The Factory vs Free Rein

It's been a while but I'm back at it! In the JFS approach to projects, there's nothing wrong with progress being slow, all that matters is continually returning to the Work.

Today I wanted to noodle on the new, defining structural metaphors for the new, revised JFS v2. This writing is a crappy braindump. It's not a whole piece, and it's certainly not final. But it's helpful to dump the ideas on the page. This writing isn't the Work, it's the doing of the things that lead to the Work.

Am I having too much fun with capitalization? Sure. Am I gonna stop? No. It's like in crochet or knitting: the thing you're working on is called 'your work.' The instructions say "turn your work," rather than "turn the piece" or "turn the work." There's something special about that.

We grow up, are educated, and go to work in the Factory.

But working on our own projects, on our own time? That's Free Rein.

The Factory and Free Rein run on opposite principles.

The Factory must accommodate everyone… by which I mean must be willing to shove just about anyone into a slot, and the slot has to fit without amputating too many pieces.

This is the defining principle of the Factory.

Factory work must be standardized, because it has to be graded. And it has to be graded because it must be mass-produced — just about everybody has to do it — and the only way to deal, cheaply, with massive volume is by cutting corners, sometimes called efficiency.

The Factory is removed from reality. In the real world, work survives or fails based on what it does. But finding out what works and what doesn't? That's not efficient. Inside the Factory, work survives or fails based on what the graders say about it.

In the Factory, you have to do what you're told, nothing less but also nothing more. Cost-cutting means efficiency and efficiency means standardization and standardization means the Factory has no structure or skill to deal with original output. Originality is in fact often punished because it doesn't comply with the grading rubric.

Inside the Factory, a lot of the time the work you're doing isn't even real work to begin with! You're spending your efforts on work that will never get shared, deployed, used, sold. It's produced, but it's not a product. It's producing for the sake of producing — making for the grading — the Factory perpetuating itself.

The boss's boss said "do this," so the boss tells you to "do it," so you do it, and the boss tells their boss that it was done, and the boss's boss either likes it, or doesn't. Often this is both the beginning and end of work.

(Or the Factory's projects are run by committee, meaning nobody is responsible, and nobody has the final say, and work just sort of… dissolves into the bystander effect.)

And thus because the Factory is an insular world unto itself — controlled by graders, gatekeepers — success in the Factory isn't about doing good work, novel work, or useful work, but by hitting artificial targets and pleasing those in power.

Factories turn people into widgets. You get slotted into your spot, and there you turn; your work is precipitated by some widgets, and evaluated by others. The true, real, end result of your work not only doesn't matter, it's beyond your reach; it's often hidden from you. Work may flow out of the Factory, but you're stuck inside. You produce based on rules, incentives, and punishments — praise and improvement programs. You work because you work.

But what happens when you take the widget out of the Factory?