I like this model, and it usefully describes a reality that I sometimes see in the workplace.
However, I claim that this is not the model that anyone’s employers are using. The decisions made around hiring budgets, as they have been explained to me, plan for the standard case: in your example, 40 hours of work per week and so one employee gets hired. In the event of crisis the employee is expected to put in extra time (which costs nothing in the US for salaried employees), perhaps they bring in help from other teams, and astonishingly often they just eat the failure.
Under the Moral Mazes view of things, this is because no one can be blamed in a meaningful way. Hiring just enough people to do the routine work is efficient under business logic, and so the people who do hiring budgets are blameless. No one predicted the spontaneous 500 pages of compliance that week, so the project managers are blameless. As a practical matter no one can be expected to quintuple their output overnight so even the employee is blameless; they get punished not for failing to do the work fast enough but for being lowest in hierarchy and therefore most expendable.
Cycling back to the top of the comment, I still think the optionality model is good. It seems like it should be chosen strategically in some cases, like some startups or any business with a lot of variance over the short term.
I like this model, and it usefully describes a reality that I sometimes see in the workplace.
However, I claim that this is not the model that anyone’s employers are using. The decisions made around hiring budgets, as they have been explained to me, plan for the standard case: in your example, 40 hours of work per week and so one employee gets hired. In the event of crisis the employee is expected to put in extra time (which costs nothing in the US for salaried employees), perhaps they bring in help from other teams, and astonishingly often they just eat the failure.
Under the Moral Mazes view of things, this is because no one can be blamed in a meaningful way. Hiring just enough people to do the routine work is efficient under business logic, and so the people who do hiring budgets are blameless. No one predicted the spontaneous 500 pages of compliance that week, so the project managers are blameless. As a practical matter no one can be expected to quintuple their output overnight so even the employee is blameless; they get punished not for failing to do the work fast enough but for being lowest in hierarchy and therefore most expendable.
Cycling back to the top of the comment, I still think the optionality model is good. It seems like it should be chosen strategically in some cases, like some startups or any business with a lot of variance over the short term.