Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "And it went click" - Dawn of the Working Dead

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Robert Propst is more than an inventor: he is a visionary, an innovator dreaming up how to make the perfect office workstation. When he reveals his bold design for a creative, flexible 'cockpit of tomorrow', he comes into conflict with the unyielding push for workplace efficiency. This clash of ideals will go on to shape our working lives forever. For a full list of show notes, see timharford.com.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Pushkin. As far as the nurse was concerned, the behavior seemed odd and distinctly unnerving. That fellow, who had been bedridden for weeks with a slipped disc. He just kept staring at everyone and scribbling in his notebook

and staring some more and writing some more. The nurse reported the suspicious activity to an administrator who dropped by the patient's bedside to investigate. What did he think he was playing at? The patient was delighted to be asked. He took out the notebook and began to do. to explain. He'd been making a careful time and motion study of the hospital staff and had observed everything, all the inefficient movements, the squandered energy, and the wasted time. It could all be done so much better.

The patient's name was Robert Proopst, and Robert Proopst was a genius. His colleagues certainly thought so. In one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went off like fireworks. Proopst had been a sculptor, painter and professor of art. He'd invented everything from playground equipment to an artificial heart valve to a machine-readable livestock tag. His formal training was as a chemical engineer, not that he let his formal training constrain him.

During the Second World War, he'd managed beachhead logistics in the South Pacific. But in the 1960s, Robert Proops would invent an object that has shaped the everyday lives of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people. But when I say that his invention shaped our lives, what sort of shape exactly? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to... cautionary tales. In 1958, the Herman Miller Company, a maker of office furniture, hired Robert Proopst. His mission was to deploy his brand of free-spirited, cross-disciplinary creativity to help Herman Miller diversify away from the potentially stayed world of filing cabinets,

desks and swivel chairs. Proopst wasn't a designer. but maybe that was a good thing. He would dream big, think deep thoughts, and take Herman Miller in new directions. Proopst started by setting up a research studio in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. That decision would have been easily explicable

had Herman Miller itself, not been located 150 miles away in Zealand. It would be a bold step, even in today's era of, of remote work. In the pre-internet world of 1958, his decision demonstrated that Proopst valued the cerebral yet convivial atmosphere of a college town

and that he wanted an extraordinary amount of independence from head office. It also showed that what he wanted, he got. Herman Miller gave him a free hand. there were only three rules. The first rule, don't design anything purely ornamental, make useful things. The second rule, don't make anything for the military. And the third rule, don't make office furniture. The first two rules, he respected.

Robert Proopst wasn't a man whose creativity could easily be constrained or directed. Herman Miller was trying to break out of its traditional business of office furniture, and Proopst seemed like the perfect man to help with that. But asking a free spirit like Proopst not to think about office furniture simply encouraged him to think about office furniture even harder. After all, thinking about office furniture meant thinking about everything, mind, body and soul. He carefully ably. He carefully ably. observed office dwellers at work. He read the latest ideas from management thinkers,

explaining that the economy of the future would revolve around a new kind of worker, the knowledge worker, and he hungrily consumed ideas from psychology, sociology and anthropology. All this grand talk about knowledge workers rather obscures the question of what exactly a knowledge worker. is. There's a black and white photograph of just such a worker using furniture designed by Robert

Proust's research team. Next to him is a computer display, 1968 style. It's on a pivot and casters for easy tilting and swiveling and movement. The knowledge worker himself is wearing the standard office clothes of the day, white shirt, dark tie, smart, dark, dark, and suit pants. He looks intensely relaxed, calmly focused on the work in his lap, leaning back in an elegant Eames chair with his feet up on a little circular conference table. And that work in his lap? A large computer interface, supported by modifications to the chair, an all-in-one module with a keyboard, a computer mouse and other controllers. And if 1968 seems a bit early to have a laptop keyboard and a computer mouse,

well, the knowledge worker's name was Douglas Engelbart. He was a Silicon Valley pioneer. He invented the computer mouse. When Robert Proopst was reading about knowledge workers, he was thinking of people like Douglas Engelbart, the top people, the most brilliant people. People who couldn't be put in boxes. People like himself.

