Icarus and Apollo
The cause of and solution to Europeia’s management problems (Part II)
Written by hyanygo
(Part I here)
Personal capacity and its implications
When Aex became president I was a vocal critic. To those I confided in privately I was the most concerned with his history of bad man management. This, as the un-edited record on the forums and discord will show, has been the only consistent criticism of Aex that I’ve held. And I think I have been largely right on this over the years.
The issue then was that the personal capacities of workers did not match their portfolios. When both match the region disproportionately benefits and they don’t, we suffer, stutter and slow. This is nothing new. Senate confirmations are, for the most part, designed to interrogate and evaluate this matching.
What I think is new is a recognition that we do not have unlimited reserves. A Lethen from 2014 is a qualitatively different worker than the current Lethen. Lethen as a volunteer is a product of his time, and capability. And this is where I think we should make our first attempt at modelling what better management looks like.
We have, in general, four classes of worker:
1 Time-rich but incapable;
2 Time-poor and incapable;
3 Time-rich and capable;
4 Time-poor and capable
For each of these categories there are specific implications for leaders and managers. For the time-rich but incapable low value and monotonous tasks are best suited to them. It does not make any sense to allocate high value work to those who are likely to have a bad end product. For the time-poor and incapable it is probably best that they are steered away from the central workings of government. For the time-rich and capable we should reserve the most special of tasks. These are our demiergos. Europeia survives, sustains and is a success on the very few capable citizens in government. The time profiles of our capable citizens vary considerably, for example, on the one hand we have Aex (relatively time rich) with Sopo (relatively time poor). I suggest that those who are time-poor should not be trusted with bottleneck tasks. The time-poor, instead, should be trusted with the thinking that drives the intellectual heart of the region.
In agile methodology, there is a concept of “story points”. Loosely speaking this is where the task is given a weighting to reflect the effort that needs to be expended on it. I suggest that Europeia does a similar thing.
Story points
Europeia has no monetary budget for ministers to misuse, however, they do have manhours to misuse. Using a crude first-approximation, I do think it is possible to quantify personal capacity and in some sense, create a set of currencies for ministers to think about their projects.
In the Aex administration, Aex attempted to use (for all intents and purposes) a wheelbarrow full of Russian roubles to fund his radio ambitions. Pichto was not a successful minister. Pichto’s combination of capability and available time was clearly not enough. In Pichto’s case, whilst he had enough time, there almost virtually no capability to sustain a value-led radio ministry.
I suggest that we think of our four classes of worker as different currencies:
1 Time-rich but incapable;(Rouble)
2 Time-poor and incapable;(Rupee)
3 Time-rich and capable;(Dollar)
4 Time-poor and capable(Pound)
In this semi-concrete way we can total up any given ministry’s “effective budget” for the coming term. The budget is only meaningful when tasks are assigned “costs”. For example, the Grand Architecture Project was loosely thought of as an expensive project and using the currency model we have can an insight as to why it failed.
A time-rich but incapable citizen would need a staggering amount of time to approach a merely incompetently dealt outcome. I would guess that a class 1 worker would probably need to spend upwards of 30-hours a week just trying to keep afloat. Getting a time-rich but incapable citizen would be like being given close to millions of roubles for a task priced in dollars or pounds. In the currency model, I think it makes sense to have roubles to be able to be converted into dollars or pounds, but I think the exchange rate is rather pitiful. The exchange rate is not a global property but a property of the task at hand. The situation becomes much worse when we think of a class 2 worker. In the currency model, I don’t think the rupee has the ability to be exchanged for any of the three other currencies. If you’re stuck with a thousand rupees, you’re stuck with that.For the last two classes of worker, I think that tasks should be more expensive when priced in pounds. You simply just need more out of a class 4 worker than you would need from a class 3 worker.
To summarise, I think we do need to pay very close attention to the intrinsic capabilities of nominees far more and furthermore still, how the intrinsic-capability crosses with time-availability. I have presented a (crude) model for how to think about management in a volunteer game which in short:
-Categorises workers into (relatively) fixed currencies
-Assigns tasks value-amounts in particular currencies
This is a model that is, admittedly, in its early stages but it gives the correct answers when we look back to previous administrations. Administrations where highly-effective and time-rich citizen effectively cashed the fistful of dollars they had into a mind-bogglingly large amount of roubles and sank those millions into a project worth only, perhaps a few hundred roubles. The metaphor of currencies provides a narrative of horrific overspend and executive wastage.
In the next installment, I’ll look at how personal capacity and the themes in the first part offer a solution in matrix management.
Views expressed in the above piece are those of the writer and not necessarily representative of the Europeian Broadcasting Corporation
