We all have an unconscious bias that says that up is good and down is bad. Lakoff and Johnson expand on this in their classic book “Metaphors We Live By”.
- Happy is up (“that boosted my spirits”) and sad is down (“I’m depressed”).
- Conscious/awake is up (“time to wake up”) and unconscious/sleeping is down (“dropped off to sleep”).
- Health is up (“the peak of health”) and sickness is down (“he fell ill”)
- Having control is up (“on top of the situation”) and not is down (“fell from power”)
This may well explain why we have such difficulty with the idea of limiting work in progress. We can all see rationally how having fewer items in progress will give us better results such as faster delivery, and higher quality, and yet we continue to pile more and more work on our plates to be busier. More is up and up is better.
This is one of those cases where down is measurably better than up and yet we’re deeply wired to believe the opposite.
Our natural biases don’t always work in our favour. Sometimes it takes deliberate effort to override those to get the results we really want.