Process

Most projects here follow the same grammar. The destination changes. The operation does too.

The Hofflebrockian methodology is a way of working on a subject until something survives that can be used. It is not a single subtractive procedure. Some things are discovered. Some are designed. Some can only be negotiated.

A worked case

A customer asks for an entertainment center. The store does not carry them. Bar stools, same answer. And when the store learns that a competitor in town carries one of its lines, it drops the line rather than compete on price.

From the sales floor these look like bad decisions, and twenty years on that floor had not made them look better.

The method starts by refusing the easy verdict. Calling a policy stupid ends the investigation before it produces anything. The question that replaces it is what would have to be true for these to be correct decisions.

Taken separately, an answer arrives. A product no competitor carries is a product whose price the store sets, and in a market small enough that a customer can walk both floors in an afternoon, exclusivity may be the only defensible position available. The scarce resource in furniture retail is not customers but floor. Bar stools carry an enormous number of variations and return little for the space they occupy. Entertainment centers stopped being furniture when televisions went on the wall.

Both policies fall out of one objective. Maximize gross margin per square foot. Nothing there is irrational.

The reconstruction could have ended as an excuse, so it was tested against that objection. What survived the test was the opposite. Every cost these policies create lands where the report cannot see it: the customer who left without a name or an invoice, and the salesperson’s time, which the up list converts directly into lost income. The system is not irrational. It is under-instrumented.

Compressed: a policy looks stupid when its costs land on somebody who doesn’t write the report.

That claim is worth reconsidering if a store with the same policies turns out to be measuring walked customers and floor labor and keeping the policies anyway.

The full note: What Must Be True to Make This Normal?

The sequence

1. Classify

Decide what kind of thing is being worked on. Something that already operates and can be found. Something that must be made. Something that exists between people and can only be agreed.

2. Externalize

Put it outside your head. Text, speech, an image, a list, a scene, an object, a prototype. The representation is not the subject, but it gives the subject somewhere to be examined.

3. Establish the field

Absence means nothing on its own. Work out what presence would have looked like and whether you could have detected it. Then find what differs, what is missing, and what refuses to fit.

4. Choose the operation

Remove when the field is full of accidental or false forms. Select when candidates can be supplied and judgment is easier than invention. Add when the thing you need has to be built or grown. Negotiate when the form exists between people. Subtraction is powerful and it is not universal. When the right operation is unclear, compare the conditions and try the opposing move before committing to either.

5. Decompose

Break bundled questions apart until each one carries a single distinction. If answering requires a paragraph of explanation first, more than one question is hiding inside it.

6. Govern

Decide what cannot change without the thing becoming something else, what is free to drift, and who is responsible: who may propose, who may alter it, who checks it, who decides, and who pays if the decision is wrong.

7. Stress

Expose the result to contradiction, changed conditions, an independent reading, actual use, or time. A clean answer is not automatically a true one.

8. Compress

Keep the shortest form that can still rebuild the next action, and keep with it what evidence would make the result worth reconsidering. Brevity that loses the reopening condition has lost too much.

9. Re-enter

Put it back into the world. Use it in an artifact, an action, a relationship, a purchase, a decision. A framework that has never been used is not evidence that the framework works.

10. Escalate

A correction should reach only as far as its evidence. When the same failure keeps returning, or the repair works only by violating what the thing is supposed to be, reopen the larger assumption and test again.