The Second System

After this lesson, the reader should understand:

• 01Distinguish the documented decision system from the operating one.
• 02Explain why divergence is structural rather than a compliance failure.
• 03State what a policy document can and cannot evidence about practice.

The clause everyone follows differently

Three managers apply the same emergency-leave clause. Their approval rates differ by a factor of four. Which of them is not following policy?

All three are following it. The clause conditions approval on "operational needs" and "prior usage" without defining either, so each manager supplies the missing definitions from experience. The variance is not deviation from the policy — under any audit against the document, all three would be cleared, because the document cannot express the thing they actually differ on. Nothing in the institution's records distinguishes the strictest manager from the most permissive, and nothing would have surfaced the difference until an automated system was handed the same clause and forced to pick one of the three.

• Is the operating system a failure of drafting, or a property of institutions?
• If practice has diverged consistently for a decade, which system is the policy?
• Who is accountable for a rule nobody ever wrote down?
• Can an institution be said to consent to a rule it has never seen stated?

Locate one divergence you already know about.

1. 01Name a decision where you know practice differs from the written rule.
2. 02Write the rule as documented.
3. 03Write the rule as actually applied.
4. 04Identify what the document leaves undefined that practice has silently defined.
5. 05Note who would have to approve the practised version for it to become policy.

• Resilience engineering — work-as-imagined versus work-as-done (Hollnagel).
• Behavioural theory of the firm — bounded rationality and adaptive routines (Simon; Cyert & March).
• Organisational ethnography — the study of informal practice.
• Operational Logic, §3 — the latent decision system.