Working faster by working slower

You know, it may just be me, but with my work as a professional web designer placing me in contact with the outcome of the new Sarbanes-Oxley laws that guarantee to break and destroy productivity in most U.S. based information systems shops, and watching the articifical introduction of slowdowns of technological systems, ranging from Microsoft XP being detuned for mysterious reasons, one gets the impression there are more things at work here...

My comments are purely speculative, but after watching government, industry, and management for many years now, I know that sometimes we can work faster by working slower.

What do I mean you ask?

Human beings, despite our many gifts, are notoriously inefficient with information and large systems. Witness the many deficiencies in recent months and years with technology, law, and ethical matters and you get the point.

The Space Shuttle Columbia accident, Enron, Worldcom, 9/11, and multi-gigahertz desktop systems combined with outsourcing, downsizing, and more efficient and streamlined organization structures in companies... How do these fit in with my argument?

Quite simply, when a society speeds up, chaotic influences arise. Compare America with a fast moving stream, and you get the point. If you increase flow rate, a tame river goes from being a placid and predictable beast and becomes a cauldron of chaos, destructive in it's potential and beyond human comprehension.

If I were a leader, or group of them, and I saw systemic problems and chaos occuring across wide cross-sections of society, with lives on the line and economies depending on things being predictable and managable, I would consider ways to slow down an economy.

How would you do this? Simply using a made up quality program to "help" make things better for a company with something like Sarbanes-Oxley, which has the potential of seriously bringing productivity and change rates down to very minimal levels for the time being.

I would also introduce technological barriers to slow equipment and people down, somewhat imperceptably, but with enough cumulative effect to be measurable and yet beneficial enough to help put the brakes on chaotic change rates.

The Sarbanes-Oxley law, of which I've considered to be poorly written and terribly executed may actually be a sheep in wolf's clothing, if my suggested theory is somewhat correct. The short-term pain may be justified in the long run.

Sarbanes-Oxley forces much more emphasis on taking time to design and then spend even more time in committee processes that reign in change. The notion of "control" is extreme in Sarbanes related worlds, and in my own business, getting work done has become an ordeal that is nothing short of frustrating.

I do know this... The extreme of any new change is difficult at first, and then things ease up over time. The hit on the entire U.S. economy from Sarbanes will be something we all talk about next year. If you don't know anything about it now, you will.

The effect of this is to give people more time and perhaps to introduce enough barriers to keep things well contolled, timed, and overseen enough to prevent chaos.

What sort of group could force such changes? I would say that a voluntary consortium of key members of society, ranging from government, religion, psychiatry, industry, and art would be the most logical group to come to some form of consensus.

Such a group would have access to real data and statistics that ordinarily are not available to the average person. But, given the effects of their decisions, such a group's existance can be inferred from looking at things systemically.

Perhaps I am way off base, but look at the effects of recent years and you get to wondering...

What are your thoughts on this issue?