Ed Schipul wrote an interesting post the other day entitled Tragedy of the Commons.
In summary, the tragedy of the commons is best explained like this: A dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen. — Wikipedia.
I think it’s a stretch associating the “Tragedy of the Commons” with cleaning a coffee pot. It sounds more to me like a simple story of teamwork. When I think of Tragedy of the commons I think of a limited resource that cannot quickly be replenished. Examples are fields of grass, a sea filled with fish, clean air, etc … not a clean coffee pot.
When it comes to repetitive chores I like to think that it’s usually the fault of the system and not so much the people. There needs to be an obvious reason for a person to do a specific chore or it needs to be so ridiculously easy to do – that the person will do it without thinking.
- Clean the coffee pot or your fired.
- Clean the coffee pot because you are on video.
- Clean the coffee pot or the office linebacker will pummel you.
If I had to suggest a sincere solution. I would agree with a suggestion that was made earlier. A coffee maker that makes a single cup of coffee. You make it, you enjoy it. The benefits of coffee pot cleanup are most obvious with this setup. The biggest con would be the amount of time wasted waiting on a cup of coffee to brew. We could share the responsibility of making a bigger pot of coffee but then we would be right back at square one.
That’s a simple setup; I am not sure how many groups out there can handle a more robust setup.
You could always assign all of the responsibility to one person, but what happens when that one person is too busy or even worse, out sick?
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