Robert Proops didn't like to be called a designer or even a researcher with its connotations of looking back to dig up old ideas. He preferred to be called a searcher. So what if he could make the perfect office for searches, like Douglas Engelbart? and like Proopst himself. At the time, the typical American office space had a large open area

with neat rows of typists and secretaries and clerks in the middle surrounded by offices with closable doors. Today's office is a wasteland, wrote Proopst in 1960. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.

But there was a hopeful development over in Germany. The Bureau Landshaft, or Office Landscape, designed by two brothers at the consulting firm, Quickbuner. Bureau Landshaft threw everything into the air. There would be one huge room with groups of desks artfully arranged, to appear haphazard. Sinuous routes between them, like paths through a rock garden,

and everything dotted with soft acoustic screens and pot plants. It was flexible. If the needs of the office changed, you just moved the desks around. Thick carpet absorbed noise. There were breakrooms rather than a trundling tea trolley. There were no offices, and no obvious hierarchy.

Proopst loved this new trend. But he could do so much better than those inefficient, flat table desks and the endless sitting, no good for your back. And Proopst was a man who well understood the agonies of a bad back. Proopst wanted to design a system which accommodated movement, a system with verticality. Stand up, sit down, spin round, In 1964, Herman Miller revealed Robert Proops' brainchild to the world.

It was called simply Action Office. According to the design historian Jennifer Kaufman Bueller, Action Office would upend the American Office Furniture Industry through the 1970s. But as we'll see, it did much more than that. Action Office was built around the idea of the workstation. One sits at a desk, like a secretary, but one sits in a workstation, like a fighter pilot sits in a cockpit,

surrounded by a variety of achingly cool freestanding furniture units. Located in the arena centre, explained Proopst, You are free to turn and use a suitable work surface, console or conference expression. Yes, indeed. Everything you need is within vision as you spin your stylish rotating chair. Your files are colour-coded, sitting on a shelf at eye level, perfectly adjustable, mounted on a soundproof divider above your equally adjustable desk. Maybe a low coffee table where a couple of coffee cups sit empty after an impromptu brainstorm with a colleague? Espresso cups, of course.

There's a pinboard full of your creative ideas. Do you need to discreetly lock them away? No problem. The board folds down to provide a secure cover over a side desk. Of course, you also have a large, angled architect's desk with a swivel stool. You can stand at it or sit, moving around dynamically from idea to idea, from chair to stool to standing at your pinboard. You are active. You are creative. You look fabulous. You are the knowledge worker, the beating heart and the pulsing brain of action office.

The concept was by Proopst, the stylish design by his concept. colleague George Nelson. Nelson, director of design at Herman Miller, was no passenger on this adventure. Nelson was one of the tastemakers of the 20th century, working with iconic figures, such as Charles and Ray Eames or Isamunoguchi. And Nelson's designs for the Action Office units were so cool that Stanley Kubrick used the Action Office on a space station in 2000. one a space odyssey. This was the kind of furniture people would have in the future,

in space, right? Some executives bought it for their own homes. The reviews were delirious. Seeing these designs, one wonders why office workers have put up with their incompatible, unproductive,

uncomfortable, uncomfortable environment for so long. There's an answer to that, and we'll hear it after the break. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark.

And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Why did office workers put up with an incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable, uncomfortable environment for so long? The answer is simple.

They didn't have any choice. When Proopst set out the action office concept, he was imagining men like himself. Yes, men, of course, who saw themselves as highly paid, highly creative free spirits. But their bosses may have seen things rather differently. And it was their bosses who chose the office design. Which raised the question, why would they pay for the Action Office? Action Office cost $500 for the simplest component, relative to the wages of the day, that would be more like $10,000 today.

The first rule for anyone seeking to sell equipment for workers surely is to remember who buys equipment for workers. It's not the workers, it's the managers. And while the workers might dream of climbing into the cockpit of their own productivity plane, the managers are focused on efficiency. This is an old story, going back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of scientific management, watching manual workers with a stopwatch

and calculating the most efficient movements and the optimal equipment, even the ideal size of shovel, to give to a labourer digging a ditch, which might differ from the ideal shovel for a labourer shoveling coal. And since this was scientifically determined, and what the labourer himself thought of it didn't much matter.

