"I don't know if that's anybody's specific job," Carissa has Security say. "It very well might be that there is, but they got pulled to the front with Nidal. This is - a really unusual situation for our procedures. If you want to ask that question of the site director, they'd definitely know exactly what went wrong."

"Question one:  Why wasn't I immediately told that Broom was from a goddess named Otolmens - why is that information secret and who here can I talk about it with?"

"Question two:  I realize this wasn't your own decision, but for purposes of concretely understanding Chelish Governance, I file a request for, possibly later, an example trace of the process that led to my, apparently, being approved to know the name of Broom's goddess, and this approval being known to you, but nobody actually telling it to me.  Was there a pending briefing or is it that - you have a process for approving me but not a process for actually telling me, what is going on, it sounds like I maybe have to acquire some domain expertise on what is going on, does this project in fact have a budget or are people in Governance just doing things -"

"Question three:  Does anything else spring to mind that nobody specifically has the ball on telling me about, even though I ought to be allowed to know it?  Because let me say right now, I've already noticed one thing like that, and have been quietly and in some bemusement and concern pretending not to notice, while I wait to see if it's being hidden on purpose for an interesting reason."

"Otolmens's name is secret. You can talk about it with Broom, you can talk about it with Security, you can talk about it with the site manager. You can request clearance for specific students, if you want to be able to talk about it with them. The reason Otolmen's name is secret is secret and I do not know it, nor whether you're cleared to know it.

I don't know how you got cleared to learn Otolmens's name, but I can request an...example trace of the process. I learned that you were cleared to know that this morning, at our briefing, and not at our evening briefing last night, so the clearance almost certainly arrived in that timeframe. 

I do not know the project budget. 

I don't know which things you've been told, but I'm assuming you're more likely to not have been briefed on things that happened since the war started? Uh, since the war started.... they found some ancient skeletons in the villa, while they were searching it for Kuthite traps? The skeletons weren't Kuthite traps, to be clear, just, someone had died there some decades or centuries ago. We've withdrawn Teleport-capable casters from the Worldwound temporarily, with other nations filling in for us, and added a bunch of them here. There was a supply run to Absalom. We raised all of the project staff who died. We instituted a mandate that all project security carry scrolls of Teleport. The girls who hadn't made afterlife arrangements did so. There was discussion of finding some perfectly normal INT 10 peasants to be on cooking staff at the project in case you find it useful to talk to an average person."

"Item I was thinking of wasn't on that list.  I'll let it keep and see what happens."

"My apologies if I sounded a bit sharp in your personal presence.  I am not under the impression that... whichever Security you are... is personally responsible for my travails here."

"I request Otolmens clearance for Carissa Sevar."

"We done for now?"

"That's all I know, though I can ask the site director to immediately deliver whatever briefing they were planning to get around to this evening or whenever."

"If a schedule exists then I am not perturbed by it happening in the evening.  Provided that there are no pending items in it on the order of divine interventions."

"Actually, further item if it won't drop memory, and if it will, let's get paper.  I request, rather urgently at this point, the nearest thing that can be found to a book which lists out all the known gods large enough or local enough or domain-relevant enough to be looking at my project, one which would include every mentioned god so far except Otolmens, and a book that will cover in it somewhere what is known about agreements between gods.  This information is apparently highly relevant in practice to my project, on what has so far been a daily basis."

"I'll pass that along as urgent."

Keltham stalks back into his lecture room.

"I don't know why I expected Planetary Average Intelligence 10 management processes and bureaucratic design principles to successfully be only slightly beneath dath ilani standards, but, in fact, they're not," Keltham says.  "I am restraining myself from interrupting the math we were in the middle of doing, for that digression.  We should finish the math first.  After that or shortly later, I am going to deliver a really pointed lecture on Lawful organizational principles whose pointedness is not, in fact, aimed at you, but is aimed at whoever ends up reading it."

Sounds really interesting!

Keltham takes a moment to compose himself.

Keltham takes an additional moment to compose himself.  If Chelish Governance is running some kind of massive effort to gaslight him, they sure are doing a good job of including the appearance of not being competent enough to pull that off, and making lots of weird errors about information that isn't really being concealed but nobody is bothering to tell him, serving as a cover for whatever it is that's actually being hidden.  Which, you know, is what you'd expect from competent Governance running a competent gaslighting operation, right?  No doubt the average thinkoomph on this planet is not really -3sd, that's ridiculous, how would people even survive.  Look at how long it took them to find or train an actor who could convincingly pose as Intelligence 10 while doing kitchen work.

Math.  He was supposed to be teaching math.

"Okay, you know what, I am not actually going to be able to focus on math until I get this out of my system.  We're just going to put everything about logarithms and bags of factors of 2 and prediction-scoring rules on hold, to be resumed later."

"Instead I'm going to deliver a talk that had better be transcribed and delivered accurately to everyone who is trying to manage Project Lawful."

"Project Lawful is a terrible name, by the way.  The moment I heard it, I knew that the decision-making processes behind it were going to be correspondingly terrible.  I wasn't going to say this until after I'd covered the concepts of probabilistic updating, probabilistic entanglement, and mutual information - those being the Law which would allow me to explain exactly why this was a terrible idea -"

"But absent that Law, consider an adversary pondering two alternative hypotheses based on evidence they've managed to collect.  One theory is that a certain Chelish project is investigating a mysterious source of knowledge not previously existent in Golarion.  One theory is that Cheliax is making a massive effort to scale up metalworking because they expect to be invaded.  If you give your projects cool names, one of these possibilities will sound much more than the other like something that someone might've called Project Lawful, even if they can't deduce the true answer just from the name.  You should call your amazing top-secret project Project Doorknob, or something else chosen completely at random by a true randomness source, which carries no information whatsoever about what the project actually does.  Except, of course, that if all your other top-secret projects also have cool names, the one with a sane name will stand out as being the only one with any sane thinker in it, meaning, someone not from Golarion, if anybody like Lrilatha knows what that should look like.  So this should be Project Dragon, maybe."

"The password to the Forbiddance on the previous project site is also terrible and completely insecure and whoever set it should never be allowed to invent any passwords again, and if you're thinking that I'm an idiot for not thinking to mention that before they set the password here, you're right.  For the record, a slightly better password for a Forbiddance might be, for example, 'escape copper shore'.  It's not hard to remember, but difficult for an adversary to guess unless they get a quite large number of tries."

"But I digress."

"Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one:  How to have anybody having responsibility for anything."

Frustrated but not suspicious is a good thing. Possibly the best outcome aside from Carissa having been good at her job, and that ship has left the harbor, so to speak. 

NONETHELESS THIS IS POSSIBLY WORSE THAN BEING LIT ON FIRE.

Meritxell does not look over at Carissa at all because she remembers being told by Security that she can have Sevar's job if she's better at it but that if she achieves that by sabotaging Sevar then she can't. Well actually she was threatened with a horrible death, to be specific.

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.