Bushel and the Psychological Impact of Heavy Handed Management

Most people take better care of things that they own. This is true for physical things, such as cars. But it’s also true for tasks. For example, if you are working on a project that involves strategies that you came up with then you’re more likely to own those results and work harder towards them.

We also tend to take care of machines better, the more flexibility that you have with the machines. For example, if you lock the desktop background on a system, the user of that system is less likely to want to self-service any issues on the device (not that they can) and more likely to treat the device with the same level of care you might.

Restrictions in iOS are options that disable certain features. For example, you can disable the camera on a device. Bushel doesn’t support a lot of “Restrictions” for iOS. There are a few reasons for this. One easy reason is that we don’t want to muddy the interface with a bunch of checkboxes that spout tech jargon. Another easy reason we don’t do a lot of restrictions is then people don’t spend as much time trying to bypass the restrictions.

But the hardest reason to talk about is the fact that employees and Apple want people to maximize what they can do on devices. A user can’t break the operating system on an iOS device. So why lock the device down? It’s not like your cost to support the device is going to skyrocket because people are getting viruses as with other platforms. A user has a harder time breaking OS X with every passing year.

At Bushel, we do not like restricting things on iOS devices. We absolutely understand and respect the fact that in some cases you need to restrict things. For example, yes, the cameras should be disabled if you have visuals on the trajectories of ICBMs. Sure, works for us. But Bushel is built for smaller organizations. And we like to think that freedom is the fountain of innovation.