The Interesting Work, and Who Gets It
Opportunity is distributed at the moment it appears, to whoever is in the room when it does.
three things · one reached them · one with no channel at all · the room side is not counted
The three questions a promotion panel will ask.
One quarter of unplanned work, recorded as it arrived, with where the person was sitting
Four such requests, all four went to whoever was visible, none to anybody outside the room
Two of these in the quarter, and the second was deliberately reserved before it arrived
One, reserved in advance, which is the whole of what deliberate allocation achieved
Three, and two of them went outside the room, because handing it over cost no conversation
Never became an allocation decision in anybody's mind, so there was nothing to allocate
Happens inside other people's heads over months and has no moment at which anything could be inserted
six things · four reached them · two with no channel at all · the room side is not counted
Eleven pieces of unplanned work in a quarter, three of them deliberately placed, and the two largest effects had no moment to intervene in. The left side carries no number: nobody counts how often a room makes somebody visible. One manager's own count over thirteen weeks; what any other team hands out, and how, differs by team.
Opportunity arrives unannounced and is allocated within seconds, to whoever is visible. Over a year this produces a difference in experience between two people that neither of them chose and nobody decided.
The evidence problem in “The Interesting Work, and Who Gets It” is easier to discuss when the underlying record can be inspected and corrected. A nonprofit reviewing Monitask guidance on remote desktop monitoring software for remote desktop monitoring software should use time and project context as one input, explain the collection to staff and volunteers, and keep consequential judgements with an accountable manager.
It is the mechanism by which a seating arrangement becomes a career.
The questions raised by “The Interesting Work, and Who Gets It” can also be compared with Chronicle of Philanthropy coverage. A useful review identifies a responsible owner and a practical change rather than copying a generic checklist.
What counts as the interesting work
Anything that lets somebody demonstrate judgement rather than competence. Talking to a client, deciding an approach, representing the team somewhere, taking something ambiguous and making it concrete.
The common property is that it produces a story afterwards.
Why stories matter more than output
Because assessment runs on description, and a piece of work with a story attached can be described. Six months of steady delivery produces no story at all.
A person who has had four story-producing pieces of work in a year will be promoted ahead of somebody who delivered more and had none, and the panel will not be behaving unreasonably: they are judging the evidence that exists.
What separates opportunity from errand, since both are handed out by the same reflex:
- It lets somebody demonstrate judgement rather than competence.
- Somebody outside the team sees them do it.
- It produces a story that can be repeated afterwards.
- Doing it badly would have mattered.
How the allocation actually happens
Somebody in the room says "could you take this?" to whoever is nearest and apparently free. No list was consulted and nobody was compared.
It takes four seconds and is never recorded.
Why the person outside is skipped
Not from exclusion. Because allocating to them requires a message, a wait, and a short explanation of context that the person in the room does not need.
That is perhaps ninety seconds of extra work at a moment when somebody is trying to clear something off their desk, and ninety seconds is enough.
The compounding across a year
Twenty small allocations is not a large number. If sixteen go to the four people in the room and four go to the two outside it, the difference in accumulated experience after twelve months is stark.
Nobody involved made a decision they would defend.
Counting it for a quarter
Keep a list for one quarter: every piece of unplanned work, who it went to, and where they were sitting. Nothing else exposes it, because no single instance is memorable.
Most managers who try this find a sharper pattern than they expected, and find it faster than they expected.
What the list should record
Three columns: what the work was, who got it, and whether they were in the room at the moment it appeared. The third column is the one doing the work and the one people leave out.
Add a fourth if you can bear it: whether the piece produced a story anybody repeated afterwards. That distinguishes opportunity from errand, and the two are allocated by the same reflex in opposite directions.
The deliberate reservation
Pick two or three pieces of visible work per quarter and decide in advance that they go to somebody outside the room, before they arrive and before anybody can be asked.
Deciding in advance is what makes it survive the four-second reflex.
Why it must be real work
A piece of work manufactured to be given to somebody is detectable and worthless. The allocation has to be of something that genuinely needed doing and that somebody else would otherwise have had.
Which means somebody in the room loses an opportunity, and they should be told why rather than left to wonder.
Telling the room
Saying out loud that allocation has been skewed by proximity, that you have measured it, and that you are correcting it deliberately. People accept a stated policy far better than an unexplained pattern.
Without the explanation, the correction reads as favouritism in the other direction, and somebody will say so.
Preparing the person
Visible work carries risk as well as opportunity, and somebody who has had little of it needs more context, not less, when handed a piece.
Handing over a high-stakes thing with no support is not a correction; it is a test that was not asked for.
The limit of deliberate allocation
The genuinely spontaneous cases, which are most of them. A manager can reserve three pieces of work a quarter and the other seventeen will still be allocated by line of sight by people who are not thinking about any of this.
The remedy is partial and it is not nothing: three deliberate allocations a quarter is twelve a year, which is enough to produce a case made of incidents rather than adjectives. Expecting more than that from a mechanism that runs against a reflex is unrealistic, and the alternative of doing nothing produces the outcome described at the top of this note with complete reliability.