Substance and form

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The existential dilemma — the paradox — of form and substance was first adverted to in Otto Büchstein’s now largely forgotten tragicomic opera La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza (often performed, if performed at all, in German, as Die Eroberung der Form durch Substanz).

Process as a proxy for content

The modern world is blighted by the comforting embrace of tickable boxes, checkable checklists, and auditable trails, all of which give their comfort by taking the easy road: rather than evaluate the qualities of your organisation, tally up its countable dimensions, however superficial they are.

There is a logic to this: the power of big data is their emergent properties: you can extract from a mass of data qualities you can’t see from individual instances. That one kettle goes on at 4:30 in the afternoon signifies nothing in particular; that fourteen million do tells you it’s half time in the football.

This is a correlation, though, not causation, and it won’t flow the other way. Just because you put the kettle on at 4:30 doesn’t mean you were watching the football, however likely it might seem. Probability is an is, not an ought.

Hume: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”.

The JC: you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought”.

Substance	Form
Lord Denning	The doctrine of precedent
Heuristics	Algorithms
Structuring	internal audit
Legal	Compliance
Anything fun or interesting in the world	HR, COO, Management consultant, middle management

Format as a priority over purpose

The paradox of fashion. The community will from time to time be gripped by a delusion that an innovation has worth in and of itself, regardless of the purpose to which it is put, or the value that it generates. This is part of the explanation for the front part of the Gartner peak inflated expectations curve: people are fundamentally mediocre, unimaginative, but very good at glomming onto another idea and riding it on a wave of collective credulity. The dot-com boom, the NFT phenomenon, and the current conviction that blockchain will change the world are examples of this.

See also

• La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza
• Closely related to the technology paradox
• Policy
• Root cause analysis