Don’t tick boxes

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Modern dogma writ large. In the mortal, unlistened-to words of tiresome Victorian librettist Otto Büchstein, La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza.

This disposition that ticking a box - fulfilling a formal requirement to have taken a step, followed a process, or sublimated an intractable hazard into a parametrised, traffic-light renderable key performance indicator should generate any comfort other than a false one, feeds on, just as it nourishes, related dogmas: of cost reduction, at all cost, that all unknowns can be known, that all vestiges of risk can neutralised, bifurcated, cauterised and eliminated to leave a pure, crystalline residue of concentrated reward. That history is at an end, that the universe can be brute-force computed, and the fact that it hasn’t yet is a minor inconvenience that we can tide over just as long as we check of few boxes and keep a clear audit trail.

Box ticking is tedious, in the technical sense of being intrinsically wasteful.

See also

Otto Büchstein’s dreary but important opera La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza.