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Education/advocacy

Organisational theory generally

Systems analysis:

• For good: Systems theory — Donella H. Meadows
• For bad: Systemantics: The Systems Bible — John Gall

Solving the future: a philosophical battle between:

• Reductionism: We can solve the future by policy/taxonomy/data/tech:
• Pragmatism: We cannot predict emerging risks — we need flexibility and expertise to make risk decisions out in the view we can manage every risk by policy.
• A mixed approach required: Make BAU as standardised, preengingeered cheap and no-nonsense as possible; leave the frontiers as clear and flexible as possible.

• BAU: Toyota Production System
• Frontier: Normal accidents

Approaches which get this wrong: anything which obliges humans to rekey, fill out forms, attest, certify as to BAU: this is should be automated

• Reg tech which tries to do the hard stuff and requires humans to do the clerical stuff: which forces humans to be form-filler-outers
• Policy as a problem: if you codify get machines to do it. If you need humans to do it, you need to keep the rules simple and clear.

The role of legal

• Not part of the operational stack
  • The two modes of legal: farming and building a frontier
  • Farming: Toyota production system
  • Frontier: normal accidents
  • The line betwixt: triage

Persuasion and effective communication

• Client communications
• Legal documents as tools of persuasion: the different functions of legal contracts at different parts of their life cycle
• Negotation
  • Commitment signalling: understanding the psychology of negotiation
  • Negotiation hacks: Getting *their* business onside, and reframing the debate between their business and their legal
  • People power: The value of interpersonal relationships. Go see the client. Build rapport. Call them. Then put it in writing.
• The nature of catastrophic risk is that it is not what you are looking at

• Drafting hacks to make something more agreeable

The basis between risk management systems and legal docs

• The value of standardisation of operational controls

The smart contract concept and how it is a metaphor The division of labour: a process that requires manual checking is a bad process.

• • Example: termsheet/contract/closing memo. If you're rekeying you're wasting effort. Structure your agreement so it is a closing memo.
• How to turn legalese into plain language
• Meetings
  • As lazy/selfish by convenor
  • As inefficient/wasteful
  • As defusing of responsibility
  • As being uneasy peace/timid consensus
• Legal documents and policies as doing the same

Tools and resources

• Problem solving toolkit

Projects

• Standard document prettifier
• Triage tools
  • Putting something in the way of lawyers to ward off stupid questions from contractors and reinforce vertical command lines
• Process simplifiers
  • Removing pointless tech
  • Waste removal: identifying common gives and eliminating escalations