Opening
Foreword
These four texts defend a single argument, from four angles.
Judgment has become the scarce resource of expert organisations. We do not know how to measure it. Nor do we know how to pay for it, and we have built nothing that takes account of it. And we go on investing heavily in output, which has just ceased to be the limiting factor.
The first essay makes the diagnosis. These organisations have never been able to explain why a piece of work is good. They only knew who was good, and artificial intelligence has just made that substitution difficult.
The second looks at what becomes of those who produced that work. Their profession splits into two halves, only one of which keeps its value, and the great majority of management systems measure the other.
The third becomes economic. Speeding up one half of a two-speed system does not speed it up, it builds a queue, and value then migrates to the quality of the sorting.
The fourth is speculative and owns it. It asks what becomes of a research organisation whose every structure answered a scarcity that has just disappeared.
None of these texts supplies a method. They put questions and propose frames. The instruments are another piece of work.
A word, while I am at it, on method. The scenes reported in these pages are compositions. They gather situations met in different contexts, years apart, and none reproduces a particular meeting, team or house. Whatever would have allowed anything to be identified has as a rule been removed or displaced.
What is described here is a condition common to expert organisations, and I believe it general enough for every reader to recognise their own in it. A diagnosis one could pin on a particular house would not say much. This one holds because it holds almost everywhere, including in the houses where I myself have at times served.
One last point, since these texts examine arrangements closely. I served them before describing them. Reputation systems, the rubrics that measure output, the committees that decided without writing down their reasons, the dashboards that counted volume. I worked inside them and I helped keep them running. They were the rational answer to a scarcity that held for three centuries and has just moved. Nothing that follows reproaches them for having existed.