Hyper-Realistic Work-Like Activities
Hyper-realistic work-like activities (HRWLA) are work-shaped tasks — presentations, alignment meetings, pre-briefing calls, deck reviews — that consume time and look identical to real work but produce nothing. Term coined by Stewart Butterfield to describe what happens when headcount grows faster than the supply of known-valuable work.
The mechanism
HRWLA is a supply-and-demand problem. At small organisations, the ratio of known-valuable work to available people stays high — everyone is doing something that matters. As organisations scale, headcount grows faster than the supply of real work. The gap is filled by activities that resemble work without producing it.
The mechanism is not laziness or bad faith. Smart, motivated people with full calendars genuinely believe they are working. The activities feel productive — you leave a meeting with an aligned decision, you send a polished deck to a stakeholder — but the output is alignment documents, not shipped products or served customers.
Parkinson’s Law as root cause
Butterfield connects HRWLA to Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. The organisational corollary: the number of administrators grows independently of the work requiring administration.
His example: 27 product managers, each with a rational incentive to hire a junior (headcount correlates with seniority, pay, authority). The aggregate result is an organisation where PM headcount outpaces the supply of product decisions requiring a PM. The gap fills with HRWLA.
The impulse at each level is rational from that level’s perspective. The aggregate is a collective mistake.
Why it is hard to see from inside
HRWLA is performed by people who cannot distinguish it from real work because the activities are structurally identical. A presentation in a conference room looks like every other presentation in a conference room. A pre-briefing call sounds like preparation. Alignment meetings produce the feeling of having aligned.
The distinction only becomes visible from outside — either by measuring output (what did the organisation produce?) or by identifying the supply/demand imbalance (was there enough real work to occupy everyone?).
The proposed fix
Butterfield’s prescription is supply-side rather than cultural. Do not tell people to work differently; explicitly define what constitutes known-valuable work and decline to fund activities outside that set. This requires:
- A specific definition of what “known-valuable” means in a given organisation or team.
- Willingness to decline funding (headcount, time) for activities that fall outside it.
- Acceptance that this produces conflict — people whose activities are reclassified as HRWLA will resist.
The cultural fix (exhortation, values statements, meeting audits) treats the symptom. The supply-side fix treats the cause: too many people chasing too little real work.
Relation to Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s original formulation (1955) observed that bureaucracies grow independently of the work they do. HRWLA is the individual-level expression: each person in an overstaffed organisation performs the administrative equivalent of Parkinson’s inflation. The supply of real work is fixed (or grows slowly); the demand for something to do grows with headcount; HRWLA fills the gap.