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Adam Greenfield

Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –

48 comments
Adam Greenfield

I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this

Adam Greenfield

rather slapdash comedy of errors, the result is not improved accuracy or streamlined process flow. It’s a new and supervening set of faulty readings, with its own particular kind of plausibility and authority, that people must somehow summon the energy to challenge and counter. Occasionally, this has literally lethal effects - if you do not live in the UK, prepare to be shocked speechless by the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britis

Luis Villa

@adamgreenfield (as soon as you made the first toot, I immediately thought of this. unconscionable.)

Janet is prematurely obsolete

@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield Same. re the Post Office scandal. The thing went on because people were so easily gaslit to think they had made errors, all the time.

I learned the word “slapdash” here…

I never lived in the US as an adult so I can’t compare. I think diligence I have encountered in Latin contexts, including postcolonial, comes from bureaucratic zeal that simply doesn’t exist here. (And I have seen more of in the US come to think of it, I have been to the DMV, lol)

Luis Villa

@janet @adamgreenfield yeah, it's hard for me to to cross-cultural comparisons, but in the US's regulatory culture there is definitely a very related learned helplessness around technical regulation: "we'd like to be diligent, but that would require understanding tech and we can't possibly do that"

Adam Greenfield

Sure, some of this can be accounted for by the deskilling, outsourcing, shoddy lowest-bidder automation and responsibilization that are part and parcel of neoliberal governance/management/governmentality. But much of it feels deep to the culture, in a way that absconds from awareness or visibility. And I don’t, actually, want to bellyache about this state of affairs: I would like to find some ways for us to *do* something about it together. But it’s daunting, “vaster than empires and more slow.”

Paul Starr

@adamgreenfield Something about this tendency is self-reinforcing, too, it feels like—the assumption that other people are being slipshod elsewhere makes it easier to justify my own lack of diligence, for sure. "low-diligence society" is apt too in that it's adjacent but not identical to a low-trust society.

Adam Greenfield

@pts Yes! Good catch, that’s precisely how I intended it, and yes these qualities are braided ‘round one another.

Paul Starr

@adamgreenfield The concept of taking personal responsibility is a vexing one, given how frequently it's used by the enemies of solidarity, and yet! Being reliable and diligent is good, actually!

Adam Greenfield

@pts I am building up to a longer rant about this, and in fact something that may well become a longer piece of writing and/or otherwise definitive of this next part of my life, but competence and capacity and clarity and diligence and strength (*clearly*, I hope, for some specified and carefully defined values of “strength”) are all things it is beyond foolish to cede to the people who hate us and love hate. Will say (probably too) much more shortly.

Paul Starr replied to Adam

@adamgreenfield good memes are another virtue we cannot afford to cede, come to think of it

Chill

@adamgreenfield
Adam this absolutely encapsulates the way I see things here in Australia. So perhaps this culture is more pervasive?
I'd enjoy reading something "more definitive".

Nicovel0

@adamgreenfield @pts I still think the long tail of empire has to bear the blame for at least some of it. When you can fuck up repeatedly and there is a quarter of the world to make up and suffer your mistakes with essentially no consequences as long as the rich stay rich, you can go a long time running inefficient systems and getting away with it.

Adam Greenfield

@Nicovel0 @pts Sure, I’ll buy “at least some of it.” But one of the lower-diligence cultures I’m familiar with, Korea, was colonized rather than the colonizer, so there’s not a 1:1 correlation.

Irenes (many)

@adamgreenfield fundamentally people have to care about stuff. those who understand the consequences of their actions will, regardless, but that's always a minority... it is the job of a society to give people some reason to care about the society's well-being.

DELETED

@adamgreenfield

We have this conversation a lot in the US about our culture's anti-intellectualism. It's poisonous and pervasive and makes so many other problems that much worse. And holy crap, the roots are deep and everywhere.

Adam Greenfield

@Emmadrime And! And! *It’s even worse in other places* (or differently bad, but at an at-least-equal intensity).

Hamish

@adamgreenfield I appreciate this focus on low diligence, for lols in a continuation of said diligence- Fujitsu are still touting their work there as a case study: fujitsu.com/downloads/SVC/fs/c

xenogon

@adamgreenfield when I first moved to the UK in about 2003 a fellow kiwi who'd been here a few years told me in passing that "there's a culture of incompetence here", and those words continue to be a good description. It's not evenly distributed, and individuals are not necessarily more incompetent that other places, but there's nevertheless a pervasive tendency to get things wrong.

