Sometimes good work keeps the system from getting better
On overfunctioning: the more you silently polish someone's raw output into excellence, the fewer reasons the system has to change.
I decided to discuss with an AI a work thought that had been spinning in my head for a while. I could only phrase it in profanity, but it got the point 😂
I can’t calmly look at a raw result. If I see a flaw — I’ll fix it, tweak it, think through the details. It ends up good, everyone’s happy.
And this is where the weird stuff begins.
Nobody sees anymore how much had to be fixed along the way. The problem disappears together with the feedback, and the system gets a simple signal: everything works as it should.
In psychology this is called overfunctioning / underfunctioning. The more one participant consistently takes on, the less the other one has to change anything.
Doing bad work on purpose is nonsense. But silently turning every raw result into an excellent one, it seems, isn’t always useful either.
I don’t know yet where the line runs between professionalism and harmful rescuing. Maybe honestly showing what exactly had to be pulled up matters more than another invisible feat.