In several mental health first aid guidelines, one of the steps is to direct the help-seeker to resources (suggest asking friends, family, professionals for help, reading materials on how to cope with the mental condition). This can provide an excuse to play hot potato: send the help-seeker to someone else instead of providing help. For example, the therapist or counsellor suggests seeing a doctor and obtaining a prescription, and the doctor recommends meeting a therapist instead.

The hot potato game is neither limited to sufferers of mental health issues, nor to doctors and counsellors. It is very common in universities: many people „raise awareness”, „coordinate” the work of others or „mentor” them, „manage change”, „are on the team or committee”, „create an action plan” (or strategy, policy or procedure), „start a conversation” about an issue or „call attention” to it, instead of actually doing useful work. One example is extolling the virtues of recycling, as opposed to physically moving recyclable items from the garbage bin to the recycling bin, and non-recyclable waste in the other direction. Another example is calling attention to mental health, instead of volunteering to visit the mentally ill at home and help them with tasks. Talking about supporting and mentoring early career academics, as opposed to donating part of one’s salary to create a new postdoc position, thereby putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.

All the seeming-work activities mentioned above allow avoiding actual work and padding one’s CV. Claiming to manage and coordinate other people additionally helps with empire-building – hiring more subordinates to whom one’s own work can be outsourced.

To motivate people to do useful work, as opposed to coordinating or managing, the desirable outcomes of the work should be clearly defined, measured, and incentivised. Mere discussions, committee meetings and action plans should attract no rewards, rather the reverse, because these waste other people’s time. More generally, using more inputs for the same output should be penalised, for example for academics, receiving more grant money should count negatively for promotions, given the same patent and publication output.

One way to measure the usefulness of someone’s activity is to use the revealed preference of colleagues (https://sanderheinsalu.com/ajaveeb/?p=1093). Some management and coordination is beneficial, but universities tend to overdo it, so it has negative value added.