There is a newsreader on television. Serious desk. Serious lighting. Serious voice.
A small slip of paper is placed on his desk, marked as a bulletin, the kind that usually signals something important.
He does not read it privately.
He does not check what it says. Or whether it makes sense.
He looks into the camera and announces, with grave authority:
“I have just been handed a bulletin. It says… I have spinach in my teeth.”
He reads this with the same tone he would use for an earthquake or a national election.
No pause.
No flicker of self-awareness.
No sense that this is private, trivial, or frankly not news.
A bulletin arrived. Therefore it must be read.
The process has been followed perfectly. The thinking has been politely excused from the building.
It is a neat little example of what happens when process runs without the application of mind.
That was Ted Baxter, a character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a popular American sitcom from the 1970s. He was written as vain, sincere, and spectacularly literal. The joke worked because the world recognised him. He felt familiar.
When the World Starts Acting Like Ted Baxter
Once you notice this, you see it everywhere.
There is the automated apology email that arrives instantly and means nothing, like a sympathy card signed by a printer. There is the birthday reminder that replaces memory with a balloon emoji and a sentence that could be sent to your plumber. There is the form that listens very attentively and then explains that your problem does not exist in any of its drop-down menus. And there is the student who becomes excellent at passing exams without ever becoming particularly good at understanding anything.
In each case, the ritual is intact. The motion is correct. The meaning has quietly slipped out through a side door.
And then we scale this up and call it management.
The engagement survey is launched with much ceremony. People answer honestly. The dashboard is generated. Colours are admired. A number is announced. Everyone nods. Nothing changes. The organisation did not want insight. It wanted a temperature reading — preferably one that does not require treatment.
Organisational and Individual Goals behave in a similar way. What can be counted slowly begins to matter more than what counts. People learn how to hit the metric rather than improve the work. Throughput goes up. Quality goes sideways. Edge cases fall off the map. The system congratulates itself for success and sends an automated thank-you note.
The bulletin has been read. The spinach remains.
A Small Defence of Thinking
Systems are very good at repeating things. They like things neat. They like things predictable. They do what they are built to do, and they do it reliably. Over time this gives us tidy processes, friendly scripts, clean dashboards, and a lot of activity.
Meaning needs something else. It needs attention. It needs someone to notice what is actually going on and respond to that rather than to the checklist. It needs a small pause before the next step.
You can see the difference in people. Some are fully in what they are doing. If they are cooking, they are cooking. If they are listening, they are listening. If they are working, they are actually at work. Being around them feels steady. The moment feels real.
Others are doing one thing while drifting through another. Replying while half replying. Listening while half listening. Living while half being there. Attention gets spread thin across too many places and leaves very little behind anywhere.
The application of mind is simply paying attention before acting. It is the moment where you ask, “What is really going on here?” It slows things down a bit. It also saves you from doing the wrong thing very well. Application of mind while reading the bulletin turns out to be a good place to begin. In a world full of scripts, the application of mind feels like a small, quietly brave act.
