couple of weeks to fill in.
00:05:51
Speaker
So I think possibly there is a bit of going towards box ticking. What do you think? Yeah, I see box ticking aspects in our job, particularly governance and sometimes that we have governance processes are are all Or that don't really match the situation. I know I've filled out governance tick lists that say you spoke into this team and I go, oh, who are those teams? Oh yeah, we got rid of that team. Like, it's just going to the last restructure. So should I watch like, yeah, tick the box, you know. all
00:06:24
Speaker
for example, people on the committee of whatever governance committee we're talking about who haven't properly looked at the pre-reading or the information on this proposal before right now. yeah But we have to have a committee to say that everyone has, even though haven't. And you think, well, how effective are their challenges going to be if they've literally only had three minute introduction, the two slides that I've shown them about this project? Like how effective and deep can that challenge really get?
00:06:57
Speaker
in a 10 minute committee slot. Or when you've got people on the committee who don't know the detail of this method, they don't know how to govern this method, but for whatever reason, that person is always on the committee. So You have to make sure you've talked to him. So I definitely think that when we do governance processing, we do tend towards box ticking.
00:07:20
Speaker
Now, some of that is absolutely understandable. It's really important that you have a checklist that you can say, yeah, I have asked all of these questions and you've got a record of that. But I think sometimes the questions that we ask ourselves are so generic or inappropriate to the situation to be virtually meaningless. And I think the real problem in insurance pricing about box ticking is that we feel because we've ticked all the boxes that we've done governance.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah. And actually it stops us from doing any further governance. If we didn't have the checklist at all and someone said, right, let's really probably challenge your abuse model. We might actually end up with more rigorous challenge because if you see a whole page of ticks, you're like, well, this is done. This is fine.
00:08:09
Speaker
And so i think sometimes... It's not necessarily that all governance is bullshit.
Meaningless Tasks in Insurance
00:08:14
Speaker
Absolutely, think that's true. But I think that sometimes the way that we go about it can turn it into a very hoop-jumping kind of bullshit activity within our actually with very important, meaningful work.
00:08:30
Speaker
And not only is that a problem because it's a waste of time, but it actually distracts us from the more valuable aspects of our job. If we're being real on this podcast today, what is the most bullshit task that you personally have ever done an insurance? And why did it exist? Why was this even something you had to do?
00:08:55
Speaker
I think there are a few that jumps mind actually. Some of this is just ah an effect of working for a big company, but I suppose that's the point with a lot of these bullshit jobs, they exist in big companies.
00:09:06
Speaker
There are quite a few tasks I can think of, but a particular one is that the employee engagement survey had asked all of us, would you buy our insurance products? And a lot of people had ticked no, which was obviously considered a problem at higher levels.
00:09:24
Speaker
And a really big committee was set up to investigate why this was and what we could do about it. It was a
Engagement Surveys and Committees
00:09:33
Speaker
lot of people. So I was part of it, but there was probably 20 or 30 people we met regularly to discuss it. now that's a big group to have a discussion with for a start, but there's a lot of money in that really being spent on salaries for people to meet up.
00:09:46
Speaker
And I couldn't work out why, because it wasn't like the first time we'd have this issue. I couldn't work it out. So I talked privately to a couple of people about why are we actually having this committee?
00:09:57
Speaker
And it turned out the finance director's bonus was linked to this question. And because it had a bad view on it, they were getting a lower bonus and they didn't want the same thing next year. So please could we turn that question around?
00:10:12
Speaker
So we met repeatedly on this, but the actual problem was never really defined. We never reached a stage where we were like, this is the problem. So we could come up with some actions.
00:10:24
Speaker
I think we ended up putting in some extra discounts for stuff, but I'm sure a lot of people know that actually staff had the worst loss ratio to going. So financially, it was not a good thing to do. It was not good for the company. And the staff weren't that interested in buying that products from us because we all know that we may as well just go on the aggregator and get the cheapest while going.
00:10:46
Speaker
it just didn't help. It was a lot of money spent on producing an outcome that wasn't useful for anyone. I think the engagement surveys can be a real source of these things. that The other one that gets me is the question that's like, do you feel that last time survey was sufficiently discussed and followed up? So you end up with meetings where we're all saying we did follow up. If this is us and we're following up, are you all aware that we are following up? We're all aware that this is what we're doing. Okay. Are we actually going to do something to make it better?
00:11:18
Speaker
No, we're going to push that into the long grass, but we are following up. And so even next year when nothing has changed at all, when you answer that question, you're kind of like, well, they did follow up.
