Observation: The grunt-work machine (NZ edition)
Notes on how high-value work gets pulled into low-value effort inside modern businesses.
Artefacts
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1 min
Many knowledge workers are trapped in what I think of as the Grunt-Work Machine, where highly paid expertise is quietly consumed by admin, rework, and retrieving information the organisation already owns.
The machine shows up in different guises. Lately, in New Zealand businesses, especially those with strong compliance and reporting cultures, I’m seeing it take forms like these:
Admin Anchor
Staff manually capture meeting notes, then spend significant time typing, formatting, and redistributing them - work that adds little judgment, but absorbs a lot of energy.
Keyboard Cuff
Experienced leaders delay writing or thinking-in-text because the physical act of getting thoughts out of their head and onto a page feels effortful. The barrier isn’t insight; it’s friction.
Search Abyss
Teams/SharePoint/folder search is unreliable enough that staff stop trying. Staff don’t trust what they’ll get, so they rely on memory, workarounds, or interrupting colleagues instead.
Data Drowning
Leaders are expected to read hundreds of pages, reports, submissions, research, board packs, to extract a small number of decisions or implications.
Different faces. Same machine.
Related patterns appear in The judgment–keyboard mismatch.