Robert Proopst didn't think in terms of shovels, but he certainly understood the appeal of time and motion studies, as the nurses caring for his bad back could have attested. And while Proopst dreamed of creating the perfect working environment for the Douglas Engelbart's of the world, perhaps the dividing line between an individual, inventor like Douglas Engelbart and a worker digging a ditch isn't as clear as he might have imagined once the bosses started thinking about efficiency.

Sure, Douglas Engelbart is a knowledge worker, but are the secretaries? Maybe, but corporate bosses weren't lavishing thousands of dollars on designer furniture for the secretaries, which explains why, despite being a critical and cultural success, the Action Office was a commercial failure. So what were bosses buying? In a nutshell, better and better stopwatches. The bosses have always been particularly keen to use technology to monitor what workers get up to so they can squeeze more work out of them. That's been true from the punch clock of a hundred years ago that records you arriving at or leaving work, right up to the complex technologies of today.

While Robert Proopst and George Nelson were making space age furniture at interplanetary prices, the bosses were more interested in squeezing workers. Which is how we got to now, with workers constantly being watched. Amazon tracks our every move, explains Wendy Taylor. She works as a packer at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri, and was one of a group of workers who filed a complaint against Amazon in May of 2024. They know every move you make. When you're working, when you're not working, they surveil you with their cameras.

Managers surveil you with their laptops because they can pull up your profile and a bar changes a certain colour when you're not active. Every move you make is being tracked. Another worker who was worried about surveillance was Carol Kramer. Unlike Wendy Taylor, Kramer had a desk-based job. She had a camera pointed at her throughout the working day, taking snapshots, both of her face and her computer screen, to verify that she was being productive.

Her pay was regularly docked because the system decided she wasn't working, even though she might have been mentoring a colleague, or making notes with pencil and paper that the camera didn't track, or for that matter, just taking a bathroom break. That might all sound familiar to the likes of warehouse packers like Wendy Taylor. But Carol Kramer wasn't a low-paid administrator or call centre worker. She was a corporate vice president, managing a team of 12 people and being paid $200 an hour. Workplace surveillance wasn't just for the factory floor or the warehouse.

It was coming for managers. like Carol Kramer. In 1968, four years after Action Office was such a cultural triumph and such a commercial failure, Robert Proopsed tried again. He published a manifesto titled The Office, a facility based on change. More importantly, he offered a less costly, more compact version of the Action Office concept. George Nelson and his iconic designs had been jettisoned. But Action Office 2 still organised space vertically as well as horizontally,

still offered multiple work surfaces, still used dividers to absorb sound and organise and display materials in use, and still sought to offer privacy without isolation. The system was modular, flexible and easily adapt. The dividers snapped together at a variety of angles, but Proopst favoured three dividers per worker with a 120 degree angle, which creates a half hexagon space packed with ideas. Action Office 2 was a lot cheaper than its predecessor, and it looked a lot cheaper too. But still, it was practical and a bit funky, especially those hexagons. The new system got good reviews.

Sylvia Porter, a colonist at the New York Post, called it a revolution. Adding, I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like the idea of sit down or stand-up workstations. She loved the way Proopst described workers as human performers. And yet, looking at publicity photographs of the system, You can't help but notice one difference. The Action Office One system tended to be photographed as a collection of unique components. Designed to equip a single knowledge worker.

A genius like Douglas Engelbart, right? And that seemed to be how Proopst envisaged them. An early sketch by Proopst shows all the cool components, the swivel chairs, the roll-top desk, the shelving, the coffee table, the angled drawing board. They are quite clearly located in a spacious, private office space. But the Action Office 2 system wasn't designed to be installed in an office, but to replace one, or more likely, a whole row of offices. Photographs showed Action Office 2 units in multiples,

not one half-hexicon workstation, but three clipped together for three workers to sit close together. A honeycomb was starting to take shape from the corporate garden that was Bureau Landshad. Get busy, worker bees. Action Office 2 took off in a way that its pricey predecessor never had. It was inexpensive, practical, compact, and it got a little boost from the government too. The US tax code changed, giving a nice tax break to companies which bought rapidly

depreciating equipment, such as furniture, rather than long-lasting office fixtures such as doors and internal walls, which meant if you could buy. If you could buy them, By furniture instead of building offices, Uncle Sam would reward you. Action Office 2 had looked cheap before. Now it looked really cheap in more ways than one. Every office furniture company in North America scrambled to copy the idea. Soon Hayworth, Steelcase, Sunar, Knoll. they were all making modular office furniture systems.

