Meetings
- Define meetings
- Negotiate: determine outcome by agreement, with no intermediary (multilateral consensus)
- Mediate: determine outcome by agreement through agent (centrally cleared consensus)
- Arbitrate: determine outcome by reasoned decision of central agent
- Elect: determine outcome by majority vote
- You can't clap one handed
- Meetings never start on time
- The more people in the meeting the less efficient it will be
- The more people in a meeting the less effective it will be
- The more people in a meeting the less likely it is anyone willing say what they think
Systemic confusion
- Confusion increases geometrically with size. There is an event horizon where confusion overwhelms an organisation’s commercial purpose.
- Escalations (being formal communications along the ley lines of the organisation) create more aggregate delay, confusion, aggravation and second-order bureaucracy than they resolve.
Tedium
Tedium and confusion are related. They may be the same thing viewed from different perspectives.
- Tedium is a marker for waste and dysfunction:
- Boring activities are generally repetitive, unsurprising, mechanical, conceptually simple and of peripheral importance. Generally, boring activities could be mechanised.
- Boring activities that are not mechanised will be done badly or even perversely.
- All other things being equal, tedious activities should be mechanised. But a surprising portion of them are not.
Reasons not to mechanise tedious operations
Upfront cost: Given the upfront cost of mechanisation, necessary activities that are boring but not mechanised will either be not important or not properly understood. The former does not matter; the latter has the potential to blow up the organisation.
there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time, middle management spend on a task and its overall importance, i, to the organisation
Consensus
Consensus is uninteresting until it turns out to be wrong. The truth debate: “show me a relativist in a plane and I'll show you a hypocrite” is to confuse truth and consensus. A relativist who gets in a plane believes it will fly
Middle management
Middle management understands nothing. The process of ascending into middle management is to unlearn whatever it is you know.
- Hence middle managers are susceptible to conjuring tricks, shiny things and new technology. Any sufficiently primitive middle manager will be unable to distinguish a basic chatbot from magic.
Change, progress
Successful inventions do not make life harder.