Chapter 1. Copied Procedures and Unowned Work

1.1Data and method

The records are NADIR's public list of question–judgment pairs, fetched by GET on 6 October 2026 (UTC) and kept in this study's folder. The list holds 1534 pairs. Every one has the status "hypothesis", and the studio files each under one of 10 layers and one of three phases of its research frame: erosion (2016 to 2025), collapse (2026) and transition (2027). Of the four authorship labels in the list, "NADIR hypothetical decision exercise" is carried by 496 pairs. The studio's note on its method says that this edition adds 496 agenda facets across 62 explicitly hypothetical situations, using 29 reusable two-option decision frames.

The selection rule is one sentence: this paper reads every pair in the layer "work", which the studio labels commitment and execution, in the phase "transition", that sets out options. The rule gives sixteen pairs, and all sixteen are hypothetical decision exercises. The layer holds 248 pairs, 197 of them in the erosion phase, 23 in the collapse year and 28 in the transition year; the 12 left out in the transition year are episode interpretation drafts, which have no options. The layer's exercises in the erosion phase (32) and the collapse year (8) are not read, so that every pair read sits in one year and one kind of record. A script checks the rule against the list and against the eight earlier NADIR studies in this series, which read 112 pairs together, none in the layer of work; none of the sixteen, nor either of their situations, appears in them.

The sixteen fall into exactly two situations, eight in each, and no other pair in the list belongs to either. In the first (the studio's situation 012), a new organisation starts by quickly copying the procedures of the previous organisation. In the second (situation 027), a small new team starts work quickly and has decided that everyone will help, without a division of who is in charge. Each pair has a question, a judgment of five sentences, a decision focus and two options, each option with a label, a benefit, a cost and a condition of use. All sixteen carry the horizon "future". By the studio's own title styles, 7 questions are noun phrases, 7 are statements and 2 are questions. None names a real person, organisation, brand, place or event.

Two cautions from the series' rules shape the reading. The first concerns the frame. The first sentence of every judgment is the pair's decision focus, word for word, and the other four are identical in all eight judgments of a situation. Measured by runs of five words that recur in the same field of three or more pairs, 82 per cent of the judgments' runs are frame, against the series' threshold of 30 per cent; the questions, the decision focuses and the options stand at 0 per cent each. This paper therefore reads each pair's own words in its question and decision focus, and each situation's four shared sentences once, as the statement of the situation, never as evidence that two pairs agree. The second caution concerns the options. Having two options, each with a condition of use, is a property the studio guarantees and is not a finding; what the options say is. The sixteen pairs use 12 distinct pairs of option labels; 8 pairs share theirs with another read pair, and in every such case the sharing crosses the two situations. Each pair of labels used here is used in the whole list by between 8 and 42 pairs, the pair read included, and 253 pairs outside this layer and year use one of them. The options are read as the studio's stock, set beside each question.

The records are in Korean. This study's editorial session put every string into English, sentence by sentence and with nothing added; the Korean stays the original. Every block quote is a sentence or field of that English, word for word, with a source line naming the pair by a short title and the field. Every count comes from a script that reads only the kept records; counts of wording were made on the Korean, on each pair's question and decision focus and, for the options, on their labels, by fixed word lists checked pair by pair against the text; only the measure of the frame was made on the English. The paper gives no advice to anyone founding, staffing or running an organisation; it reads only how a published set of synthetic exercises frames one kind of decision.

1.2Copied procedures: rules that outlast their reasons

The eight exercises of the first situation are invented, and what follows says only how they frame a decision. They frame the inheritance of procedure as a problem of reasons. A procedure arrives in the new organisation with its form intact and its purpose left behind, and the exercises ask, one after another, what happens when the form goes on working without the purpose. The situation is stated in the same four sentences in all eight:

The passage gives the whole situation its test. A procedure is not good or bad in itself; it is the answer to a problem, and the problem is what deserves to be copied. Two conditions decide whether the old answer still fits: whether the same risk remains, and whether the scale and the roles have changed. Feldman and Pentland separate the structure of a routine from the performances that bring it to life. The exercise draws a related but different line, between the document and the problem, and places the value of the routine in neither the form nor the performance but in the risk it was meant to meet. That shift is this paper's reading of the passage, not something their study says.

