Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something.  If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for it.  This is the proverb of dath ilani management.  Are three people responsible for something?  Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.

Dath ilani tend to try to invent clever new organizational forms, if not otherwise cautioned out of it, so among the things that you get warned about is that you never form a group of three people to be responsible for something.  One person with two advisors can be responsible for something, if more expertise is required than one person has.  A majority vote of three people?  No.  You might think it works, but it doesn't.  When is it time for them to stop arguing and vote?  Whose job is it to say that the time has come to vote?  Well, gosh, now nobody knows who's responsible for that meta-decision either.  Maybe all three of them think it's somebody else's job to decide when it's time to vote.

The closest thing that dath ilan has to an effective organization which defies this principle is the Nine Legislators who stand at the peak of Governance, voting with power proportional to what they receive from the layers of delegation beneath them.  This is in no small part because dath ilan doesn't want Governance to be overly effective, and no private corporations or smaller elements of Governance do that.  The Nine Legislators, importantly, do not try to run projects or be at the top of the bureaucracy, there's a Chief Executive of Governance who does that.  They just debate and pass laws, which is not the same as needing to make realtime decisions in response to current events.  Same with the Court of Final Settlement of which all lower courts are theoretically a hierarchical prediction market, they rule on issues in slowtime, they don't run projects.

Even then, every single Governance-level planetwide law in dath ilan has some particular Legislator sponsoring it.  If anything goes wrong with that law, if it is producing stupid effects, there is a particular Legislator to point to, whose job it was to be the person who owned that law, and was supposed to be making sure it didn't have any stupid effects.  If you can't find a single particular Legislator to sign off on ownership of a law, it doesn't get to be a law anymore.  When a majority court produces an opinion, one person on the court takes responsibility for authoring that opinion.

Every decision made by the Executive branch of government, or the executive structure of a standardly organized corporation, is made by a single identifiable person.  If the decision is a significant one, it is logged into a logging system and reviewed by that person's superior or manager.  If you ask a question like 'Who hired this terrible person?' there's one person who made the decision to hire them.  If you ask 'Why wasn't this person fired?' there's either an identifiable manager whose job it was to monitor this person and fire them if necessary, or your corporation simply doesn't have that functionality.

Keltham is informed, though he doesn't think he's ever been tempted to make that mistake himself, that overthinky people setting up corporations sometimes ask themselves 'But wait, what if this person here can't be trusted to make decisions all by themselves, what if they make the wrong decision?' and then try to set up more complicated structures than that.  This basically never works.  If you don't trust a power, make that power legible, make it localizable to a single person, make sure every use of it gets logged and reviewed by somebody whose job it is to review it.  If you make power complicated, it stops being legible and visible and recordable and accountable and then you actually are in trouble.

The basic sanity check on organizational structure is whether, once you've identified the person supposedly responsible for something, they then have the eyes and the fingers, the sensory inputs and motor outputs, to carry out their supposed function and optimize over this thing they are supposedly responsible for.

Any time you have an event that should've been optimized, such as, for example, notifying Keltham that yet another god has been determined to have been messing with his project, there should be one person who is obviously responsible for that happening.  That person needs to successfully be notified by the rest of the organization that Cayden Cailean has been identified as meddling.  That person needs the ability to send a message to Keltham.

Good job, real Cheliax, bad job, fake Cheliax.

Carissa's own fault analysis here, insofar as she's making herself think about it, which isn't all that much because she's still not back at 100%, is that obviously it was her job, once the decision was made to bring Pilar back and once Pilar's authorized lies were settled on, to get those authorized lies conveyed to Keltham at the speed it would happen in alterCheliax. It's really obvious why she didn't do this - it's because, as literally every authority she has talked to in the last twenty-four hours told her, she's not in fact fully recovered, not tracking everything - but it was still her job. Cheliax knows who has responsibility for figuring out what Keltham learns and when, and it's her. 

And in her absence it's Maillol, and if he criticizes her for this she'll criticize him right back, but the entire reason (well, most of the reason) she took his job was that she expected he'd miss things she wouldn't, so. 

This is a thing Carissa likes about Cheliax: it is not a place that hesitates to assign responsibility. Right now it's going to assign it to her, and that's going to suck, but, that's how we get stronger. (Unless punishment doesn't work) Asmodeus specifically instructed on Carissa's punishment and can be assumed to have had an aim in mind.

In companies large enough that they need regulations, every regulation has an owner.  There is one person who is responsible for that regulation and who supposedly thinks it is a good idea and who could nope the regulation if it stopped making sense.  If there's somebody who says, 'Well, I couldn't do the obviously correct thing there, the regulation said otherwise', then, if that's actually true, you can identify the one single person who owned that regulation and they are responsible for the output.

