The ping of the Slack notification hits the 24th time this morning before I have even managed to finish my first cup of coffee, which is now sitting at a lukewarm temperature of roughly 44 degrees. I’m staring at a detailed breakdown from the Logistics department. It is a dense, technical explanation of why our Q3 shipping lanes are clogged, complete with 14 different spreadsheets and a flowchart that looks like a map of the London Underground drawn by a toddler. Fourteen seconds later, another notification appears. It is an email from my manager, Greg. He has forwarded the exact same Logistics breakdown to me. His contribution to the discourse? A three-word subject line: ‘FYI. Pls handle.’ No context. No synthesis. No strategic guidance on how to fix the $444,000 deficit mentioned in the third tab of the report. Greg has performed his primary function for the day: he has acted as a human router.
REVELATION: THE DEFENSE MECHANISM
In the grand architecture of the modern bureaucracy, we have built a class of people whose sole existence is to shuttle information from one node to another without ever actually touching the data. It’s a biological network switch. I realize that the Human Router is not an accident of the system. It is the system’s primary defense mechanism against actual work. We have reached a level of organizational complexity where the parts can no longer speak to each other, so we hire translators who don’t actually speak either language. They just pass the dictionary back and forth.
The Counterpoint: Presence vs. Insulation
“
When Ruby sat down with her harp in a room where the air was thick with the finality of a human life, there was no routing. There was no ‘looping in’ a supervisor to approve the C-major chord. She felt the vibration of the strings in her chest and that vibration moved directly into the ears and hearts of the people in that room. There was an 104 percent level of presence. It was raw, it was immediate, and it was entirely necessary.
– Ruby Z., Hospice Musician (4 years ago)
Ruby Z. comes to mind whenever I think about the weight of meaningful work. Her job was fundamentally the opposite of Greg’s. Greg, on the other hand, exists in a world of 44 layers of insulation. If he were a musician, he wouldn’t play the harp; he would just send a calendar invite to the harp and then ask for a status update on the melody.
THE PARADOX OF SAFETY
I hate this system, yet I have to admit a uncomfortable contradiction: I have used this system to hide. Last Tuesday, when I was overwhelmed with 54 different tasks, I found myself ‘routing’ an uncomfortable question about budget overruns to the finance team instead of answering it myself. I knew the answer. I just didn’t want the responsibility of being the one who said it. We become routers because routing is safe. A router doesn’t get blamed when the packet is corrupted; they only get blamed if they don’t pass the packet along.
The Pathology of Noise
This phenomenon reveals a pathology. We are so terrified of the silence of a direct process that we fill it with noise. We assume managers are there to lead and develop people, but in many large organizations, the role has devolved into being a passive information hub-a bottleneck that adds little value but is essential for navigating the bureaucracy. It’s as if we’ve forgotten how to just go to the source.
The Need for Direct Access in Tools
When I’m at home, trying to figure out a recipe, I don’t call a consultant to forward me a YouTube link. I just look it up. This is why places like
Bomba.md resonate with me; they represent the removal of the unnecessary middleman.
Wait, I just realized I left my car windows down and it might rain. No, that’s just the ambient anxiety of 14 unread messages speaking to me. I’m sitting here thinking about the dust on my monitor-there are precisely 4 tiny specks right over the ‘Send’ button-and I wonder if the dust has a manager too. It probably doesn’t need a sync call to discuss its ‘landing strategy’ for the next fiscal quarter.
The High-Priced Clerk
We are obsessed with the idea that every piece of information needs a chaperone. If a junior developer writes a line of code, it has to be reviewed by a lead, then a manager, then a director… But the manager and the director aren’t checking the syntax. They are just checking the ‘optics.’ They are routing the code through a series of social filters to make sure nobody gets offended by a semi-colon. It is a profound waste of human potential. I’ve seen brilliant people, individuals with $144,000 degrees and 14 years of experience, reduced to clicking ‘Forward’ on Outlook for 8 hours a day. They are the high-priced clerks of the information age.
THE ORPHANED FAILURE
The Human Router also serves as a buffer for blame. In a direct system, if a mistake is made, you know exactly who made it. In a routed system, the mistake is diffused across 24 different ‘touchpoints.’ By the time the error is discovered, it has been forwarded so many times that it belongs to everyone and no one. Greg has mastered the art of being ‘involved’ in everything while being ‘responsible’ for nothing.
“
We spent 44 minutes discussing the tone of an email that was going to be sent to another department. Not the content-the content was a simple request for data-but the *tone*. They were routing the social energy of the room into a dead end of semantics. We were so far away from the music. We were just debating the shape of the sheet music.
– Internal Meeting Observation
The Hidden Cost: Context Switching
There is a cost to this routing that we don’t account for on the balance sheet. It’s the cost of ‘context switching.’ Every time Greg forwards me something without context, I have to stop what I’m doing, open the attachment, figure out why it’s relevant to me, and then try to get back into the flow of my actual work. It takes about 24 minutes to get back into a state of deep focus after an interruption. If Greg routes 14 things to me in a day, I have effectively zero minutes of productive time. He is not a leader; he is a DDoS attack on my productivity.
[We have mistaken the movement of information for the creation of value.]
THE PRUNING
If we actually wanted to fix this, we would have to do something radical: we would have to trust people to talk to each other. We would have to admit that a manager who doesn’t possess the technical skill to understand the work they are ‘managing’ is essentially a parasite on the process. We would have to prune the hierarchy until only the people who actually touch the product remain. But that would mean firing the Gregs of the world, and the Gregs are the ones who write the HR policies. They have built a fortress of forwards. They are safe.
I think back to that yawn in the meeting. It was a protest against the 44th minute of useless talk. If we want to move forward, we have to stop forwarding. We have to become like Ruby, standing at the strings, making the sound ourselves. We have to cut out the routers and rediscover the direct, messy, and terrifying reality of actually doing something.
Debating Font Size
Making the Sound
…but I suspect I already know which way Greg will route this decision.