Finding meaning in stable/routine operation

 The course I mentioned last post talked a lot about communicating meaning in terms of concrete objectives, with very clear examples like NASA "we are going to put a man on the moon and bring him back again safely." Now as an engineer I've been more often involved in the design, build, and commissioning side of things, or a distinct process improvement for an existing facility. There's a concrete goal with a definite endpoint.

But what about ongoing operations? There is no endpoint, no time when you can say "congratulations everyone, we have achieved our goal!" or even track steps towards an end goal.

I've seen operational goals set such as producing or treating a certain number of units of whatever the facility does, but I don't find that inspiring... especially when the numbers are or seem arbitrary, and doubly so when the reward for meeting them is a more difficult target next time around.

So maybe considering the value in what the facility does and the value of having that constantly available would be more meaningful. Since I'm completely biased in favour of doing things which protect the environment and public health, I'll start with that category.

Take a sewage treatment plant as an example. Most people don't like thinking about them and like to smell them even less, but they're absolutely crucial to both public and environmental health. People's lives literally depend on them; without, every town above a certain size turns into a festering miasma of waste-transmitted disease. Cholera, for example, was a lot more deadly than people these days realize. This seems like, with accurate communication, some pretty meaningful work, even if it is stinky. I wish the general public would be more aware of just how important sewage treatment actually is, but that's a whole other post.

But how about a facility that produces things in the general category of "non essential stuff" - which really could be anything that exists to make the company owners money, and which they have to advertise to convince people they totally need it, really.

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And this is about where I got hung up on this post, because I don't have a solution and I'm an engineer, I want to have at least a suggestion before I talk about something. So it sat for about a year as a draft, I've long since finished that course, and I don't have an answer to how to make work meaningful when I don't already think it is. Such is life, I guess; lots of people have been thinking about this topic and coming up with lots of blather. I think I'll stop before I add blather, and instead add only: I don't know.

Meaningful blather

I'm currently going through an online course in the business leadership vein, of which there are multitudes, but this one specifically is on a subject that produces immense quantities of corporate blather: communicating the meaningfulness of the work, from the corner office to the peons doing the actual labour.

Oh wait, is my bias showing there?

The thing is, I do recognize that a person who finds meaning in their work is going to do a better job and be more engaged than someone who doesn't, all else being equal.

Where the corporate blather comes in is when the company tries to hand wave meaning into tasks or ill defined aspirations. The positively unreadable vision and mission statements of so many companies are great examples of this. "Our vision is to be the best in our field" or something so generic seems to me pretty useless at engaging employees.

What if you're making some non-essential item that the company has spent loads of marketing dollars to convince people that they totally need? Where's the meaning there? Do the people making, shipping, and selling those things find them meaningful? Do the company owners find their chosen product(s) meaningful, or are they trying to wave around a concept of meaning to get more labour out of their employees?

But then, how much of what I classify as "corporate blather" is them being bad at communicating meaning, how much is them handwaving to hide a lack of meaning, and how much is me simply not being the target audience? (I heard once that if you find an advert annoying then you're not the target audience. Seems I'm not the target audience for the vast majority of ads I've seen...)

The course did a good job at describing factors that contribute to a sense of meaninglessness of work. Alas, many of the factors that undermine meaning in work are ones I and my friends have encountered many times. Not seeing results, lack of autonomy... being berated for taking initiative to improve or suggest an improvement to a process really takes the cake though. The course mentions Marx and his concept of "alienation of labour" (note to self, read a bit of Marx) which would be related. Meaninglessness, disconnection, alienation—all describe a situation in which workers do only what they must for the pay they need in order to live.

(I promise the next one won't be so cynical. Had to get the easy snark out of my system first...)

Update: Greenwashing 7 - Simple Green

Way back when I followed a CBC Marketplace show and assessed their assessment of the products, I mentioned that I should buy and try one of them: Simple Green.

Well, I did, and I forgot to post an update. So, here it is.

I tried it out on a stubborn dirty spot that both "Scrub Free" and "Fantastik" barely touched, even with a lot of scrubbing. I followed the directions on the bottle: for tough dirt, spray it on full strength, let it sit for a minute or two, then wipe/scrub as needed, and rinse.

Things I noticed:

• I don't really like the smell. I guess sassafras smells strange to me. But then, I don't like the smell of most cleaners; I think "eye-watering pine" smells worse.
• It hardly took any scrubbing to get about 90% of the grime up. A second dose (after rinsing to see what was left) got the rest of it easily.
• It is not labelled "irritant", which both Scrub Free and Fantastik are (I use gloves for those two).

