The online Camino started in the beautiful Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port, right at the foot of the French Pyrenees. This time there was not a small get-together at the starting point and that was a good thing, because I wasn’t there either. I started the walk many thousands of kilometres away.

Every day, I walked the streets around my home and uploaded distances to a website. The process stayed trivial until the very end, but it also served as a constant reminder of the 17,000 km gap between where I was taking steps and where the pilgrimage was meant to occur, Fig. 24.1.

Fig. 24.1
figure 1

Gap between the walk and the pilgrimage

Full size image

A few days in, I received an email from the organisers with an ‘activity conversion’ list. It turns out that I could record time spent doing other (preapproved) non-walking activities in the real world, and then convert that effort into virtual kilometres taking me ever closer to Santiago de Compostela.

The list included an eclectic collection of seemingly un-pilgrim-like activities such as dancing and ping pong. My favourite conversion activity was housework. If I am honest, I was hoping I could reverse the conversion and exchange all of my 774 km for its equivalent of over 200 hours of housekeeping, and then be exempted from that much of it in the real world. Sadly, my partner didn’t buy it.

While I didn’t use any conversion, they lead to an interesting question: is walking a necessary requirement of a pilgrimage? If we can, as we mostly do, walk without it being a pilgrimage, could the converse also be true?

I could hardly recognise myself. Not so long ago, I had been enraged by an ad promoting a virtual version of El Camino, a couple of days into it I was taking pot-shots at the very nature of pilgrimages.

However, my heresy paid off in two ways. First, I now believe that it is in fact possible to do a pilgrimage without walking. This is encouraging news to those who have asked me how they too could benefit from a similar experience of a pilgrimage without the steps. More on this on Chap. 32.

Second, the intangibility of a pilgrimage and the physicality of the walk seem strikingly similar to the intangibility of work and the tangibility of tasks. Decoupling a pilgrimage from its walk set me up for attempting a similar challenge with work and its tasks.

Two signposts emerged in quick succession:

figure a
figure b

Along this line of thought it became clear that both, pilgrimages and work, stand to lose a lot when we reduce them to their most common metrics: distance covered and its outputs. The ensuing signpost inevitably followed:

figure c

I was on a roll and before I put my feet up for the day, another signpost came up:

figure d

That last signpost came out of the realisation that our predominant view about work, and thereafter the workplace, comes from, wait for it… our ability to work. But are there lessons about work worth learning from instances in which work can’t be done?

Imagine this:

It is 4:30am and you are awake and ready to go to work. You are starting the day early not because your commute is long, nor to finish early and sneak in a gym session before dinner. No, you are up that early to spend as much time as you can working.

If that sounds too keen or frankly unappealing, what if I also told you that you were not going to be paid for it? In fact, you will be trading objects for the privilege to work. Why? To have something to do.

This is not the plot of a post-Artificial Intelligence dystopian novel about a jobless society in which technology replaces humans. This was a case documented by researchers [50] almost three decades ago. This scenario happened in a prison where inmates would get up before dawn, exchange cigarettes and negotiate privileges to be able to do a job – for the sake of having something to do.

The job in question was to feed the fish in the fish tank.

Lessons from “a state of preclusion from engagement in occupations of necessity and/or meaning due to factors that stand outside the immediate control of the individual” [51], or occupational deprivation environments for short, would allow us to see work as more than a sum of its tasks. It could also help us design better places for when we do need to work.

FormalPara Footprints in the Snow

In Agatha Christie’s novel, Murder on the Orient Express [52] the motionless body of Mr. Ratchett is discovered with twelve stab wounds. As the mystery unfolds, we learn that a window of his train compartment was left open, suggesting the killer had escaped. But Hercule Poirot, the consummate detective, knew the killer was still on the train. There were no footprints in the snow outside.

While less dramatic than Christie’s train setting, workplaces can also be approached as crime scenes where the environment provides clues into the nature of work done in them. Amongst the many clues, one that is the loudest and most common across workplaces is that it’s all about productivity. But like in Mr. Ratchett’s case, the most evident clue is also a misleading one. Like Poirot, we know better.