A difficult task given to a lazy person is claimed to produce an easier method, because they will find one rather than endure the work.
The insight is that industriousness and improvement can be opposed. A diligent worker completes the tedious process; someone reluctant to complete it has a reason to examine whether it is necessary. The condition the saying omits is authority: the same reluctance without permission to change anything produces avoidance rather than method.
In practice
- A team that automates a report has usually been annoyed by it, not commissioned to improve it.
- A worker with every reason to shorten the task and no power to change it simply does it slowly.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is effort minimisation: someone reluctant to repeat a tedious process has a standing incentive to examine it, which a diligent worker who simply completes it does not.
- In its favour
- Process improvement does often come from those most exposed to the tedium, and the mechanism is consistent with research on how automation targets are chosen.
- Against it
- The attribution is unsettled and the claim untested, and laziness produces shortcuts that skip necessary steps as often as it produces better methods, which the maxim does not distinguish.
- Standing
- The attribution is unsettled and the claim untested. Effort-minimisation does plausibly drive process improvement, and the version that would survive testing is narrower: incentive to reduce effort produces method change only where the person also has the authority to change the method.
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- The success literature and its sceptics