Relevant section of Project Lawful, on how dath ilan handles accountability in large organizations:
“Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one: How to have anybody having responsibility for anything.”
Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something. If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for it. This is the proverb of dath ilani management. Are three people responsible for something? Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.
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Dath ilani tend to try to invent clever new organizational forms, if not otherwise cautioned out of it, so among the things that you get warned about is that you never form a group of three people to be responsible for something. One person with two advisors can be responsible for something, if more expertise is required than one person has. A majority vote of three people? No. You might think it works, but it doesn’t. When is it time for them to stop arguing and vote? Whose job is it to say that the time has come to vote? Well, gosh, now nobody knows who’s responsible for that meta-decision either. Maybe all three of them think it’s somebody else’s job to decide when it’s time to vote.
The closest thing that dath ilan has to an effective organization which defies this principle is the Nine Legislators who stand at the peak of Governance, voting with power proportional to what they receive from the layers of delegation beneath them. This is in no small part because dath ilan doesn’t want Governance to be overly effective, and no private corporations or smaller elements of Governance do that. The Nine Legislators, importantly, do not try to run projects or be at the top of the bureaucracy, there’s a Chief Executive of Governance who does that. They just debate and pass laws, which is not the same as needing to make realtime decisions in response to current events. Same with the Court of Final Settlement of which all lower courts are theoretically a hierarchical prediction market, they rule on issues in slowtime, they don’t run projects.
Even then, every single Governance-level planetwide law in dath ilan has some particular Legislator sponsoring it. If anything goes wrong with that law, if it is producing stupid effects, there is a particular Legislator to point to, whose job it was to be the person who owned that law, and was supposed to be making sure it didn’t have any stupid effects. If you can’t find a single particular Legislator to sign off on ownership of a law, it doesn’t get to be a law anymore. When a majority court produces an opinion, one person on the court takes responsibility for authoring that opinion.
Every decision made by the Executive branch of government, or the executive structure of a standardly organized corporation, is made by a single identifiable person. If the decision is a significant one, it is logged into a logging system and reviewed by that person’s superior or manager. If you ask a question like ‘Who hired this terrible person?’ there’s one person who made the decision to hire them. If you ask ‘Why wasn’t this person fired?’ there’s either an identifiable manager whose job it was to monitor this person and fire them if necessary, or your corporation simply doesn’t have that functionality.
Keltham is informed, though he doesn’t think he’s ever been tempted to make that mistake himself, that overthinky people setting up corporations sometimes ask themselves ‘But wait, what if this person here can’t be trusted to make decisions all by themselves, what if they make the wrong decision?’ and then try to set up more complicated structures than that. This basically never works. If you don’t trust a power, make that power legible, make it localizable to a single person, make sure every use of it gets logged and reviewed by somebody whose job it is to review it. If you make power complicated, it stops being legible and visible and recordable and accountable and then you actually are in trouble.
The basic sanity check on organizational structure is whether, once you’ve identified the person supposedly responsible for something, they then have the eyes and the fingers, the sensory inputs and motor outputs, to carry out their supposed function and optimize over this thing they are supposedly responsible for.
Any time you have an event that should’ve been optimized, such as, for example, notifying Keltham that yet another god has been determined to have been messing with his project, there should be one person who is obviously responsible for that happening. That person needs to successfully be notified by the rest of the organization that Cayden Cailean has been identified as meddling. That person needs the ability to send a message to Keltham.
In companies large enough that they need regulations, every regulation has an owner. There is one person who is responsible for that regulation and who supposedly thinks it is a good idea and who could nope the regulation if it stopped making sense. If there’s somebody who says, ‘Well, I couldn’t do the obviously correct thing there, the regulation said otherwise’, then, if that’s actually true, you can identify the one single person who owned that regulation and they are responsible for the output.
Sane people writing rules like those, for whose effects they can be held accountable, write the ability for the person being regulated to throw an exception which gets caught by an exception handler if a regulation’s output seems to obviously not make sane sense over a particular event. Any time somebody has to literally break the rules to do a saner thing, that represents an absolute failure of organizational design. There should be explicit exceptions built in and procedures for them.
Exceptions, being explicit, get logged. They get reviewed. If all your bureaucrats are repeatedly marking that a particular rule seems to be producing nonsensical decisions, it gets noticed. The one single identifiable person who has ownership for that rule gets notified, because they have eyes on that, and then they have the ability to optimize over it, like by modifying that rule. If they can’t modify the rule, they don’t have ownership of it and somebody else is the real owner and this person is one of their subordinates whose job it is to serve as the other person’s eyes on the rule.
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‘Nobody seems to have responsibility for this important thing I’m looking at’ is another form of throwable exception, besides a regulation turning out to make no sense. A Security watching Keltham wander around obviously not knowing things he’s been cleared to know, but with nobody actually responsible for telling him, should throw a ‘this bureaucratic situation about Keltham makes no sense’ exception. There should then be one identifiable person in the organization who is obviously responsible for that exception, who that exception is guaranteed to reach by previously designed aspects of the organization, and that person has the power to tell Keltham things or send a message to somebody who does. If the organizational design fails at doing that, this incident should be logged and visible to the single one identifiable sole person who has ownership of the ‘actually why is this part of the corporation structured like this anyways’ question.
If one specific person in the Dutch government had been required to give the order to destroy the squirrels, taking full responsibility for the decision, it wouldn’t have happened. If there had been an exception handler that employees could notify about the order, it wouldn’t have happened.
Relevant section of Project Lawful, on how dath ilan handles accountability in large organizations:
If one specific person in the Dutch government had been required to give the order to destroy the squirrels, taking full responsibility for the decision, it wouldn’t have happened. If there had been an exception handler that employees could notify about the order, it wouldn’t have happened.