People are always chasing the latest fashion in thinking.

In 1960, the new fashion in thinking was Time & Motion Studies, what we’d now call efficiency experts.

Reducing everything to numbers was the fashionable way to replace actual thinking.

So Fords asked some T&M experts to look at their huge Dagenham plant.

The main finding was that the workers’ 10 minute tea-break could be cut to 5 minutes.

Their reasoning was, if you cut 5 minutes off every worker’s tea-break you’ll save many worker/hours across the whole plant.

While this makes sense in pure numbers, it fails to take humans into consideration.

10 minutes is only a short time for a break in an 8-hour shift, so cutting it in half feels petty and vindictive.

Naturally, the workers objected, but management went ahead anyway.

So the workers decided that if management was being unreasonable, they would be unreasonable.

Previously, in order to make the most of their ten minutes, each group of workers would send one person to the canteen with a tray to get all their teas, pay for them and bring them back to where they were working.

Now they decided to be as petty as management were being.

Each worker went on their own to the canteen to get their cup of tea, when they got there the line was enormous as each worker paid individually for their cup of tea.

This was in the days before decimalisation, when a cup of tea cost 3 pence.

So each worker paid with a £1 note, which meant the person serving had to give them each 19 shillings and 9 pence change, made up of a 10-bob note, two half-crowns, two 2-bob bits, a sixpence, and a threepenny bit.

Obviously, this took forever, and the 10-minute break now stretched into two or three times that long, for each worker.

just thinking about the numbers on their own hadn’t worked, they ignored the human factor and production suffered badly as a result.

The 5-minute tea-break was a Time & Motion disaster.

Ford had to return to the traditional 10-minute break, and when they did production increased.

Just looking at numbers on a page is seductive for management, and advertising is no exception.

Currently, major clients are being persuaded by media companies that repetition is a more efficient way to spend their budget than creativity.

They are told they don’t need a campaign of several ads, they can save the production money by shooting one single ad and using the savings to buy extra spots.

Which is why we see the same ads again-and-again-and-again every night in every single break until we’re absolutely sick of them.

The point is that media companies have misunderstood what repetition means.

They’ve ignored the human factor.

Sure, we should repeat the core message, but we should vary the executions.

Creative briefs used to have a section labelled OTS, this stood for Opportunities to See: roughly how many times the target audience would be exposed to a campaign.

We knew that an OTS of 50 was too many times for a single ad, people would get bored after about 10 viewings.

So with an OTS of 50, our campaign would need to rotate about 4 ads (all delivering the same core message) to avoid boredom.

But if all we do is look at the numbers, and exclude humans, we won’t see that.

We’ll think we’re being more efficient when actually we’re just boring people to death.

William Bruce Cameron was an expert on measurement systems.

He summarised the problem in a book, a simple introduction to sociological thinking:

“Not everything that counts can be counted.

And not everything that can be counted, counts.”