the magic button

worries about the strategic use of everything

Apologies for the non-appearance of Wednesday’s post, and Friday before that – life intervened in the form of a bunch of conference travel. While at a finance conference this week, I got to thinking about the differences between private and public sessions, which in turn reminded me of an invention which I came up with at another conference last year, which I’m sure will make my fortune as soon as I can vibe-code it.

This invention, which is surely worth billions, takes the form of an add-in for Slack, Teams or similar corporate chat and communication systems. It’s called “The I Never Said That Button”.

As the name suggests, you click the button and a text field pops up for you to enter a short description of a concept, view or implied promise which you would currently prefer to have have never said, but which you suspect that the Slack or email archive may contain text which kind of looks like you did say it. Using LLM technology, the add-in scours the complete record, deletes anything that looks like the thing you never said, then replaces it with automatically generated innocuous and noncommittal text.

Obviously, there will be disclaimers needed to warn against its use in regulated financial institutions or government departments subject to Freedom of Information requests. And equally obviously, this isn’t a mass market product; I was thinking of starting the pricing at $10,000 and restricting the licences so that in any organisation, you can be reasonably sure that only the boss has one. (“Only the boss has one” is a key part of the value offering of course, and I’m thinking of trademarking that phrase as a subsidiary marketing slogan).

I joke, I joke of course.

But the policy of this ‘stack is always to take jokes seriously and metaphors literally, because you will often be surprised at what you learn. And in this case, it is interesting to consider why an “I Never Said That Button” might be a joke worth telling.

Denying that you said something, when you did, is a sin as old as management itself; it is a core function of being a boss. Lots of leadership styles rely on projecting a level of certainty and commitment which really isn’t consistent with the tendency of the world to change.

I don’t think anyone necessarily paid attention to the possible consequence of making this kind of normal management behaviour so much more difficult, when we moved to a world of largely text-based communication.

And it’s also affected the communication itself. Anyone who’s been active on social media for a while is likely to have on occasion caught themselves in the act of rephrasing something defensively. There are plenty of times when it’s appropriate to write on the basis that your words will be given the worst possible interpretation by your worst enemy at the worst possible moment. There just didn’t used to be so many use of them.

The strategic use of communication is something I’m going to be writing quite a bit more about over the next few weeks, because it’s a subset of strategic behaviour more generally, and I think that if we look hard at this kind of subject, we might find the source of quite a lot of our problems of governance and state capacity.

I wrote about “Pre-emptive risk aversion and state capacity” back in April, and I’m beginning to think the concept might generalise. The problem with the regulatory state and abundance might not be the regulations themselves, but the way in which the regulatory system facilitates strategic behaviour. (A major factor in the Sheephouse Woods Bat Structure, our favourite example, was the utterly cynical use of Tree Protection Orders by Buckinghamshire Council).

And since I’m on record in that context as saying that a huge amount of the problem of state capacity is caused by the absence of informal communication channels which can be used to discuss problems and solutions before commitments and decisions are made, I think the fact that we’ve structurally directed public regulatory bodies to only use archived text – the very worst possible medium for informal or preparatory discussions – could be very relevant.

Maybe Stafford Beer was on to something when he argued that the key tool of management cybernetics was a room full of cigars, comfortable armchairs and whisky.