This week I’ve done policy-writing and team-being-together-ing. The team getting together was excellent. I think in part it was excellent because most everyone already knew everyone else, so we didn’t need to do the work of building trust with each other before we got into the meat of what we had to discuss. That saves time. Building trust saves time when we have to move quickly, but you can’t build trust quickly. It’s an interesting little – not symmetry, exactly, but opposite? To go fast, first go slow.

Policy writing is fascinating to me. I did a whole six-minute speech on this to some colleagues. Policy is just the writing-down of the behaviour we’d like to see. Writing things down is not performative, though I think some of us policy-writers would like it to be so, and some of us believe it to be so. This is because the system focusses on getting the words right, and POSIWID.

Sorry, I’ve introduced two completely different ideas there and rudely not told you what they’re about.

Performative actions are acts where we perform something and in doing so make it reality. A nice simple one is a judge saying “You will be taken to prison,” because upon that pronunciation it actually happens. “I now pronounce you married” changes the state of the world from one in which two people were not married to one in which they are.

Judith Butler says gender is performative, and I think that’s a very interesting thing to think about.

Policy-writers can change the world from a place where an act is permitted to one where it is not permitted. But it will not change the behaviour of the people in the world, unless there are actors who will enforce it. The words will only be performative if the actions of the actors reflect that it’s true.

I’m getting quite tired of worrying about the very specific words I’m writing, and more interested in the…vibes, I guess? Of making the changes that are written in the policy. I think most people will only make change over time, and they’ll generally follow the spirit of a policy rather than its specific clauses. So the sooner I can get in front of people and say, hey. Please make these changes to how you do your job. It’s important. I know it’s a pain. I know we’re going to argue about it. Please do it anyway. Please. Please!

…the sooner it’ll actually start to happen.

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is an acronym¹. It’s well-loved in a management science called cybernetics. It argues that the purpose of a system is not defined by vision statements or well-meaning corporate values but by what the system actually does. If the tax system creates millionaires, then that is its purpose. If a social media company amplifies disinformation on behalf of foreign governments, then that is its purpose. And if an organisation argues its purpose is to ‘change the conversation’ or ‘create high performing teams’ or ‘secure investment’ and most of their work is on writing and publishing things then the purpose of the system is what it does, and all this system does is generate tyrannical editors and an obsession with ever-more-flowery language.

If the point of the system is to change behaviour then that is what we have to make the system do.

1. A true acronym, where you say the letters as a word, as opposed to an initialism, where you say the letters (NSA, FBI). Sometimes, for fun, if someone says that a thing is an acronym when it’s an initialism, I treat it as such.
   
   I know I’m obnoxious. You don’t have to tell me. ↩︎