I suspect (without real evidence) that it may have started as a sort of passive resistance to generations of being ground down by kings and tories, but I can't support this suspicion.

A related but different point is there's also a lot of nonsensical systems in place where following the letter of the procedure will not give the desired result, you just have to magically know how to fudge things just so.

@adamgreenfield when I first moved to the UK in about 2003 a fellow kiwi who'd been here a few years told me in passing that "there's a culture of incompetence here", and those words continue to be a good description. It's not evenly distributed, and individuals are not necessarily more incompetent that other places, but there's nevertheless a pervasive tendency to get things wrong.

Linda

@xenogon @adamgreenfield there is no single culture, NHS, Legal jurisdiction or education system in the U.K. and much of failings in England are totally irrelevant and inapplicable to NI, Wales and Scotland. The other 3 nations have their own challenged, but when will ignorant comments from those who equate England as U.K. stop?

xenogon

@Lassielmr @adamgreenfield The observed effect is not limited to or defined by administrative systems, it is cultural and exists at a wider more basic level than the failings of bureaucracy which it contributes to. So the partially separate bureaucratic systems in the smaller nations of the UK is only marginally relevant. The effect is culturally in the people. It is also, as I said, unevenly distributed.

I do agree that it seems to be at source an English phenomenon, and Scotland seems somewhat better, but I have not lived in Scotland and may be basing this on the selected sample of Scots I know and the visits to selected areas.

Nevertheless I think it likely that the sheer hegemony of english cultural dominance likely means that the effect is observable in Scotland too. Much as american failings now appear throughout european societies.

I almost said england rather than UK, but felt that the phenomenon I was describing was somewhat vague and emergent and defining it's exact boundaries didn't seem so important.

I have insufficient experience to comment meaningfully on Wales or NI, but my impression is that they are more strongly within the English cultural influence than Scotland is.

@Lassielmr @adamgreenfield The observed effect is not limited to or defined by administrative systems, it is cultural and exists at a wider more basic level than the failings of bureaucracy which it contributes to. So the partially separate bureaucratic systems in the smaller nations of the UK is only marginally relevant. The effect is culturally in the people. It is also, as I said, unevenly distributed.

Adam Greenfield

@Lassielmr @xenogon I’ve observed it in Scotland too, and I’ll thank you not to call me “ignorant.”

counterinduration

@adamgreenfield

Do you think that a focus on high efficiency (in terms of some effect over time) leads to a low diligence?

In a sense I think this could be about quantity over quality for any given effect.

Adam Greenfield

@counterinduration An interesting thought, but no, it’s far too widespread for that. It crops up in too many contexts where the Taylorist grid was never imposed.

Adam Greenfield

Heya! I’m really grateful for your interest in the question of a diligence spectrum, but for those of you who have asked or suggested, I’m afraid there’s no real way one could quantify the appearance of this quality in a culture – other, I suppose, than doing the kind of thing that brash and overconfident management consultants do, i.e. collating a few proxy statistics, and calling it a finding. These are simply anecdotal and partial observations, drawn from my own experience.

Loukas Christodoulou

@adamgreenfield I would link it to what i see as the thickness of social buffers in the different cultures. In the UK banter, irony and grumbling form social buffers where unhappiness with diligence can be attenuated. In Sweden there is zero buffer and people either communicate or cooperate with total precision or not at all, because the consequences are totally unbuffered.

Adam Greenfield

@Loukas I think that’s absolutely correct. It’s a stretch, but I wouldn’t be surprised either if some everyday solidaristic institutions here (and here I’m thinking primarily of pubs) derive some of their motive power from the fact that they offer a platform for commiseration and low-key mutual aid in the face of it.

Loukas Christodoulou

@adamgreenfield the classic explanation for pubs was they were a place for working class men to escape from the unhappiness of married life. So much so that women used to, and sometimes still do, face violence if they go to a pub, because jer like you say, it's a designated male grumble zone

Adam Greenfield

And the point of sharing that experience is not to cast blame or judgment. Given the *massive* amounts of waste and redundant effort that are involved in repairing or working around low diligence in the UK – like, in all seriousness, I would not be at all surprised if it approached something like 15% of GDP – my interest lay in wondering whether it might somehow offer a point of ecological intervention. But it’s not a low-hanging fruit, not at all. It may actually be intractable.

ewhac

@adamgreenfield I just learned about this via the Plainly Difficult video series on YooToob.

youtu.be/g8Y_0RoWh0M

John Grey

@adamgreenfield no surprises for Australians, except our bastards targeted the most vulnerable
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt

tipap

@adamgreenfield What you describe here is something I've observed in Germany, but only partially. Where this kind of low diligence is most evident is in jobcenters where the weakest of society have to beg for financial help and experience what you have have experienced: papers get lost, have to be resend, then get lost again, all the paperwork has to be filed again, until these people literally run out of money and lose all hope and stop opening their mail, as there is only bad news to expect.

