NAB Erases The Duplication. The Work Is Less Cooperative.

There is something restful about the word “duplication.” It suggests two copies of a document, one of which can be removed without anyone having to work through lunch.

NAB plans to cut 2,500 jobs, about 6% of its workforce, in a restructuring reported by the Guardian. Most cuts are expected before the end of the year. The bank says it wants to reduce duplication and make decisions faster.

The people are quite precisely counted. The duplicated work has not been given a similarly memorable number.

That difference matters. A job disappears from a payroll when someone loses it. A task requires a little more cooperation. It must actually stop being necessary, become easier, or land on somebody else's desk. Only the first two outcomes deserve to be described as less work. The third is less staff with a vigorous internal delivery service.

The finance union says employees are already facing “unmanageable workloads.” That is the union's account, not an independently measured total of every worker's day. It is nevertheless an inconvenient detail to place beside the bank's reassuring noun. If there is already too much work, duplication has been disguising itself exceptionally well as things that still need doing.

NAB also says it will substantially reduce its use of consultants and outside contractors. That commitment belongs in the picture. This is not simply a reported plan to remove employees while promising an untouched consultant population. Whether the remaining organization can perform the work is still the relevant test. A smaller collection of people can be very streamlined right up to the moment somebody calls it.

The bank cites competition, a difficult economic environment and rapid technological change. The Guardian reports an expert's view that banking is undergoing a structural shift toward more digital work. None of that establishes that AI caused these particular cuts. The technology should not receive either the blame or a productivity medal on evidence the announcement does not supply.

Our driverless-car cartoon makes a related distinction: removing a visible role does not remove all the work around it. A bank's organization chart has the additional convenience of never displaying a queue of unfinished tasks. The boxes simply become fewer. On paper, everybody copes beautifully.

There may be genuine duplication to remove. If so, the improvement should eventually be visible in the work, not merely in the number of people left to handle it.

Until then, the announcement has demonstrated one kind of speed beyond dispute. It can get from 2,500 employees to an efficiency objective in a single sentence. The employees will have a rather longer journey.