One of the Sunar designers went to admire the installation of their modular system at a large government office in Canada, excited to see the dynamic new system in action. He came back looking as pale as a beige partition. It was awful. One of the worst installations I'd ever seen. he said. Sunar had installed dividing panels

that were 70 inches tall, not tall enough to be a proper wall, but high enough to block all line of sight. There'd seem to make sense on the drawing board, but on mass they were oppressive. While the original Bureau Landshaft concept felt like strolling through a shrubbery, this new installation

was more like a sterile labyrinth, with workers trapped behind a maze of Hessian-wrapped walls. At the time, the designer didn't have the right words to describe the horror of it all. It was only years later that the culture started to provide them. Looking back, the designer summed it up. I'd failed to visualize what it would look like when there were so many of them.

It was Dilbertville. The designer of Action Office 1, George Nelson, wouldn't have been surprised at how grim these new modular furniture systems looked. Furious at being discarded from the Action Office project, he wrote to his boss at the Herman Miller Company, tearing into Action Office 2, complaining that the whole idea treated people as less than This dehumanizing characteristic is not an accident, but the inevitable expression of a concept

which views people as links in a corporate system for handling paper, or as input-output organisms whose efficiency has been a matter of nervous concern for the past half-century. People do indeed function in such roles, but this is not what people are. merely a description of what they do during certain hours. Nelson's point was powerful. If you treat people like components in a machine, it doesn't matter how excited you are about their dynamism or movement or flexibility or how they can mesh together to produce remarkable results.

Ultimately, you have forgotten that they are human. and don't be surprised if that lapse has consequences. Action Office 2, continue Nelson, is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. And then comes the prophetic next line. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies.

for employees as against individuals, for personnel, corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market. Ouch. But George Nelson had put his finger on the problem. While Robert Proopst wanted workers to be able to adapt, to move around, and above all to be in control of their own knowledge work benches, George Nelson realized that it didn't matter what Robert Proopst wanted, and it didn't matter what the workers wanted. Managers were in charge, and managers had their own agenda.

Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think Iheart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. The conflict between Nelson and Proopst shouldn't have come as a surprise. Proopst could be intellectually stubborn and intolerant of people who disagreed. He believed his way was the right way, said a colleague, and he was usually right. But there was more than that stubbornness to the falling out.

Nelson had highlighted a contradiction in Proopst's thinking. Proopst spoke of human performers. But what if there was a tension? between job performance and simply being human. Proopst embodied that tension. One day, he's setting up a research studio 150 miles away from head office, insisting on his freedom to innovate

and to skip boring corporate meetings. Another day, he's a hospital patient making minute observations on all the ways that the nurses around him could move more efficiently. Time and motion studies are fun If you're the one holding the stopwatch and the clipboard Action Office imagined a class of people like Prupsed himself or like Douglas Engelbart

Whose performance depended on the fullest exercise Of their human freedom and human creativity But Action Office 2 didn't appeal to the boss class Because it encouraged human freedom and human creativity but because it was efficient. And the inevitable next step, they would try to make it more efficient still. The great architect, Frank Duffy,

described that awful realization to the writer and office historian, Nikil Saval. There was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone figured out that you didn't need the 120-degree degree angle, and it went click. That was a bad day. It took only five seconds for action office to turn into a box. Robert Proopst had shaped our lives, and that shape was a cube. Proopst had been ahead of his time in emphasising flexibility, worker autonomy and movement away from the sedentary desk.

Indeed, he hated the very word desk. For proofs, knowledge workers were like artisans at their workbenchers. Tools organised close at hand rather than hidden away. Everything in motion, vibrant rather than austere. And yet, somehow, he had invented the hated cubicle. Lesser dynamic cockpit for a knowledge pilot, more a cage in an administrative factory farm. The beige cage multiplied across American offices.

