The question
A new start after a collapse raises questions about work that are not only about how hard people will try: what to bring along from the organisation that failed, and who will do the small, steady tasks that nobody plans for. This paper argues that a published set of synthetic decision exercises frames the work of starting again in these terms. It treats work not as a matter of effort or devotion but as a matter of location: where a procedure's reason is kept, and where a recurring task's owner is named.
The exercises come from NADIR, a studio in the RISCON family that writes about decline. NADIR files short question–judgment pairs under a research frame supplied by the person who owns the research: a decade of erosion from 2016, a collapse in 2026 and a turning point in 2027. The studio states that this frame is a research context, not an observed fact; every pair has the status of a hypothesis, and its judgments and options are, in its words, a model's conditional proposals. The pairs read here are hypothetical decision exercises, unreviewed, set in invented situations that name no real person, organisation or event. This paper reads them as a record of how one studio frames a decision and draws from them no fact about any real organisation.
The studio sorts its pairs into layers, and one of them is labelled commitment and execution. This paper reads every pair in that layer, in the transition year, that sets out options: sixteen exercises in two situations. In the first, a new organisation starts by quickly copying the procedures of the previous one. In the second, a small new team starts work quickly and agrees that everyone will help, without dividing who is in charge of what. The question this paper asks is how the record set frames the work of starting again: what it treats as carried over, what it treats as left without an owner, and what the options set beside those questions turn the decision into.
That question sits under the one the series poses to every studio: in a decline, what must be decided now, and what would make the decision change? For work in the year of the turning point, the exercises answer that what must be decided is not whether people will commit themselves to the new venture, but which tasks it will keep, why, and who holds each one when the usual person is away. What would change the decision, in their own terms, is a change in the risk a procedure guarded against, or in the scale and roles of the team.
The contribution
The paper offers three things. First, it reads synthetic exercises in which a procedure copied from a failed organisation is a hazard because it outlives its reason, and in which the proposed defence is to copy the reason with the form: an invented but explicit case for the debate on how organisations carry their history. Second, it identifies a risk of shared work that differs from the familiar one. The familiar worry is that each member does less; the exercises worry that the work goes on being done, by particular people, with no one answerable for it. Third, it shows that the options set beside these questions come from a reusable stock and speak of scope and charge, never of inheritance, so that the substance of each exercise lies in its question.
Three debates
What a new organisation carries from an old one
The first debate concerns how organisations carry the past into the present. Barbara Levitt and James G. March, in Organizational Learning (1988), review a literature that views organisational learning as routine-based and history-dependent: organisations learn by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behaviour. Their section on organisational memory discusses how organisations encode, store and retrieve the lessons of history despite the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. The exercises read here start from the far side of that concern. In this paper's reading, their worry is not that the lessons of history will be lost when people leave, but that a routine will be carried into a new organisation after the inference that produced it has stopped being true.
Martha S. Feldman and Brian T. Pentland, in Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change (2003), challenge the understanding of routines as a source of inertia. They separate a routine's ostensive aspect, what is usually thought of as its structure, from its performative aspect, the specific actions of specific people at specific times and places that bring it to life. The ostensive aspect lets people guide, account for and refer to performances; the performative aspect creates, maintains and modifies the ostensive one. The exercises draw a line of a similar shape, between the form of a procedure's document and the problem the procedure once solved, and ask that the second be carried over.
Christopher Marquis and András Tilcsik, in Imprinting: Toward a Multilevel Theory (2013), review research on imprinting across several fields and offer a definition precise enough to keep it distinct from path dependence and cohort effects. They trace imprints at several levels, among them single organisations, and describe imprinting as a lens for organisational research that takes history seriously. The copied organisation of the exercises is, in a loose sense this paper adopts, a deliberate imprint made at founding; the exercises do not test the theory.
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, in Structural Inertia and Organizational Change (1984), treat structural inertia as an outcome of selection. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for activities are, in their account, important competencies of organisations, achieved when an organisation can reproduce its structure with high fidelity; older organisations have more inertia than younger ones.
Sidney G. Winter and Gabriel Szulanski, in Replication as Strategy (2001), argue that replication is not the mere exploitation of a simple formula but a process: a phase of exploration in which the business model is created and refined, followed by a phase of exploitation in which it is stabilised and replicated at scale. They discuss the broad scope of knowledge transfer and the concepts of the template and the Arrow core. One exercise in the set holds that a good copy explains the parts that will not be changed together with the parts that will. This paper reads that sentence beside their concepts, as a demand that a copy carry its own account of what is essential. The reading is this paper's and goes beyond what their note says.
How formal rules enable or coerce
The second debate concerns the rules themselves. Paul S. Adler and Bryan Borys, in Two Types of Bureaucracy: Enabling and Coercive (1996), propose a view of workflow formalisation that reconciles two assessments of bureaucracy, as alienating employees or as enabling them to do their tasks better. Whether formalisation affects employees' attitudes well or badly depends, they argue, on whether it enables employees better to master their tasks or serves management as a means to coerce effort and compliance. Two exercises draw a related line between a rule that serves the work and one that merely persists: a workaround known only to insiders, set against published rules, and a form that goes on producing unneeded information. This paper reads these as the record set's version of an enabling rule and a dead one, a reading that extends Adler and Borys rather than applying them.
Work held in common
The third debate concerns work that belongs to everyone. John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman, in Role Conflict and Ambiguity in Complex Organizations (1970), note that the literature links role conflict and role ambiguity to dysfunctional consequences for people and organisations, and they develop measures under which the two constructs prove distinct; the measures tend to correlate with satisfaction, anxiety and the propensity to leave. The second situation of the exercises is built on role ambiguity by design: a team that agrees everyone will help has, by agreement, no division of who is in charge.
Steven J. Karau and Kipling D. Williams, in Social Loafing: A Meta-Analytic Review and Theoretical Integration (1993), define social loafing as the tendency of individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually, and find it robust across 78 studies and across tasks and populations, moderated especially by evaluation potential, expectations of co-workers' performance, task meaningfulness and culture. The exercises name a different danger: not that people in the shared team will do less, but that the work will be done by particular people and that no one will be answerable for it.
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, in Crafting a Job (2001), propose that employees craft their jobs by changing the cognitive, task and relational boundaries of their work, and that the altered configurations change the meaning of work and the identity of the worker. In the exercises the boundaries of a job are also drawn by what people do, but not by choice: a role grows because someone helped once, or because someone was good at a task, or because someone noticed a problem first.
Kyle Lewis, in Measuring Transactive Memory Systems in the Field (2003), develops and validates a scale for transactive memory systems, which matter especially for teams designed to draw on their members' expertise. One exercise in the set tests what the whole team understands of the work by a single holiday, and distinguishes being able to explain a task from being able to handle it alone. Reading that exercise beside Lewis's scale is this paper's own step.
Chapter 1 describes the records and the rule that selects them, then reads the two situations and the options set beside them. Chapter 2 reproduces every record read, word for word. The conclusion returns to the three debates.