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 a central proverb in dath ilani management.  Are three people responsible for something?  Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.

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 laws in slowtime, they don't run projects.

Even then, every single Goverance-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 goes into abeyance.  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.

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.

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 laws in slowtime, they don't run projects.

Even then, every single Goverance-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 goes into abeyance.  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.

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.

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 Goverance-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 goes into abeyance.  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.

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.

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 goes into abeyance.  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.

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.

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.