In 1997, nearly three decades after Action Office 2 was launched, it was estimated that more than three quarters of white-collar workers were working in cubicles. The average cubicle had also halved in size, between 1987 and 1997. Workers were packed in like eggs in cartons. The office has come a long way since the punch clock. In 2022, the New York Times reported that

eight of the 10 largest private sector employers in the US were carefully tracking productivity metrics for individual workers, often in real time. There were Amazon warehouse packers, UPS drivers, cashiers at Kroger, but there were also people who previously had been viewed as too skilled and perhaps too high status to subject to second-by-second surveillance. The workers have noticed, too. One long-running research project in the UK concludes that back in 1990,

almost two-thirds of employees felt that they were empowered to make decisions about the tasks right in front of them. By 2024, that proportion had fallen dramatically to one-third. Workers don't decide how to spend their time from minute to minute anymore. The computer does. The Times found that this sort of bossware

often seemed counterproductive. Grocery cashiers found themselves getting impatient with elderly customers for slowing down the checkout scan. Social workers who were counselling patients in drug treatment facilities found themselves marked as idle because they weren't sending emails. Middle managers at United Health knew the tracking system was flawed but couldn't fix it. According to the Times, they told employees to jiggle their mice during online meetings and training sessions. What Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, would have made of all that?

I do not know. But the more fundamental problem with workplace surveillance is the same as the problem George Nelson identified with Action Office 2. workplace surveillance treats workers as components in a system. And as Nelson had complained back in the late 1960s, that might indeed be what people did, but it wasn't what people were. Carol Kramer was one of these unwilling components. She was the corporate vice president, manager of a team of a dozen people,

who found her employer had installed boss-we. to take frequent snapshots of her screen and her chair to check that she was actually working. That raised all the usual questions about whether the software was really rewarding the right behaviour. Did a conversation about work over coffee with a subordinate count? Did jotting some ideas on a piece of paper count? Did going for a walk to think about a business problem in a new environment count?

Of course they all should count, but they didn't. Carol Kramer found that she was getting her pay docked for failure to work in a way that satisfied the bossware, which was annoying in more ways than one. Yes, she felt cheated and pressured to work in a counterproductive way. But there was also the question of whether she was being treated as a human being. you're supposed to be a trusted member of your team. But there was never any trust that you were working for the team, she complained.

It wasn't just that the bossware could be stupid and blinkered. It was the whole idea that Carol couldn't be trusted to use her own judgment about how to work, when to work, and even, shockingly, when there was more to life than working. The data backs up these anecdotes. In 2022, three experts on workplace psychology performed a statistical analysis of more than 50 studies of electronic workplace monitoring. They found that such monitoring reduces job satisfaction, increases stress, and prompts counterproductive behaviour.

It has no measurable impact on job. performance. The only people who'll be surprised at that are the bosses. Those bosses had treated Carol Kramer like an organisational component. They'd forgotten, but she was also a human being. She quit. Robert Proopst kept searching, with designs ranging from a hospital furniture system called Co-struck to a gigantic vertical timber harvester that looks like a modified mechanical excavator. He earned 120 patents. But by far his most important invention is the one that came to horrify him, the cubicle. At the age of 77, he gave an interview which has now become infamous.

Not all organisations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren rat hole places. Barren rat hole places. The interview conveyed the bitter regret of a man who saw his life's vision twisted by avaricious fools.

But should we really be surprised? George Nelson wasn't. He saw it all coming, but Robert Proopst didn't want to hear it. And when George Nelson was proved right, Proopst didn't seem to realise that the bosses who packed workers into cubicles hadn't twisted his vision at all.

They had simply taken it to its logical conclusion. Two years later, he was dead. Prupsed had loved the idea of the creative knowledge workers, physically dynamic, always searching for new ideas, empowered by the workplace around them. But he'd also been a man who hated the thought of a wasted or inefficient movement so much that he'd laid in a hospital bed with a notebook, conducting a time and motion study of the nurses who were caring for him.

Would those nurses really have provided better care if they'd been rushing about on an optimized schedule? Despite Nelson's warning, Proops never did seem to realise that there might be a conflict between helping workers to be empowered and creative and helping them to be maximally effective. There's only one word for his well-intentioned mistake. Tragedy.

Essential sources for this episode were Nikil Saval's book, Cubed and Jennifer Kaufman-Buller's book, Open Plan, a design history of the American office. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written. by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaf Halfrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us.

And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.