The shop that keeps the count

Shop

Giving gets sorted by size. How much arrived, how much went back, whether the two sides look close enough to leave alone.

Size is the wrong question. What sorts giving into its kinds is whether a count is running, and who can read it.

Think of a shop. The shop gives, a person walks out with the thing in a bag, and the shop keeps the count, because keeping the count is what the building is for. The trade is honest because both sides know the count is there and both sides can read it.

You can run the same operation with no sign over the position and no prices on anything. The giving looks warm from outside. And behind it something is going down in the count, and one of the two people in the room does not know the count exists.

A shop with nothing written on the window is still a shop.

I ran one for a long time and I would have told you I was being generous. I was. Both things were true at once, the generosity and the count, and the count was mine alone.

Provision is the name for it, and it took me months to get the definition down to something that does not leak. Not generosity. Two features and nothing else: supply that keeps arriving, and a running count that one side can read and the other cannot.

Naming the position changes one thing, and the one thing is enough. You can catch it while it is running instead of on the day you hand somebody a bill they never agreed to.

Count

So the axis is who is counting.

Sorted by Who Counts

You get five kinds, and they come apart cleanly the moment you stop weighing what moved.

1. Overflow. You give because you have it and it costs you close to nothing. Nobody counts. If it never comes up again, you do not notice.
2. Reciprocity. Both give, nobody counts, and it evens out over years without anyone tracking it. Asked who owes who, the question sounds stupid.
3. Exchange. Both count, out loud. There is a figure. When it is paid, you are square.
4. Provision. You give, they receive, a total forms, and only you know that it exists.
5. Insurance. You give to hold your position. Only you count, and stopping feels dangerous.

Nobody counts in two of them, and that is what makes them clean. One is clean because both count and both can read the figure. The trouble sits in the last two, where the counting runs on one side only and the other party has no way of seeing it happen.

You can hand over far more than you ever get back and still be owed nothing, as long as no count was running.

This is why the size test fails, and it fails in both directions. I have put a long stretch of technical work into something that was not mine and was never going to be, and by any weighing of the two sides that is lopsided beyond argument. It never read as provision to me and it was not, because I was not counting.

Nothing accrued anywhere. If it had been thanked once and never mentioned again, nothing in me would have moved. Meanwhile a far smaller thing handed over somewhere else can sit in me for a long time, taking up space, coming back at odd hours, because at the moment I handed it over a count started and I have been keeping it ever since without deciding to.

Lopsided is not the criterion. Counting is the criterion, and the two look identical from the outside, which is the whole reason the size test survives as long as it does.

You cannot see the count from the other side, and it is not secrecy that hides it. Supply that is any good arrives before the need is spoken. The person on the other side never experiences having the need, so there is nothing visible to thank, and the better the supply gets the more invisible it becomes.

You cannot narrate it in the moment either, because narrating it out loud is the count, said out loud. So the count stays on one side by the structure of the thing, not by anybody hiding it.

The other tell is the one that arrives with a claim on it. Somebody gives, and attached to the giving is a share of something, or a thing you will owe back later, or a favour with no date on it. The bill exists from that moment.

What is missing is not the amount, it is the date, and the date gets filled in later by whoever has been holding the count. A total is forming from the first minute, so that kind of generosity is hard to take even when it is large, and the same person giving the same thing with nothing attached is suddenly possible to accept.

Do I Know the Total?

One question separates all five, and you can run it in the middle of a conversation without anybody noticing. Ask it plainly. If a figure comes up fast, you are in provision, you have been in it for a while, and you were the shop whatever the two of you have been calling it.

Overflow and reciprocity do not produce a figure, because nothing in them is being added up. The bill is not attached at the start, and that is what makes it so hard to catch: it accrues quietly while both of you are still using the warm word for what you are doing.

And there is a tell for later, which I needed more than the first one, because most of what I start is clean at the start. The conversion happens at the moment you notice you know the total, not on the day it gets presented or argued over.

Atrophy

The part I could not explain on my own is why the other side of one of these arrangements gets less able the longer it runs, and not more. I could account for what I was doing. I could not account for what the supply was doing to them.