The first exercise, on a five-step approval moved unchanged to the new team, shows what goes wrong when the line is not drawn:

The harm the sentence names is the misreading of the delay: the risk has shrunk, the approval stays, and the slowdown is taken for a lack of capability. A procedure that outlives its reason can lead to a false reading of the people who carry it out. Hannan and Freeman count the faithful reproduction of structure among the important competencies of organisations. This paper's reading, which goes past their note, is that the exercise shows its other face: a structure reproduced faithfully in a new organisation can misstate the capability of the people inside it.

The second exercise, which judges a past reporting form by whether it helps present decisions, moves from approval to reporting:

Here the form survives on habit alone. Where Levitt and March see history encoded in routines, this paper reads the exercise as picturing a routine that goes on after what it was made for has gone, and as proposing the present decision as the test. The organisation here, in this reading, remembers too well rather than too little.

A third exercise, on old exceptions not explained to new members, turns to what the copied procedures do not say:

The title speaks of old exceptions that are not explained to new members, and the sentence says that a workaround only insiders know makes the published rules hard to trust. The newcomer sees the published rule; the insider knows the way round it. This paper reads the sentence beside Adler and Borys, whose line runs between formalisation that enables people to master their tasks and formalisation that serves to coerce effort and compliance. The exercise draws neither line: in this reading, a published rule with a private exception neither helps nor coerces, and the reading goes past their note.

Two exercises concern the decision to discard. One asks who should judge whether the previous system is to be discarded, and names the difficulty when it is left to the person who designed it:

The other gives even an experiment that removes unnecessary procedures a condition for restoration:

Read together, the two pairs put conditions on the decision to discard as well as on the decision to keep. The first names a collision between the designer's wish to protect a contribution and the present need; the second makes the reduction of excessive defence depend on a way back. In this paper's reading, a team that can undo a removal has less reason to defend every old control.

The remaining three exercises of the situation ask how much to build and what to write down. One warns against building every function at once:

Another observes that a form can exist and the work still stop, if nobody knows who judges and who passes it on:

The last makes the situation's test into a rule for copying:

This pair states, more plainly than any other, what the situation asks of an inheritance. In this paper's reading, a copy is good when it carries its own account of which parts are essential and which will be changed, so that at the next change the form alone is not insisted on. Winter and Szulanski speak of a template and of an Arrow core in replication; in this paper's reading, the exercise asks a new organisation to write down its own version of such a core when it copies its predecessor. The exercise on the form without a judge adds a limit: a form does not say who judges.

Across the eight, the procedures that come from the old organisation are treated as answers whose questions may have expired. Of the eight pairs in this situation, 6 name a procedure, an approval, a form, a control, a system or a rule in their own words, and 4 name the past, the previous, the old or the existing. The hazard they describe is that the new organisation remembers its predecessor's forms without its reasons; the remedies are to copy the reason, to test removal with a way back, and to keep operations to the scale actually needed. This is the first part of the paper's contribution: a reading in which inheritance fails by fidelity rather than by loss.

1.3Work held in common: tasks that nobody owns

The eight exercises of the second situation are invented as well, and they frame the work of a small new team as a question of ownership. The team has agreed that everyone will help. The exercises do not doubt the agreement or the people who made it. They ask what becomes of the work that the agreement places with everyone, and therefore with no one in particular. Their common statement reads:

The passage divides the team's work in two. The work of exploring can stay fluid; the work that repeats cannot. For the second kind, the passage asks for two names, not one: a person in charge and a substitute. The demand for a substitute stands in all eight judgments and is read here once. Rizzo, House and Lirtzman develop measures of role ambiguity, which the literature they cite links to dysfunction. The situation is ambiguity by consent, and the passage does not ask the team to give up the consent. It asks only that the work which must continue be lifted out of it.

The first exercise, on the tidying-up that remains to the very end in the name of everyone's work, names the mechanism of the danger:

The title speaks of a tidying-up that remains to the very end, and the record does not say who does it. The sentence makes a claim about language: the words “anyone can do it” can become the condition in which no one takes responsibility. Karau and Williams find that individuals tend to expend less effort in collective work, a tendency they describe as robust. The exercise's worry is related but not the same, and this paper reads the difference as the situation's central point. The danger it names is an absence of responsibility, which the sentence does not tie to how much effort anyone gives.

