One of the purposes of this newsletter, per the manifesto, is to contribute ideas and metaphors that stick in your mind, so here’s one that’s been hanging around in mine ever since I read it in an article about communal living (health warning; I came across this article while trying to find out what had happened to the local cult when I was growing up, which turned out to be a quite nasty example of the genre).
The phrase that stuck in my mind (and which now appears to have been a slight misremember) was that “a competent person is one who understands that cleaning the draining board is part of the job of washing up”.
To some extent, it’s expressing a similar concept to that of “technical debt”, the idea in IT systems that adopting a quick fix to a problem rather than spending the time and effort on a full system-level solution is deferring a cost that will need to be incurred at some point in the future. It’s also a very easy way to spot the difference between good and bad builders; people who have been properly trained will always understand that the job is complete when the site has been cleaned, tidied and returned to a usable state.
This isn’t a cybernetic concept, but it’s sort of cybernetics-adjacent because the key shift of perspective is very much one related to seeing individual tasks as part of an overall system, where there is a certain amount of work that is required to maintain the integrity and viability of the system.
In fact, though, of course, there’s nothing intrinsic to the task of dishwashing that means that cleaning the draining board has to be allocated to that same subsystem (just as it’s not intrinsic to the solving of social and economic problems that part of the job ought to be getting re-elected). In fact, you could organise things in a completely different way; both in the micro example of kitchen cleaning, and in the general case, you might decide to have a specialist team or function, with the specific job of carrying out the second-level maintenance work of restoring the overall system, separately from the jobs that needed to be done for their own sake.
At some points in Stafford Beer’s work on “viable systems”, he seems to me to be suggesting that this is an important analytical point, and the aphorism is wrong. Although you might organise the division of labour by saying that “cleaning the draining board is part of the job of washing up”, you need to analytically recognise that maintaining and optimising the system’s resources is a different function from using them, even if it might be efficient and incentive-compatible to assign them to the same person.
I think it's a good point that a repeating process is not completed until the system is reset to carry out the next iteration from the same starting point. Anyone or any team who can't comprehend (or do) this can't successfully carry out the process repeatedly and are therefore not competent.
I probably would make an analytical distinction between those steps which realistically have to be done every cycle (clean the board, put the tools back neatly) and which are true maintenance done at longer intervals (sharpen the tools, replace the chopping board)