00:11:31
Speaker
So I'm going to have to take it a score quite highly, but... Nothing changed. So you I agree with you. i think these like, you know, we're doing an engagement form not to surface the real reasons, but for some kind of performance or benefit distribution that that most people aren't aware of. Yeah. It's like, can we change that KPI and not can we deal with the actual issue? Yeah.
00:11:56
Speaker
Can we work out why employees who work here don't like our products? No, no, no. Let's just try and get a five percentage score on that particular the statistic next year, please. Yeah.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, there was a little bit, a few bullshit tasks that kind of relate to that kind of thing. Then the other thing is some committee, I mean, it just even the word committee, just like fills most people with drugs. Sometimes committees are set up at maybe grassroot level or a group of people who actually really want to do something meaningful and valuable.
00:12:28
Speaker
But for whatever reason, they actually don't have, then leavers can make proper and lasting change. I used to be the leader of a sustainability employee network, and it was set up by a group of people who wanted to make the office more sustainable. And some of the things that we did, i would say were really meaningful and absolutely not bullshit. and Things like actually matching the signage on recycling bins to the items that we had to recycle. This this is like my pet peeve just generally in life. but
00:13:00
Speaker
I hate it when the recycling bins, you know, you're at a cafe or coffee shop and the bins aren't labeled with where you should put your coffee cup. And you're like, well, I don't know. Is it, is it plastic? Is it cardboard? Is it general waste? Like, what is that?
00:13:14
Speaker
So we went through with someone from property services. And so, okay, this box that we get from the canteen, where should it be recycled? Let's put a literally a picture of the canteen boxes on the labels. There's still thing about that, which actually I do think are valuable to do. It shouldn't have taken so many people's involvement to get that to happen, but it did happen. Okay, some things are hard, I get it.
00:13:38
Speaker
But there was a lot of tasks and particularly later as the network became bigger and more sponsored by the company itself that we ended up talking about issues which we really didn't have the power to solve.
00:13:53
Speaker
Things like talking about assessing carbon emissions for all of our policyholders. Well, yeah, it'd be a good thing to do, but a group of people doing that side of desks, really not the right way to implement that.
00:14:06
Speaker
We were much better off sticking with set up a battery recycling point in the lobby and let signpost people to the local repair cafe and the local refill stores. But there was a big part of the committee that ended up kind of being bullshit, super wasted time because we were given these action thoughtings to discuss, but without the empowerment to actually resolve them.
00:14:30
Speaker
If you're not realistic about how they're going to be supported or how their ideas are going to translate to action, that is a way that people get kind of discouraged by these things.
00:14:41
Speaker
So I do think that there is an element where bullshit tasks can creep into things that even start as something very worthy.
Handling Bullshit Tasks in Corporations
00:14:49
Speaker
But how can we as leaders create environments where people can just turn around and this work doesn't matter or we've suddenly veered into in the sky, bullshit.
00:15:00
Speaker
How do we get that atmosphere without stepping some of its toes or without an ams atmosphere of fear? now I'm going to say something really controversial here. I'm actually quite sure you're not going to be happy to with the quality of people listening. aren't even happy When you work for a big company, sometimes you get asked to do a bullshit task by people that are senior and stuff, and you may as well just lie on her and do it.
00:15:25
Speaker
Sorry. I know it's not a very good answer. And I know that you end up having to go to your team and they turn around and tell you, this is bullshit. You can't really agree with them, even though you do.
00:15:36
Speaker
And you're like, no, no, it's super important piece of work. Yeah. that You're asked to fill in a questionnaire by, great. Just do it. Just love it this time.
00:15:46
Speaker
Don't spend a lot of time on it. Like say have a bullshit detector, but often probably just do the work. Sorry. but but I guess that's honest, right? And that's what most people currently do. Yeah.
00:16:02
Speaker
My feeling would be asked genuinely, what is the point of this task? What is the outcome that we're trying to get to? Because if the answer is, oh, we're trying to, well, basically we're just trying to improve the, whoever, the finance. Directed by.
00:16:14
Speaker
All right. Okay. So guys, we can all save ourselves a significant amount of time we just agree to vote highly on it next year. All right. At least then we know, you know, the thing is, it's really difficult. It's typically in big organizations, but it's really hard to know just because it's low value for you. it might actually be high value or useful for someone else. So it is difficult to know.
00:16:36
Speaker
i think that's the flip side of the coin. Cause genuinely when I worked in group, I discovered that actually a lot the work done in group is important. That is bullshit. Don't get me wrong. But actually quite a lot of this stuff is important.
