Mis-specification
Sometimes putting numbers on things and contracting for delivery makes things much worse. My paradigmatic story about this was explained to me by an architect colleague. He specialised in relating business process to building function — a revelation to many of his clients. His example was the specification of office block buildings. Typically the specification will include the internal temperature of the building and some rather tight limits on the variation of that temperature in practice. No-one wants offices that get too hot or too cold, do they?
If the contract for the building specifies plus or minus two degrees, then there are things that must not happen, like people mustn’t open windows. If you ask the office workers themselves, they will be unanimous in wanting to be able to open windows. Yet, in prestige office blocks in London, windows are not openable. Just another nonsense outcome that no-one addresses because it is not their problem.
From my days working with supermarkets and foodservice companies, I can remember what the specification for a manufactured food product looks like. Often twelve dense pages of ingredients and permissible substitutions for those ingredients. But I saw a farmer complaining the other day that the supermarket specification for beef from his cows (less than 30 months old, fat in certain places and not others) did not allow him to produce tasty beef at all. His recommendation was not to buy supermarket beef, which chimes with where these blogs are heading.[1]
For a much bigger example I spent quite some time looking at the fitness for purpose of buildings owned by the NHS before they were financially engineered away. Some effort goes in at the design stage to building an estate that meets current and anticipated future needs, but the facilities management contracts after the buildings are commissioned are not based at all on fitness for purpose and do not mention health at all. I was told that a contract that was based around fitness for intended purpose would be impossibly expensive! Think about it.[2]
What these examples of contracts that preclude the purpose of the relationship show is a morbid lack of trust. You will be screwed unless you have legal redress, but the possibility of legal redress ends up destroying value. This is a specific example of the trust model I developed with John Smith, that shows how the dynamics of basing trust in mechanisms like contract lead progressively to zero room for manoeuvre.
We saw in last week’s blog post that the sort of governance and system structure needed to keep systems focussed on their intended purpose is both quite subtle and needs bold challenges to the overt purposes that will otherwise take over. In case you think this is a quibble:
Surgeon kills himself and confesses in his death note that his colleagues performed unnecessary surgeries. Other times he was told to withhold care he felt indicated. — Dr Leland Stillman
And quality systems
I once spent some time looking at food safety in the foodservice sector. The commonest source of food poisoning if you have a meal out in the UK is salad crops: lettuce, peppers etc. The way this was described to me is that if you go to Spain you will find vast warehouses packing fresh salad for particular customers. These customers have a pecking order based on perceived risk of sanctions. Tesco gets prime attention, smaller customers are less important in the scale of things.
The quality documentation is impressive. This crop was grown in this particular field. The fertilisers and pesticides that have been applied, and the dates are all listed and signed off. So far so good. However, there are competing pressures. Continuity of supply is absolutely vital. When there is not enough of a given product from the fully documented provenance system, there are always informal supplies available. You can rest assured that the documentation for these informal crops is every bit as good — it is just a fiction.[3]
What we want to note here is that as soon as you reach the edge of the properly documented product, absolutely nothing is known about provenance and microbiological safety. The safety does not degrade slowly, it goes off a cliff edge.[4]
As an aside, I developed a concept with academic colleagues to fingerprint areas of production in terms of their mineral signature. Then you could take a product that claimed to be from a particular field and say whether or not it actually was. That would have given, for the first time, a way of verifying that the official quality system paper trail was correct. As it turned out, that was a can of worms that the sector did not want to open up: reputation was more important than customer food poisoning. For what it is worth, the estimate is 5.5M cases of food poisoning in the UK each year.[5]
Working this through
There is a pattern here that is clear at least to me. All companies want to sell their goods and services to their customers. In most sectors there is oversupply — customers have some choice where to take their business and what sorts of products and services they want to engage with. Not everyone wants to do online gambling.
To win and keep customers, the appearance of the initial offer needs to be good. I need to feel that I am getting good service, reasonable products at a realistic price. This upfront character of the deal is however, short term. If Tesco get my food shopping business, what they need is to sell me products that I will go back for again. The ideal product is something I will be addicted to consuming, the way some people need to drink Coca-Cola.
“processed foods are “supernormal stimuli” purposefully designed to be addictive, and effectively outcompete whole foods on our tricked taste buds… but we can’t lump all processed foods together as being bad” — Dr Cameron Sepah
For the foodservice example, if people expect to be able to get salad with their steak no matter what the season, that is an addiction of sorts: and addiction to a level of service without thought to its implications.
The loyalty of customers trumps in the short term, repeat sales if you like, trumps any medium or long term implications. Specification of the short term transactional qualities trumps the longer term actuality. You can have stable temperature to work in and the fact that you can’t open the windows when you want to doesn’t come into the equation.
The major corporate ethical standards disasters of our era all take this pattern. Denying the health effects of smoking. Denying the climate effects of burning fossil fuels. Denying the health effects of a diet based on carbohydrates. Denying the destruction of the soil by using fertilisers and pesticides. We have spoken about this as predatory delay: raking in profit while you can and avoiding any responsibility for the damage you are causing.
Rape
Nora Bateson has written a long article recently called I Want You to Want Me to Want You [and vice versa]: The Simple Complexity of Sexual Consent. Probably sexual consent is the context in which it is clearest that specification is illusory. Consent gets talked about in terms of whether a yes or a no was articulated but Nora makes it clear that this, while important, does not even begin to scratch the surface of the actual relationship and the implications of what is being consented to, or not.