Where that effort goes is the subject of the next three exercises. The first concerns tasks that go to the capable:

The second concerns the person who notices a problem first:

The third concerns the person who helped at the start:

Read together, the three pairs describe the routes by which unowned work finds an owner without anyone deciding it: to the person who does it well, where the benefit of a quick solution turns into that person's long-term burden; to the person who found the problem, where responsibility for the discovery is tied automatically to the authority to solve it; to the person who helped at the start, where early cooperation is read as acceptance of an unlimited role. The second pair adds a cost to the whole team: if finding a problem means owning it, fewer problems are reported. Wrzesniewski and Dutton describe employees who craft their jobs by changing the boundaries of their work. The exercises describe jobs whose boundaries are drawn by drift, by the accident of competence or timing, and they ask that the boundary be asked about again when the situation changes. That contrast is this paper's, not theirs.

Two exercises ask what comes with assigning roles. One holds that a meeting which sets roles must also set the work that will actually stop:

The other asks which roles to separate before the team grows, and offers a measure:

The first is the exercises' sharpest correction to their own remedy. A name attached to a task is not capacity: if the work is not reduced, the lack of capacity remains. The second gives the test for separating a role as a boundary: the point at which the costs of conflict and waiting grow.

The last two exercises concern what the team can see of its own work. One tests everyone's understanding of the work by a single holiday:

The other holds that a new role's performance includes the burden lifted from existing work:

The title makes a single holiday the test of everyone's understanding of the work; the sentence separates explaining a task from handling it independently. Lewis's scale measures transactive memory systems in teams that draw on members' expertise; the exercise asks something narrower and more practical, whether knowing about a task is the same as being able to take it over, and answers that it is not. The second pair turns to coordination and upkeep, whose value, it says, can be missed if only direct outputs are evaluated; its question counts the burden lifted from existing work as part of a new role's performance.

Across the eight, the exercises frame shared work as work that is done but not held. Of the eight pairs, 4 name a role or a person in charge in their own words, 3 name a burden or a cost, and 2 name responsibility outright; none in the first situation names a role or responsibility in its own words. The people at risk are not the idle but the capable, the attentive and the obliging; the remedy is to name a holder for each continuing task, to stop some work when roles are set, and to count upkeep as a contribution. This is the second part of the paper's contribution: a reading of collective work in which the danger is unanswerable work rather than withheld effort.

1.4The options set beside the questions

The options beside the sixteen invented questions are the studio's stock, and they speak a different language from the questions. Of the sixteen pairs, 6 name a procedure, an approval, a form, a control, a system or a rule in their own words, and 5 name the past, the previous, the old or the existing. No option label in the set uses a word for a procedure, a form, an approval, a control, a system or a rule, and none speaks of the past, the previous or the old; the one label that speaks of the existing names a person in charge, not a procedure. What the labels speak of instead is scope and charge. Of the sixteen pairs, 10 have an option label that speaks of a scope, a boundary or a limit, and 6 one that speaks of roles, a person in charge or delegation.

The exercise on the five-step approval shows the gap. Its question is about an approval carried over unchanged from the old organisation; its options are these:

Neither mentions the approval, the risk it answered or the old organisation; both treat the decision as a choice of scale. The same labels stand beside the exercise on early cooperation, where the fit is closer: whether to narrow the scope or keep it in full with support restates whether early help commits a person without limit.

The fit is closest where the label speaks of the second situation's concern with who is in charge. Beside the exercise on nameless repeated tasks, one option is to rotate the roles and the burden, and its condition of use names the situation closely:

Here the stock option and the question meet. The fit is not a finding about teams, since the labels recur across the list; it shows that the set's recurring move, to give continuing work a holder and a limit, is available in the stock as well. The labels shared across the two situations point the same way. The exercise on minimal operations in the copied organisation and the one on stopping work in the small team share an option to reduce the workload and secure room for recovery. The exercise on removing procedures and the one on the holiday share an option to test within a limited scope. These are signs of how the studio's frames meet its questions, not evidence that the two situations agree.

In both situations the exercises look past the visible object of the decision, the procedure or the agreement to help, to what it leaves unstated: the reason a procedure exists and the person a task has settled on. The remedies they reach for are reasons and holders. The options set beside them offer limits and charges. The conclusion takes these readings back to the three debates.