Elizabeth

@adamgreenfield I can't thank you enough for your observations. I'm a yank in England, and can only compare the US and UK, but I get it. Prior to moving here, I was warned of the dearth of accountability in business. It's laughable!

gardenpeach

@adamgreenfield I'd be so interested to hear more about how these 5 cultures compare to one another. Which is the most high diligence?

Adam Greenfield

@gardenpeach Japan is the most diligent, but the least flexible: you cannot put raisins or shaved coconut in curry rice, because “curry rice does not have raisins or coconut in it.” Korea is a relatively low-diligence society – everything is ppali-ppali, “hurry hurry” – but it’s buffered by a high degree of flexibility, adaptability and the expectation that you and a service provider will negotiate a modus vivendi.

Adam Greenfield

@gardenpeach Finland is higher diligence, but stoic about defaults and shortfalls in a way that approaches the British. When people fuck up (and Finns generally assume they will, because people and life are disappointing), you’re just supposed to tough it out with lots of sisu and perkele. For all its many faults, and barring only its addiction to litigiousness, American culture actually balances these qualities reasonably well.

Adam Greenfield

@gardenpeach But maybe I actually prefer the Korean way? Like you can get a pair of prescription glasses made, same day, and even when the prescription’s complicated, for something like fifty bucks. They might not be Zeiss quality, but honestly, if they’re not, I can’t tell the difference (and while I’m not an expert, I’m the kind of person who would). There’s a kind of cheap-and-cheerful, LFG-ness to a lot of everyday process. The *flipside* is terrible, though -

Adam Greenfield

@gardenpeach things like the Sewol ferry disaster or the collapse of the Sampoong department store, where the systems and processes that a higher-diligence society would insist on being observed have just been blithely circumvented, at awful cost.

Hana Loftus

@adamgreenfield I am so with you on this. And it makes life for those of us whose literal job is to be high diligence (architects with actual ethics and a care for design and durability in my case) incredibly hard when we have to operate in a low diligence context. Sloppiness everywhere.

Adam Greenfield

@hanaloftus You, of course, have my sympathies. In your work, what measures do you put in place to mitigate or compensate for the failures of others to attend with due care?

Hana Loftus

@adamgreenfield Labour intensive, loss-making levels of checking and rechecking and sadly never able to guarantee timescales with any certainty any more. It is worse than it used to be. Plenty of pressure to just get things over the line even if shoddy. Grenfell was not an exception. And in regard to the work I do in public engagement, clients being sold shit digital platforms and having no understanding of, or respect for, rigorous analytical methodologies.

SewBlue

@adamgreenfield Personally I think this is because GB still has a literal, titled aristocracy and the expensive, exclusive school system to support it.

You do not need to learn and value rigor when your place in life in guaranteed. When you can pull rank target than work hard. That sets the tone for the rest of society. It is only fairly recently that aristocrstic people even had jobs as we understand them, if they weren't the "spare."

What has always fascinated me is that GB kicked off the industrial revolution, inventing steam, mass production and power looms, only to give up within a generation or two, wanting to "live like a gentleman" and not work.

When the pinnacle goal is to not to work or be associated with hard work (ie Margaret Thatcher being inadequate for being the daughter of a grocer) is it surprising that laziness reigns supreme?

@adamgreenfield Personally I think this is because GB still has a literal, titled aristocracy and the expensive, exclusive school system to support it.

You do not need to learn and value rigor when your place in life in guaranteed. When you can pull rank target than work hard. That sets the tone for the rest of society. It is only fairly recently that aristocrstic people even had jobs as we understand them, if they weren't the "spare."

Julian Schwarzenbach

@adamgreenfield Something I see quite a bit in business is a mix of the British ability to innovate coupled with a feeling of being empowered to 'improve' things. This often results in people thinking they don't need to provide all the data on the task just completed, because it was not mandatory, using a different material because they hope it will be good enough (and avoids going back to the stores for the correct one) etc. It is not just about cutting costs!

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