Reducing Bullshit Tasks in a Pricing Team
00:16:48
Speaker
and Okay, but what is one practical change that a pricing team could make this quarter to reduce the amount of bullshit tasks they've got? I would say if everyone tried not to create bullshit, then the system would be better. I do, I do think having just a bullshit detector and actually thinking to yourself when you give work out, if this should be useful, it is going to be effective. We talked about governance earlier. Sometimes people end up in tics, blocky stuff just because it's hard to change things.
00:17:22
Speaker
So actually keeping stuff up to date. When you put on a governance checklist that's going to be reviewed annually, actually review it annually because that's not the bullshit bit. The bullshit bit is filling it in when it's three years out a day.
00:17:39
Speaker
So if you just tick every year to say I've reviewed it and you never actually update it, then that's creating bullshit. So actually doing the stuff that you're meant to do on the review cycles, I would say is probably my tip for avoiding bullshit.
00:17:54
Speaker
And it's weird because a lot of people probably think, but doing the reviews is bullshit. But disagree with that. I think just ticking stuff off when it's out of date is bullshit. man Well, it's literally box ticking, isn't it? Yeah. it's how do grabu sing I've got two things, I guess. One is we're talking about being a duct taper earlier, you know, fixing an issue to cover up for someone upstream not doing this thing that they're going to doing.
00:18:21
Speaker
And let's be honest, we're not the best people to be... trying to fix our data warehouses and the stuff, know, you really should get a data engineer, for example.
00:18:32
Speaker
So one thing that teams in that position can do is to agree for a set period, maybe it's four to six weeks. It doesn't have to be long. But every time that you get one of these issues and you think, oh, I could just kind duct tape it myself and okay.
00:18:48
Speaker
Or, oh, I have to raise a ticket with IT t and oh, that's a pain. Yeah, it is. But otherwise, how are IT going to know to fix it? And also... More widely than that, why are your team having to use your resources to fix something that another team supposedly do have resource to do? If genuinely they have too much on and they can't do all of their tasks, then you kind of artificially hiding some is not going to give them the leverage they need to ask for more resource.
00:19:19
Speaker
It's kind of a lose-lose when we duct tape like that, as well as the obvious problems of creating technical debt and the risk of errors. So I think the first thing you can do is do ah an IT ticket binge for a short period time, one month or kind of six weeks, something is fine. i think the other thing is to really think about our admin.
00:19:38
Speaker
We don't have lots of the admin. We're quite fortunate in pricing, but I do see a lot of teams spending 15 minutes, 30 minutes a week. Maybe more, particularly more for managers, staffing about with whatever ticket management task allocation system you have and moving tickets around and all those of things. Do we really feel like that's adding value? Like the purpose that task, surely, to update the manager on what is in the backlog, what is in progress, what is blocked, what is now complete.
00:20:13
Speaker
It's just the prompt for those headings. What new has come into our inbox? What are we working on? What can I help you with and what can we take off? And I think ah other than that, what is the purpose? If it's from visibility for senior managers, is there a better way of doing it? would almost always, if it involves raising some kind of picket thing, i would usually say there is. I used to do all of my planning and that kind of stuff on Excel because I always have Excel open.
00:20:44
Speaker
That's what I would do, yeah. i put my Kanban boards in Excel. I mean, you don't need specialist software. You just need three columns that colored in, don't you? I heard the phrase, write only documents.
00:20:56
Speaker
You'll never read it. You just write it. Yeah. I think there's elements of that that goes on definitely. Yeah. Especially in the ads mini. Let's move the tickets forward. Let's lock what we did and stuff where it's like, no one's ever actually going to read that.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think that if you have an extra system, all it does is it logs your tasks. And realistically, you're never going to actually look at it. So even on like the Microsoft to-do list, I don't use it because it's not something I automatically have open all the time.
00:21:25
Speaker
but Honestly. If you can do it in Excel, like do it on SharePoint. So everyone, and also that everyone has access to the same document. Everyone in your team knows how to use Excel.
00:21:35
Speaker
So allowing people that own, it's like freedom to put stuff on there saves the manager time. It's so much quicker to do anything Excel because we're already you good at it.
00:21:47
Speaker
I always think that going back to almost the first principle, ah sorry, who is this for and what do they actually need to know from it is so much more important than using whether it's a JIRA board or Slack or anything like that. i mean, speaking to someone recently who said, yeah, according to our JIRA board, all of our tasks are completed at 9.29 on Monday One minute before their weekly prioritization meeting. you know That's just, that that's not giving you data. That is just. Yeah. that's bit box who it's minute Yeah.
00:22:21
Speaker
I think I found task marks an interesting one because I can think of times where we've had project managers who have actually been really good and have driven the project forward, done really useful organization so on.
