Laws of Conservation
Physics teaches us that there are at least six laws of conservation. I really think there's another one that applies to the workplace. Today we had a large project team meeting for our Production Transition Process. There's a lot of interest in making the process easier, naturally, but there seems to some thinking that easier means less work. That may not be the case: certain things will never be totally automatable; we'll likely never devise a perfect schema for capturing, store and exposing the knowledge we're trying to persist. Mostly, though, folks will still probably groan about having to use it. That lead me to decide that their really is a law that deals with the conversation of matter, energy and work. To wit:
People will always seek to exhaust their potential energy on work that doesn't matter when they've exhausted their work that doesn't matter.
Cynical, I know.