A bad system will defeat a good person every time
Across the cultural sector, digital practitioners are blaming themselves for hidden work that nobody planned or resourced. My research finds the same pattern everywhere and traces it to structural conditions that predate any individual.
One of the more upsetting things that I heard whilst doing the research for the Hidden Cost report was how many digital practitioners have interpreted the hidden work they're dealing with as a personal failing.
When people described what it felt like to have to deal with work that nobody had formally planned or resourced, a lot of them ended up questioning themselves - had they set something up correctly, early enough? Were they efficient enough? Would a more capable version of themselves be managing this situation better?
For a lot of understandable reasons, including the fact that digital practitioners are often 'a department of one' (are the only digital specialist in their team/organisation), that a typical digital remit is almost impossibly broad, and that we don't talk enough about the things that are hard or don't work, the conclusion that a sad and surprising number of them had reached was that the problem was them.
I want to state this as clearly as I can - it isn't.
I can say that so confidently because, from what I can see, the pattern is the same everywhere. I heard about it from people in two-person teams in heritage organisations and people in national performing arts institutions, from early-career staff and directors, across museums, galleries, performing arts organisations sector-support agencies, and archives, and across several continents.
If hidden work was occurring simply as a result of individual competence, it would show up randomly, and would follow the people who happened to be struggling around. Instead it is widespread, consistent in its character, and, on investigation, is produced by a set of structural conditions that were in place before any of these people arrived and that will still be there after they have departed.
Work that behaves like that is not the result of personal shortcomings.
In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming estimated that 94% of the problems in any organisation belong to the system, not the person. The evidence in this research points to something close to that pretty extreme ratio when it comes to hidden digital work. The structural conditions that lead to hidden work cannot be resolved by one person simply working harder or setting things up more cleverly.
You may be thinking - but why does this misattribution matter, beyond it being unfair? I think there are two main reasons.
The first is that it has a particularly horrible impact. Believing that you are the reason the work is unsustainable is incredibly corrosive, because the problem you are trying to fix is yourself. I think this links to and is amplified by the weird set of definitions that often sit around digital roles, that they should be expert in everything that could conceivably be badged as 'digital' (this isn't a new observation - I seem to have written that a lot when looking into this issue - The University of Leicester's One by One research found the same patterns back in 2018) and that they should be proficient in operating at every level from strategy to delivery. Indeed I think this myth that one 'digital person' can 'do it all' also stems from the same systemic issues that also cause hidden work.
The second is that people blaming themselves can end up keeping the work hidden. A practitioner who thinks the situation exists because of them is not going to name it as something that the organisation needs to address. So the silence that keeps hidden work invisible is, in a lot of cases, being maintained by people who are not sure they are even allowed to call it a problem.
If this feels familiar then I would point you towards something I saw Dr Carrie Goucher say about this kind of situation:
Take a breath, say to yourself: "Fix the system, not the person"
The tiredness at the end of every week, the sense that your one job has somehow become three, the suspicion that you are the only thing standing between your organisation's mission-critical digital operations and their failure. None of these are signs that you are managing badly, they are they type of thing that these structural conditions produce, for almost everyone, almost everywhere. You did not create them, and you cannot be expected to dismantle them on your own.
The full Hidden Cost report will be released in full, for free to my newsletter subscribers from September 24th.