Sane people writing rules like those, for whose effects they can be held accountable, write the ability for the person being regulated to throw an exception which gets caught by an exception handler if a regulation's output seems to obviously not make sane sense over a particular event.  Any time somebody has to literally break the rules to do a saner thing, that represents an absolute failure of organizational design.  There should be explicit exceptions built in and procedures for them.

Exceptions, being explicit, get logged.  They get reviewed.  If all your bureaucrats are repeatedly marking that a particular rule seems to be producing nonsensical decisions, it gets noticed.  The one single identifiable person who has ownership for that rule gets notified, because they have eyes on that, and then they have the ability to optimize over it, like by modifying that rule.  If they can't modify the rule, they don't have ownership of it and somebody else is the real owner and this person is one of their subordinates whose job it is to serve as the other person's eyes on the rule. 

'Nobody seems to have responsibility for this important thing I'm looking at' is another form of throwable exception, besides a regulation turning out to make no sense.  A Security watching Keltham wander around obviously not knowing things he's been cleared to know, but with nobody actually responsible for telling him, should throw a 'this bureaucratic situation about Keltham makes no sense' exception.  There should then be one identifiable person in the organization who is obviously responsible for that exception, who that exception is guaranteed to reach by previously designed aspects of the organization, and that person has the power to tell Keltham things or send a message to somebody who does.  If the organizational design fails at doing that, this incident should be logged and visible to the single one identifiable sole person who has ownership of the 'actually why is this part of the corporation structured like this anyways' question.

Yes, most of the command structure is at the Nidal front because of Golarion's stupid-ass correlation between management rank and combat potential.  Keltham gets that.  There are ways to design organizations to be robust to exceptional structural events like that.  Dath ilani corporations consider how to operate in earthquakes, or if communications get cut by a massive solar weather event.  Everything like that gets rehearsed at least a little, once a year during the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival.  The central principle is that so long as the ability to identify who's now responsible for something can still function, the organization can still function.

Cheliax's problem is not that the person whose job was to tell Keltham about Cayden Cailean is fighting Nidal.  Cheliax's problem is not that this person's failover was also on the Nidal front.  Cheliax's problem is that the question 'Well who's responsible then?' stopped without producing any answer at all.

This literally never happens in a correctly designed organization.  If you have absolutely no other idea of who is responsible, then the answer is that it is the job of Abrogail Thrune.  If you do not want to take the issue to Abrogail Thrune, that means it gets taken to somebody else, who then has the authority to make that decision, the knowledge to make that decision, the eyes to see the information necessary for it, and the power to carry out that decision.

Cheliax should have rehearsed this sort of thing by holding an Annual Nidal Invasion Rehearsal Festival, even if only Governance can afford to celebrate that festival and most tiny villages can't.  During this Festival, the number of uncaught messages getting routed to Abrogail Thrune, would then have informed the Queen that there would be a predictable failure of organizational design in the event of large-scale catastrophe, in advance of that catastrophe actually occurring.

If literally everybody with the knowledge to make a decision is dead, it gets routed to somebody who has to make a decision using insufficient knowledge.

If a decision can be delayed - which class of decisions, by the way, does not include delaying telling the guy who started the last god-war about the latest set of divine interventions targeting him, that bit could actually be important for all somebody knows - then that decision can be routed to some smarter or more knowledgeable person who will make the decision later, after they get resurrected.  But, like, even in a case like that, there should be one single identifiable person whose job it would be to notice if the decision suddenly turned urgent and grab it out of the delay queue.

It all sounds obvious and practically impossible to do at the same time. 

Keltham gets that Golarion doesn't have the incredibly convenient universally connected devices that Civilization uses to run all of its corporations and government.  He gets that.  But the fact that people were walking around knowing that Cayden Cailean had intervened on his project, authorized to tell Keltham this if he asked, and the thing ended up waiting until he asked, seems like the symptom of some deeper organizational mis-structuring whose details Keltham cannot guess.  It means that Cheliax is underperforming what should be possible to do even with the technology that it has.

It is plausible that Keltham should look at the administrative structure above himself, rip it apart, and put it back together the way it would be put together in Civilization.

But the general mode of operation in which he still has never been invited to meet the site manager on this project, been told a budget for it, shown the names on the chain of command leading up to Abrogail, et cetera, all seem suggestive of some kind of motivated illegibility in which somebody somewhere thinks something bad will happen if Keltham can access all that info or they are incentivized against it by flaming farts know what kind of bizarre payoff function.

He does not think this is because Cheliax is plotting dark plots against him, to be clear, because if they were plotting, they would show him a fake organization above himself, rather than leaving him in a bizarre limbo where he does not know who is actually managing this project, and his only actual conversation with anybody he knows to have any authority over it, was that time he spent half an hour sitting next to the Queen of Cheliax watching her feed tiny crumbs of food to fish, and this is not a scalable solution.