I think this stuff is a win. I'm going to keep it.

Unnatural or Natural

Something I've been thinking about for a while, even since before I did the greenwashing article series, is: what makes a thing "natural" or "unnatural"?

Many people would say that "natural" things are things which come from nature with minimal processing. It sounds like a reasonable definition at first glance, but when I try to get specific, I start running into trouble with the definitions of the words used to define "natural". They seem to be a bit fuzzy themselves, which makes the term "natural" hard to pin down.

So my first question is, what is meant, exactly, by "from nature"?

Opening my eyes

I was on a work trip and sitting in the lunchroom at a client site, chatting with the operators there. It was a friendly group, and we got to know each other reasonably well in our lunchtime conversations. I and one of the locals were talking about running and race training, being both runners. Another of the operators mentioned that he occasionally ran a mile at the track, and was asking about training for a 5k race, three times farther than he had run before.

Because he and I both find running more than a mile or so on the track unutterably boring (I think he hadn't run more than a mile on the track partly because he was bored, not because he was too tired to continue) I suggested that he run on the street, through the neighbourhood where he lived, so at least the scenery was a bit different. I frequently use google maps' walking directions tool to plot out a route of the distance I want to run when I'm not in the mood for an out-and-back straight line run, especially in an unfamiliar city.

He laughed and said he couldn't do that. Because he predicted a response to him being out running along the sidewalk: "Honey, call the cops! There's a black man running!" And the rest of the group laughed, because they knew it was true.

It had never in my life occurred to me to even think that somebody might call the police on me while I was out minding my own business on a training run.

White privilege: yeah, I have it.

Chemophobia

I've been busy lately so I haven't had time to put together any good posts. In the interim, here's some interesting reading. The first sentence describes me perfectly, but then I'm one of the group named in it as well: "It’s the number one pet peeve of just about every chemical professional I talk to: why is ‘chemical’ such a dirty word in the minds of so many people?"

Even people who have some interest in chemistry can fall prey to this. I was talking to a friend (who does have an interest in chemistry) recently and this came up, and he pulled out a few of the classics about synthesized things not being tested "enough" (even though it's been my experience that for many chemophobes there is never a level that will be "enough") using "unnatural" or "chemical" as a loose synonym for dangerous—acknowledging immediately when I pointed out that there are plenty of natural poisons, because he does know more than a little about chemistry, BUT...

It's easier to argue with strangers about this, than with friends; at least I find it so. It sucks when friends hit your pet peeves, and it's easier to walk away from strangers who do the same.

Greenwashing and CBC: some final thoughts

Well, that ten-post greenwashing series was a bit more work than I had anticipated, but interesting. I learned a lot, so I think that makes it worthwhile. After all, that is the point of this site!

I noticed some common threads running through nearly every item on the Marketplace list, which I've also seen and heard elsewhere. The main one is a fundamental misunderstanding of chemistry. I've lost count of how many times I've heard people in other context using "chemicals" as a blanket term for something bad. It's as if they don't realize that water is a chemical, vitamin C is a chemical, every micro- and macro-nutrient in food are chemicals, everything made of matter—beneficial, harmful, or neutral—is made of chemicals.

And they probably truly don't realize it.

Being a chemical engineer I've been so immersed in chemistry I sometimes forget that after about grade ten general science class, chemistry of any kind becomes optional. A lot of people, probably most people, don't take chemistry and don't have anything more to do with chemistry after that—sometimes to the point of not knowing the difference between an atom and a molecule.

Unfortunately, this seems to lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what is natural and what is healthy—and what is environmentally friendly. In turn, that makes it really challenging to make informed decisions on those subjects.

At this point, I should probably reiterate my disclaimer from the first post, lest somebody claim a conflict of interest in my interest here. I have no connection with any of the companies or products listed in this series. I don't work in household products at all, in fact. I spend my days doing industrial scale environmental cleanup type work—mostly prevention lately, but I have done remediation as well. I'll also add that if some new, quality research comes to light that contradicts any of my conclusions in the previous ten posts, I'll update the relevant post accordingly as soon as I learn about it.

I'm actually more disappointed in Marketplace than I am in most people who don't understand these things, for two reasons. First, Marketplace probably has the budget to find a good expert to help them and their viewers understand this stuff—and if they don't know where to look, then they should go ask their colleague Bob McDonald: that guy has a team that can find experts in fields you didn't even know existed, and he's really good at explaining things. Second and more importantly, Marketplace have a good reputation for exposing actual problems. I had expected a higher level of accuracy from them, as well as a lower level of gullibility.