About six times today I heard the phrase “valued added.” Each and every time I heard it, I wanted to punch a baby in the throat. Look, maybe I should care about “demonstrating value added,” or team building, or joining hands and giving peace a chance, or whatever. All I’ve ever wanted to do anywhere was the best job I could within the confines the job itself placed on me. With those confines growing increasingly tighter week by week and month after month, we’re all going to have to get use to the idea that how we define “doing our best” is going to change for the worse.

Over short periods of surging to meet the unexpected, people have a remarkable capacity to do more than expected. In a pinch, they can even give the illusion of doing more with less. Most people, most of the time, want to contribute and do their part to make sure the trains run on time. Relying on that capacity as a long term “get well” plan, however, generally has consequences that are less than good. Under sustained pressure to perform above optimal levels and with diminishing resources with which to do it, even the best are going to pull up lame eventually. I can’t cite a scientific study that tells me this is true, but I’ve spent more years than I want to admit watching people and seeing how they respond under pressure.

The truth is some people just handle a high stress environment better than others. A few people might thrive on it, but the vast bulk of them are going to hit a wall, burn out, fade away, or otherwise just stop giving a good goddamn. That’s a dangerous place to be for any organization. The slippery slope from actually doing more to getting less is really more like falling off a cliff. One day everything will hum along at top speed and the next it’ll be in free fall towards the jagged rocks below.

I’d never argue that this is a universal truth, but it does reflect my personal observations based on a little more than a decade as a decidedly interested observer of bureaucratic processes. There are always options available and B does not always have to follow A in this case. Preventing this outcome requires someone with enough horsepower to drive a change and make it stick to realize there’s a problem and for them to do something about it. Unfortunately, my best advice is to not hold your breath waiting for that to happen unless you have some kind of weird workplace oxygen deprivation fetish.