En-route adventures and stunning landscapes along the real Camino have inspired books such as Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage [53], Hollywood movies The Way [54], and even award winning documentaries Walking the Camino [55]. As far as I know, nothing so lofty has come out of the virtual version and I think I know why.

My real-world route was dull, uneventful and it took me nowhere. It was a loop that started and finished at my home and ran along what once was a creek, but is now a concreted open stormwater drain, see Fig. 25.1.

Fig. 25.1
figure 1

Picture from El Camino de Santiago (top) and my stormwater drain Camino (bottom). (Top picture courtesy of Matthew and Heidi Smith)

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Expectations were low that such a dull route could deliver the stimulus necessary for a pilgrimage. What is more, this time around my appearance blended with that of other walkers on the suburban trail. I was an undercover pilgrim doing a virtual pilgrimage. However, I still followed the two self-imposed rules of my analogue version, walk alone and no distractions.

As I looked for other routes to provide some relief from the monotony of my loop, The Incline popped into my head. The Incline is a short 1.42 km long, yet steep trail in Colorado, US, with a summit that is a staggering 610 m higher than the start, hence its nickname [56]. Walking up the Manitou Springs Incline one time is difficult, so why would anyone even consider doing it 690 times? [57]

If you are quick with numbers, you might have already worked out that walking up 610 m a total of 690 times gets you close to a figurative altitude of 421 km. If you are equally adept at trivia, you would know that this is the altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) orbit [58].

Walking up and down a hill just short of 700 times over the course of a year is absurd and meaningless. Similarly, climbing the same hill until one achieves the same elevation as the ISS, is still absurd, but meaningful because you will have figuratively reached a destination – and a very cool one for that matter. So why would someone walk the same hill more than 700 times, 719 times to be precise? One reason is to beat the guy that reached the ISS, another is more symbolic: 719 is the Area Code for Colorado Springs.

Thinking about the absurd rivalry between two very fit guys searching for meaning in the Rocky Mountains allowed me to reframe my own predicament. I realised finding routes with more appeal than my stormwater drain would not make for a more meaningful pilgrimage.

I convinced myself to not only tolerate the mundane loops of my walk, but to also embrace them for what they were: another reminder of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the same mountain, for eternity. So when you look at it that way, I wasn’t just doing loops around my house, though that was exactly what I was doing, I was doing El Camino de Santiago Sisyphus style – and I loved it.

Adding meaning, if not purpose, to help people undertake routine tasks has not been overlooked by organisations who have rebranded the mundane as exciting. In lieu of going to the office every day, we are offered a chance to be a hero every day, see a clear path to success, engage in personal quest-based narratives and win prizes at work [59]. Such is the offering of a company using “all the mechanisms and strategies that make games exciting and addictive to sustainably drive employee engagement, learning, and performance” [59] an approach known as gamification.

The reason I think gamification works so well for those attempting a tough physical feat such as The Incline, or even walk the Camino online is the very same reason why I have reservations about its use in the workplace. Gamification can add meaning, even purpose, to otherwise meaningless tasks, but working at one’s workplace (not necessarily the office, as we shall see) should be the equivalent of doing the El Camino de Santiago in Spain – no need for added gamification. And so, an important signpost on alignment:

figure a

The use of gamification in the workplace might also suggest that work and tasks can not only be decoupled, as I had initially wondered, but that it might be inevitable.

It took me a good dose of meaningless and repetitive loops to arrive at a similar conclusion as the German sociologist and economist Max Weber reached in the early 1900s. Weber argued that to become more productive at a lower cost involves investigating every opportunity to make tasks more efficient [60]. This rational efficiency process, he noted, came at the expense of removing traditions, values, and emotions which were strong motivators within such activities.

Rational efficiency might well make an organisation more efficient, but conversely it could strip them naked. A compilation [61] of 30 of the most common rituals adopted by some organisations illustrates the process of re-introducing activities that may have fallen to this process. These include ‘Grow Days’ where employees are given a day off work to invest in upskilling, and ‘Critical Thinking Starters’ where meetings begin by asking a critical question.

Two signposts here are:

figure b
figure c

Weber had a lot more to say, eventually leading to his Bureaucratic Management theory [62]. Not long after, we would see the development of another management theory: Taylor’s Scientific Management [63]. Both theories set expectations about how work should be done and managed and continue to shape the workplace over a century later.

FormalPara Sisyphus’ Backpack: Carrying the Workplace

I didn’t pack anything for the virtual Camino. I had no need to carry clothes and with my warm bed nearby, I didn’t need a sleeping bag or to struggle with a wet tent. Most definitely, I didn’t need a backpack. This made me realise that the vast majority of the stuff that I carried to Sydney was intended to help progress the walk – with the exception of a notebook and a pen, which I packed for the pilgrimage itself.

Can we think about the workplace as a backpack, and consider its contents in relation to the role they play in supporting tasks (walking) and work (pilgrimage)?

I tried. But the clarity I had about the purpose of items I packed didn’t follow to workplace components. That a fish tank can be the embodiment of work, makes things too difficult.

Still, it was an intriguing exercise that I invite you to try. Unpack the components in your workplace and assess whether they help you progress a task, support work, or both. You may find the why behind each decision is more interesting than the item itself. If like me, you might end up with a list of items supporting tasks, which make up a ‘taskplace’; and another list, incredibly shorter, that makes a workplace.

At a time when many are questioning the purpose of the office, it might be best to offload the deadweight of items which add to a ‘taskplace’ and carry only those which make it a workplace.

As I uploaded my loop-earned kilometres into the website, I could see my virtual whereabouts being updated along the French route. Sometimes I had a look at the online map and I clicked on the street view to see the beautiful scenery that I virtually passed through and was left feeling a sense of joy, virtually. Virtually in both of its meanings: the computing of a simulation of the real world, and its other meaning of almost or nearly, but not completely, what it should be.