The Queen did WHAT.

Carissa could tell him who is in charge (to Keltham, it's Maillol) but she thinks this might disrupt the momentum of his rant.

And in fact, now that Keltham thinks of it, an obvious guess is that nobody is managing this project, because Asmodeus said to set it up, so people in Governance did that, but Asmodeus didn't say who should manage it, so nobody is, and everything going on here is actually being routed into a completely ad-hoc system of random people in Governance grabbing bits of authority and responding to his requests as he makes them, and there is apparently a site manager because this person has been mentioned to him, but there's nobody above that site manager and so the site manager is hiding because he knows he won't be able to answer any of Keltham's questions.

Which is, Keltham supposes, what project management and governance might very well end up looking like, after subtracting 6 Intelligence points from everyone and everything.

Is he wrong?  Is anyone allowed to tell him if he's wrong?  Is the person who would need to sign off on that on the Nidal front, is their failover replacement dead, and is there now a long awkward silence while everybody in this room knows the correct answer to his question but the person who needs to sign off on answering it is discarnate?

"- should we volunteer answers to questions or are the questions meant to be illustrative."

"If you actually know and are allowed to tell me, please do."

"The site manager is Ferrar Maillol; his office is labelled on the maps they put up in the cafeteria; he's the person I go to when you want mice or something. I....think he reports to someone in the Church? Probably a higher circle cleric? And probably someone at the front right now. They probably report to the Queen and the Grand High Priestess."

"If they're reporting to the Queen and the Grand High Priestess then they're not reporting to anybody.  Pick one."

"To be clear, that advice was not directed at you personally."

"I will note, however, Carissa, that you do not, in fact, have any idea of who is above Ferrer, except that somewhere up there is the Queen and Grand High Priestess.  It's actually pretty rare where I come from to not know who is your boss's boss.  Maybe this is because you don't have the universally interconnected machines but I really wouldn't think so.  You have not actually disconfirmed the fallback hypothesis that what you do not know about, does not exist, and there is nothing above Ferrer but an amorphous cloud of individuals in Governance whom Ferrer individually contacts each time he tries to make something happen on the site."

"Anyways, I think I am done with the main part of my rant that I needed to get out of myself.  Any questions you expect the actual readers of this lecture will want answered?  After that, by the way, and on reflection, maybe more urgently than resuming the math parts, I need to know WHO THE ASS IS CAYDEN CAILEAN IN VASTLY GREATER DETAIL."

No one else talks; this is obviously in authorized lies only territory. 

Go on, Pilar.

Claims that have been authorized about Cayden Cailean, all true:

He is a former human adventurer. History has it that he ascended on a drunken dare, which isn't the kind of thing that should be possible. His areas of concern are competition, exploration, sex, mind-altering substances, and revelry; his herald is a prostitute and former travelling companion; he tends not to seek out conflict with other gods, but is allied with Desna, Milani, Sarenrae, Shelyn, and Torag; he has chillier relationships with the Lawful gods, and it's generally understood that He and Asmodeus don't get along, being diametrically opposed in alignment. He doesn't have a holy book, having never seen fit to inspire the writing of one. There are rumors that He personally attends drunken festivities in the River Kingdoms in His honor.

Pilar will repeat all that pretty flawlessly, since she's had time to rehearse it, including the part where she doesn't sound rehearsed.

"...gods can just show up to places, looking human?  That is a thing that ever happens?"

20% probability that one of his girls is exactly that, if so.

Pilar has not been instructed in advance on how to answer that question!

"I'm... not sure?  I didn't think to ask about how many chances in 100 that it would be true."

Does anyone want to stop her from answering, think think?  No?

"Gods can do most things but they usually don't, when they manifest looking like people it's usually inside their divine realm.  There's stories about gods manifesting in Golarion, but only during huge crises, and it's not clear to me from my reading that any of it must have really happened, except that most books say that Aroden was doing that when" Asmodeus killed him "he died."

Ione didn't go out of her way to collect information like that, or at least, that's what she told herself, but in retrospect, maybe she happened to be hanging out in sections of library where there were books talking about how vast and how ancient Golarion and other planes were.

"So gods are easier to kill when they're manifested looking like people, and they only do that in their highly protected home where it's safe, or after they build what they think is a large enough coalition to protect them from other gods, or in massive emergency-opportunities?"

"If there was any book that had that kind of information it would be in the incredibly protected library of a five-hundred-year-old ninth-circle wizard, I think.  Which I can't borrow from, to be clear."

"Ione, what's Cayden Cailean doing messing with my project?  Best guess?"