00:22:36
Speaker
I can also think of times where we've had project managers who had just done a weekly project meeting with us, basically asked people if they've done stuff, picked it or marked it amber and just been really frankly unhelpful.
00:22:52
Speaker
Somebody at the center of stuff, keeping stuff so it in order. And then if something's going to be late, communicating it to people. This is useful stuff. I can also think of people who have genuinely just been really task mastery and just been like, right, it's here.
00:23:06
Speaker
or Amber and then just stuck it in a rapport and stuff. And we ended up running late and yeah, so I can see that as being a real bullshit job. man Yeah.
Review of 'Bullshit Jobs' and Its Ideas
00:23:18
Speaker
All right, so overall, i did quite enjoy this book. It's very long. It's like 11 hours on Audible, which is a really long time. Yeah, I felt like it was a book of two halves. So the first half was all about describing a bullshit job.
00:23:35
Speaker
Also describing the psychological aspect of having a bullshit job, how makes you feel, what it does to your mental health, what it does to your sense of value as a person. So it's interesting.
00:23:47
Speaker
The second half was much more about work more widely. How would we get rid of all these bullshit jobs? Is that a good thing to do? Why have we not done that already? And if we did get rid of all the bullshit jobs, what would that 40% of the population do instead?
00:24:04
Speaker
And how do we create that as a situation? Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing or something else? It reminds me bit of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, actually, where there's a race called the Golden Fringians who decide to effectively get rid of their middle-class people, the people they feel they actually do stuff. So it's the hairdressers and strategy consultants and telephone sanitizers.
00:24:27
Speaker
And in fact, they end up dying of a plague caused by having got rid of these people. So a little element of me does wonder, cause we do live in a capitalist society and companies do want to make a profit.
Capitalist Forces Behind Bullshit Jobs
00:24:40
Speaker
So we talked about blunkies being a bullshit job. And I agree with you that it's bullshit, but they're not the reverse of that.
00:24:49
Speaker
It means that company retained someone who's actually really good at their job. Is that small price to pay for that? So actually are there sort of secondary capitalist forces going on that create these things?
00:25:04
Speaker
And it is in some ways useful. I just putting that out there is that counterpoint to the book. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I kind of came away thinking, gosh, there probably is a lot of work that we could get rid of. And I think the goons category kind of fits this a lot. So jobs only exist because other people have other jobs. So for example,
00:25:23
Speaker
If a government department said, set a new rule that said, companies have got to submit this report, blah, blah, blah, making that and enforcing it and checking it It's not actually getting to the outcome, the really meaningful outcome that we want. um And there's lots of studies that show that kind of industry regulation doesn't always get you the outcome you want. Not only is that job kind of bullshit, but also then the company, the insurers have to have some goons who are maybe in the, I don't know, regulatory reporting team or the external governance reviewer. I don't know, whatever team might be called, but...
00:26:03
Speaker
The insurers will have to have some jobs exist only because the government or the regulator has other people who are doing a bullshit job and the goons are kind of fending off the bullshit from that other external source.
Universal Basic Income and Essential Jobs
00:26:16
Speaker
So again, I do actually think that there there are groups, themes of work that you think, you know, actually, if we just organize this a bit better, then we could get rid of the whole whole theme of bullshit.
00:26:28
Speaker
I mean, the book ends. wildly like wildly out really up really far out do we send the middle classes off into space Yeah, it kind of ends on a slightly odd note where he kind of says, obviously people in healthcare, well, i'm caring responsibilities will have to still work. They will receive universal basic income, but obviously they'll still have to work 40 hours a week, like doctors and nurses and teachers and carers and waste management people, those kind of important jobs.
00:26:57
Speaker
they They still need to work. And the book kind of ends on saying, yeah, they still would work even with universal base income. i didn't I didn't quite follow the logic on how do you convince someone to spend 40 hours of their week being paid minimum wage, caring for someone.
00:27:19
Speaker
It's very difficult. It's a very mentally and physically taxed job. At the same time as everyone getting a universal basic income to live on, I found that argument kind of tough.
00:27:32
Speaker
to follow but like i say the first of this book was really good i kind of wish they'd stopped at six hours so i don't really recommend it all right okay well thank you very much katrin that's very interesting take on bullshit jobs by david grader we'll be back next time with some more pd language i'm very sorry you should thanks ever so much for joining us and looking forward to seeing you all next time
00:28:08
Speaker
PriceWriters transforms pricing professionals into the most respected leaders in insurance. Find out more about our capability audits by visiting PriceWriters.com.