Template:M intro design protestant and catholic

It is the JC’s contention that above our heads — at a level of abstraction far beyond the molecular comprehension of our frail, mortal minds — rages an apocalyptic battle between the massed forces of form and substance. It is a battle, and a war, that the subject matter experts have been losing for 30 years (being the more or less the length of the JC’s career.)

Form versus substance in a nutshell

Form is the map: simplified, rationalised, modularised: it establishes, through followable rules, a safe passage through the incomprehensible thickness of the jungle. It tries to reduce complexity — scary, unmanageable, non-linear — to mere complication — fiddly, but tameable by punctilious attention to detail — by prescribing fixed rules and procedures — process — which may be followed even by those with no particular experience or expertise of the territory. As long as you can read, and are generally disposed to quickly and quietly doing what you are told, the only question which is asked of you in such a formal system will be: did you faithfully follow the rules?

Substance is the territory: the fractal, inchoate, indeterminate, dancing, organic mass of messiness in which we are consigned to play our mortal games. Without a map, there is only one way to navigate the territory: by knowing it. Given that it moves — like some diabolical, shapeshifting labyrinth, doors disappear, staircases vanish, chambers and oubliettes wink in and out of existence— knowing it is hard, and takes continuing application, investment, time, patience, energy and skill. A map is a proxy for knowledge, not a substitute: one who has the knowledge, and knows the territory — an expert — will bridle upon being told to use a map.

Put it this way: would you use a map to navigate from the station to your own home?

In any case these are quite divergent philosophies when managing risk in a complex system. Form has but one advantage over substance: unit cost. You don’t need expensive experts, who have invested the time and resources in understanding the territory, to follow a playbook: a school-leaver from Bucharest, with a suitable command of English and a sullen teenage disinterest in asking precocious questions, will do. Better, in fact, since experts do tend to ask precocious questions, and that really isn’t in the spirit of things in a formal world:

Formal organisation

Top down, the organisation implements process A, to deal with malign contingency X. Process A will be formulated and managed by an administrator, who need not, and usually won’t, be a subject matter expert.

Now, processes being based upon simplified models of the worlds they represent, process A’s shadow inevitably will fall across benign contingencies Y and Z: circumstances not needing process A, but which “it won’t hurt” to subject to Process A anyway.

(The alternative would be to implement a Process A', drawn wholly inside the boundary of malign contingency X, and whose shadow therefore didn’t fall across any benign contingencies, but which also did not quite cover all aspects of contingency X. Such a process, which fails to address “tail risks”, is a bad process).

We should expect process A to get in the way every now and then, when a contingency Y or Z comes about. When it does, the alternatives are to run process A anyway, even though everyone knows it isn’t needed, or to waive process A, by invoking process B (the “process A waiver” process).

Either alternative has a cost, the first being marginally preferable because it is already costed in. To justify the second one must show that the cost of obtaining the waiver will be less than the cost of just running process A, and so will result in a saving. This will, in turn, will trigger process C (the “justifying the cost of a new initiatives” process) which will, of course, increase the cost of process B, making process C, and therefore process B more likely to fail.

There is another way of doing things, of course: engage subject matter experts — which we define as “one who understands the territory and therefore the map’s limitations” — who can apprehend that this is a benign contingency Y and make the substantive judgment that, Process A is not substantively relevant, and thereby ignore process A.

This will upset two categories of people: administrators — who we define as “that class of people who are not subject matter experts, don’t understand the territory, fetishise the map, and therefore are aggrieved, or fearful, when the map is disregarded”; and rent-extractors — those who stand to be gain by rigid application of the map, some of whom will be administrators, but many of whom will be external professional advisers. (Often the waiver process might require, for example, a legal opinion: being a certificate from a specially-engaged subject matter expert that there is nothing to worry about.)

Protestant and catholic modes of organisation

This leads the JC to offer two modes of operation: the run-of-the-mill protestant mode by whose principles nearly all significant organisations are run — in which rules are rules, to suffer is divine, and rewards are presumed to be in the next life, since they clearly don’t apply in this one — and the much-talked-about-seldom-seen catholic mode — in which people who know what they are doing act immediately and. if need be, ask for permission, or forgiveness, later.

That always seemed more fun, open-minded and apt to uncover opportunities, and expose lurking risks, one might not find when following the same, mandated path home every day. The map may be linear, after all, but the territory is definitely not.

To be catholic is certainly to walk a high wire: there is no room for bluffers, fakers or know-nothings — they may ask for permission, but few will get it. But nor should you hire bluffers or fakers, and if you have hired no-nothings in your protestant strategy, you will be a long time finding a catholic path to redemption.

Adjacent possibles

If you run on rails you have no chance of the serendipitous interaction — the mythical water cooler moment, beloved of CEOs in their current mode of entreating staff back to the office — working remotely, in self-imposed physical exile, communicating only digitally, and in pre-arranged multi-party meetings with a standing agenda is about as railish as one could possibly be (hence the JC’s theory that COVID, and bring your own premises, brought to its logical conclusion/reductio ad absurdum the 40-year deprecation of subject matter expertise that has been the management modernists’ intellectual project.) There is no chance to bump into anyone, no raised eyebrow at the resting state absurdity of it all, no off-colour wisecracks to bring some humanity to the situation (AND JUST AS WELL, intones the director of human resources) — no opportunity to reimagine the way things are currently done.

Of course expecting creative sparks to fly from rocks as damp and browbeaten as most modern legal, compliance, risk and HR personnel is wishful, but the principle is surely right — only opportunities for unscheduled interactions, spontaneous, communication , an absence of an agenda, and unstructured play — designed, or at least permitted, system redundancy — gives the organisation any chance of serendipity.

The modernist agenda, though sees business as fundamentally soluble by data. There may be a dim appreciation that new business requires innovation, but managing the bau surely does not, beyond further refining, digitising and simplifying the process. Risk management is a matter of operational excellence, and operational excellence is a matter of following the rules as quickly and quietly as possible.

The JC has said it enough already on this site that it hardly needs being said again, but nothing for be further from the truth. The roll of honour refers. You don’t die under the wheels of a brand new opportunity. You die when something you thought was boring blows up. People riding on rails will never be able to stop boring things blowing up. They are doomed to be surprised by them.

Risk management as protestant, new business as catholic