Mildly tangential sequel to my response to Apenwarr’s Every layer of Review last week.

How I failed to internalize the lesson

I have probably heard “ask for forgiveness and not permission” more than a hundred times in my life. In business books, in business articles, in “getting stuff done” type of Effective Altruism Forum and LessWrong articles. But I never managed to internalize the lesson properly, before now. Why?

I think one problem has been compliance. Not compliance with the law or the organization but compliance with expectations. I internalized this belief that I need to perform other people’s, my employers, other stakeholders expectations.

The problem here is two-fold:

if you perform too much, you get a bunch of problems related to self-sacrificing, not having boundaries, etc. We won’t go in-depth into this today.
On the other hand, if you are performing expectations and not what the counterparty values, you are basically spinning your wheels for no-ones benefit.

I think the rational case is to perform either your own values, your counterparty’s values, or a compromise between them. But the compromise need not include but the bare minimum of expectations. If they actually value that you perform something according to a specific standard or the standard is important for work output, this should be visible.

So then, let’s explore the question of why do organizations expectations shift from their values over time?

Processes as band-aids for failure

Lets take as our starting point an organization that is trying to achieve some goal. Let’s say they are building a SAAS app. Then a mistake happens; a production vulnerability is exploited, automated billing does a large mistake, or someone is fired illegally. And then this mistake has a cost to the organization.

A common reaction to something like this happening, is to add a process step that is supposed to catch this type of mistake. Vulnerability scanning, code review, approval layers in firing processes.

At first, this might work just fine. You add one step of process, and it lessens the probability of a significant mistake. Time goes by. A mistake happens again.

Guess what. The organization will naturally want to add another step of process.

It is easy to imagine that when you take this into the limit, the process becomes unbearable. So what do you do? You refactor the process to have more steps, and continue.

Demming, and Apenwarr through reading his work, noticed the problem with this: Often the addition of the step is not good for business outcomes. This relates a lot to the themes present in Apenwarr’s post from last week, my response, and especially Apenwarrs older essay on Demming’s idea of quality in manufacturing.

Sometimes this is just because steps have costs. But there are also second order effects: Humans will leave mistakes in, because they mentally trust that someone will catch them.

Processes as a playing field:

As the excellently written Gervais Principle states, there are also other factors that make people add processes, and also add layers to the organizational hierarchy. For individuals actually optimizing for their personal goals, the “sociopaths” in the Gervais Principle frame, the organization is a playfield. They do not care about the organizations stated values. Reductively, let’s assume here that they mostly care about their own position in the organization, climbing to a better position, keeping the position.

Organizational hierarchy and processes offer an effective playing field when you actually see the reality. Some people follow the rules as written. Some people follow the organizations stated values, because they are clueless. Some people just try to get by, since they are losers. (But because they are not effectively trying to transform the playing field, it’s the sociopaths who get to hold the reins.)

So the people in the organization who do the real decisions on what new processes and other mutations to induce, are often playing to their own values. This means that they will aim to transform the processes and the structure in ways that benefits them. The benefit to the organization’s “values”, its real world output, and its employees is orthogonal to this.

What does this mean for processes

So this means that often when you have a process, it’s either created because it benefits someone, or because it’s a bad stop-gap for a real problem. And the stop-gap processes are more often harmful than beneficial. (Even when the process steps output is beneficial, the effort included in following it can lead to compliance being net harmful.)

So how do you solve this problem?

On an organization side, I guess you should read your Demming, and integrate quality into your process, instead of adding layers of steps where the process performs quality control. You should also realize that many decisionmakers are not playing to the “organization’s values”, not the stated ones nor the coherent extrapolated values of the organization. (If your organization is more aligned to it’s mission you should expect less of this second kind, but keep your eyes open. Constant vigilance!)

As an individual, you should take into account the info from above, and realize that often the probability mass is on the side that implies rigid compliance to processes is suboptimal.

I don’t think the obvious implication is to ignore every process that the organization has.

The implication is that you should be mindful of which processes you follow, and which you do not.

Asking for forgiveness, and not permission

What does it mean to ask for forgiveness, and not permission?

I don’t think it means to put zero thought into what the consequences of the action are. But often the situation is such that if the action seems reasonable, then you will be forgiven. (Disclaimer: If you cross some lines you will most likely get fired and possibly put into prison. Be competent in your mindful consideration.)

Takeaway: If it makes sense to you and the organizations goals and doesn’t harm anyone consider asking for forgiveness, and not permission.

Claude’s takeaway: The process is a proxy for the organization’s values compressed with external constraints, and drifted proxies don’t deserve the deference we give them. The person who bypasses drifted process to serve the underlying goals is more aligned than the person who follows faithfully.