The whole #metoo movement has raised the visibility of consent not being consent to the point where even the most insulated of the previous generation are aware.[6]
So many goods and services get sold using sex as a marketing ploy. It used to be blatant and now it is more subtle and subliminal. In the house I am staying at in France there is an old poster of an attractive young woman gazing with rapture at the latest typewriter! But it seems sex is the most extreme example of something that is not what it purports to be on the surface of things. This of course is the oldest story in the world and takes us back to our blog about projection and what we are capable of reading into a suggestive situation.
The #metoo campaign outed many Weinsteins. Typically older men with lots of power over other people. They all claim that what they had was consensual sex. After all, don’t all women want to have sex with them? Where is the problem? The pattern we noted above of selling us things that get us addicted in one way or another is instigated and run by the same characters. They know we want to buy what they have to sell, and they are quite capable of telling themselves that what we buy from them is in our own interest.
And we are quite capable of rejecting that proposition if it’s phrased/presented differently. Robin Hanson ran a series of twitter surveys using the soon-to-be-Oscar-and-Bafta-winning film A Star is Born as a McGuffin. He presented the plot without revealing its source and asked whether it was socially acceptable. He received a resounding rejection, right through to wondering how he dare pose the questions. And yet, told well as a story that obscures the objectionable elements, it’s a socially-acceptable award-winner and nominee for best picture, best screenplay, best leading and supporting actors…
The same power is used to instigate economic slavery[7] of all kinds and the existence of so many (70%?) bullshit jobs is testament to the importance of holding people in slavery rather than doing anything useful with their time and commitment. The slaves of the deep south[8] knew they were slaves and had various kinds of mutual support to deal with the situation. The modern situation is less clear yet: it is only major events like the bank bailout that seem to raise people’s consciousness. There is an old hippy phrase: raising consciousness. How have we managed without it.
Sex and specification
My understanding of the history of the golden age of Rome, is that powerful men had catamites:
a catamite was a pubescent boy who was the intimate companion of a young man, usually in a pederastic relationship — in the broadest sense. — Wikipedia
These relationships were affectionate and largely monogamous. In today’s society the same behaviour will get you murdered in prison. Times change, morals change, the modes of power change, particularly because power always finds a way.
Where specification is a mode of power, it will be used to keep other parties in a subservient place. The contractual mode of big public contracts and the operations of major corporations typically are in this place of exerting power rather than getting anything done. I worked on Crossrail twenty years ago and its level of competence has continued to decline!
What I am recommending here is that we use sexual consent as a model for understanding what we are being asked to do. There were plenty of comments flying around Twitter about the fate of Julian Assange, to the effect that the UK is the USA’s bitch and Australia is the USA’s bitch. I find the strident language cuts to the heart of the matter quite effectively. Whose bitch are you?
If you think you can specify a product so that it is high quality and meets users needs, think again. I once looked at the specification for a big fancy new database engine on which to do data mining for health policy insights. The specification, of which the technical author was very proud, said that the data in the database must be of high quality! When I asked him what that might mean he took offence very quickly.
If our mental model of specification is the analogy with sexual consent, especially if we really care about either end of the analogy, then we won’t get tempted down a legalistic “we have to be very precise” road and the exhaustive listing of properties.[9] Try that with your nearest and dearest and see how far it gets you.
But please also do the other thing, and look at some of the products you buy. Ask yourself where your real needs got taken into account. Remember cars are only crash tested with male dummies and drugs are not tested on women because their hormonal cycles make that too expensive. We need relationship and trust to be full spectrum, especially when we think we don’t.
[1] Indeed, on a recent work trip to Houston I ate steak bought at a high-end supermarket. Grass-fed ribeye, the man said, and we paid a pretty penny for four steaks of enormous size. Tough, tasteless, and not worth finishing. Very sad.
[2] In a similar vein, I’ve seen contracts that pull themselves apart, where one half must be run for efficiency and the other half for opportunity, but which have been bundled together into a single contract. And a contract that was artificially extended to include both the maintenance of a legacy system as well as the development of a key new system. Needless to say, no happy endings in either case.
[3] Not limited to food records. Business Analysts often want to capture a ‘complete’ specification of a new system, and keep asking increasingly detailed questions until they can produce such a specification. Trouble is, of course, that most of the answers don’t exist, and can’t be known at the time of asking.
[4] Provenance and safety is the prime problem with the horse-meat scandal that hit Europe a few years ago, despite the press focusing on the emotional response of eating horses.
[5] Some cases of food poisoning have long-lasting effects; my girlfriend met a man on dialysis because his kidneys had failed following a bad dose.
[6] Maybe the POTUS is an exception.
[7] In the spirit of things not being what they purport to be, the rise of ‘modern slavery statements’ on company websites in the UK (throughout Europe?) suggests that economic slavery is entrenched. Similarly, the John Lewis Partnership recently rebranded as John Lewis & Partners (also Waitrose & Partners), perhaps foreshadowing the demise of their long-standing partnership model.
[8] As I understand it, theirs was also a form of slavery that didn’t classically exist, an American invention to prop up the failing Cavalier class.
[9] The opposite approach might also be enlightening. By opposite I don’t mean non-consentual. I mean the safewording undertaken by some/many sexual partners/communities. Consent exists only in the specific and the now, and maybe not always then.
