Comfortable
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Office anthropology™
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Comfort
ˈkʌmfət (n.)
1. (Outhouse): A state of nonchalance towards a contingency that will never happen that an agent may reach upon payment of a suitable fee.
2. (Inhouse): Reluctant acquiescence, by means of a tacit acknowledgment that your immovable object really doesn’t have a prayer against the other guy’s irresistible force.
The beauty, for an agent, of the raging war between form and substance is the invitation it provides to stand on ceremony.
So, we implement process A, to deal with malign contingency X, but processes being only simplified models — derivatives — of the worlds they represent,[1] process A’s shadow inevitably falls 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 instances of contingency X. Such a process, which fails to address tail risks, is a bad process).[2]
We should expect process A to get in the way every now and then, when a contingency Y or Z comes about.
The options are:
(i) to run process A anyway, even though everyone knows it isn’t needed, or
(ii) to waive process A, invoking process B (the “process A waiver” process).
Either option has a cost: option (i) being marginally preferable because it is already costed in. Justifying option (ii) involves demonstrating 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 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: a subject matter expert — which we define as “one who understands the territory and therefore the map’s limitations” — can apprehend that what she beholds is benign contingency Y and make the substantive judgment that, while it is formally applicable, Process A is not substantively relevant, and thereby ignore process A.
This will upset two categories of people: administrators — which 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 when the map is disregarded”; and rent-extractors — those who stand to be gain by rigid application of the map, many of whom will be, of course, administrators.
This leads the JC to offer two models of operation: the protestant mode — being the first one, in which rules are rules, to suffer is divine, and rewards are presumed to be in the next life, since they patently don’t apply during this one — and the catholic mode — being the second one, in which you act now and ask for permission, or forgiveness, later.
Usually expressed in the subjunctive: You could get comfortable by being inclined to be supportive at this point in time — proverbial broomsticks propping up any number of escape hatches, barn doors, and manholes through which you could scarper, bolt or drop, were the circumstances to recommend it — there goes that subjunctive again — but through which you know you won’t have to, because should this whole thing turn to mud, so many other people will be put in the stockade before you that those lovely portals — still propped up by your trusty broomsticks, if you’ve played it right — will give your sorry behind all the shelter it should need from the forthcoming The tempest.
So — get comfortable in there.
See also
- I would be inclined to be supportive at this stage
- Subjunctive
- The map and the territory
- If in doubt, stick it in
References
- ↑ We take it as axiomatic that, the “real world” being analogue, fractal and complex, a process cannot perfectly map to a target contingency: to believe it might is to mistake a map for the territory.
- ↑ It is also the principle upon which almost all modern risk management is based, but that is another story.