Peter Senge set the answer out in The Fifth Discipline in 1990, working from the system dynamics that Jay Forrester’s group at MIT had been building since the fifties. His claim was that a small number of structures produce the same behaviour over and over, in any industry, and that once you can see the structure you can stop arguing about the people standing inside it. One of them he called Shifting the Burden.

A problem has two available fixes. One is symptomatic, fast, and it works. The other is fundamental, slow, and hard.

The fast fix gets used because it works, and every use of it lowers the pressure that would have driven the slow one, so the slow capability gets exercised less, and a capability that is not exercised wastes. The loop closes on itself. The symptom keeps returning, the fast fix keeps being reached for, and the ability to solve the thing properly keeps shrinking underneath.

The version that applies here is the one he named separately: Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor. In that one the fast fix is supplied by somebody outside the system. The host’s own capability wastes through disuse, the outside supplier becomes structurally necessary rather than helpful, and the more competent the supplier is, the faster the wasting runs.

Senge wrote it about consultants, head offices solving a division’s problem for it, aid programmes. The field has used it that way ever since, mostly to explain why technical assistance produces dependence and why the best fixer leaves behind the least capable client.

The Function You Supply

The handle I took out of it is the function. In any arrangement of mine that ran too long, there was one function I was supplying, and it was the specific one the other side was avoiding developing. It was the one function that was missing, delivered reliably and free.

It comes in kinds, and the kind follows the shape of the arrangement rather than anything about the person standing in it. You read what the arrangement will not produce on its own and you have the name of what is being supplied. Terms that never get written.

Scope that never gets closed. A decision that sits there unmade for months. Whatever the missing piece is, the supplier hands it over finished, on demand, free, and finished is the part that does the damage, because a thing that arrives built means the building never has to happen once, and the building was the capability.

The kind that is hardest to catch is the kind that looks most like help, because it is made of the same substance the arrangement already has too much of. Supply of a function that is already strong reads as generous and changes nothing. More of it is only more to hold, and holding was already the part carrying too much.

Supply of the function that is weak is the reason it stays weak.

Indispensability and the other side’s stuckness are the same fact, not two facts.

Finding that true cost me the resentment, and the resentment was the part I had been most attached to. It was accurate about the behaviour and wrong about the cause. Capable people were not doing work they were plainly capable of, and the reason they were not is that the work kept arriving done.

Nobody’s fault in it, and still a cost. You cannot see the loop while it is running, because competence hides it. The fix was fast and it was correct and it always landed, so neither side had a reason to look at what the fixing was producing.

The correction that comes out of the structure is narrow, and it is not to give less across the board, which is what I tried first and which failed fast. Name the function, withhold that one, stay fully present on everything else. What stops arriving is the thing that has been standing in for somebody’s own capability, and nothing else in the arrangement changes.

Supply

Provision is a position, not a defect in a character. Feeling generous tells you nothing about which position you are standing in.

I am not going to become a different man, and nothing here asks me to. You cannot provide alone. Somebody has to be standing at the other end taking the supply, which makes provision a position two people hold between them and not a thing I carry from one arrangement into the next.

Change what passes through it and it is not the same position. That is why written terms moved something that had stayed still for years.

Underneath it there is a reason the position forms at all, and it is structural. In any exchange both sides need some way to establish value. A market uses price.

An arrangement with no price uses reciprocity, watched over a long time, which is why it needs years and trust to work. Where neither one is present, the person in that seat has no way to establish that they belong in the exchange except to keep supplying. Supply becomes the only evidence of standing available in the system.

So provision is not a thing somebody carries into arrangements. It is what forms inside an arrangement that has no way of valuing anything, and it forms around whoever happens to be capable of supplying.

Two clean forms, then, and one mixed.

Priced: supply bounded by terms, the count visible to both sides, and it gets paid.

Unconditional: supply happens and no count runs at all, nothing expected back, in any currency, at any point.

Both of those are fine and I want more of both.

You get the mixed one when bounded supply carries no invoice at the end, the giving of a business arrangement with the paying of a friendship, and that is provision by definition. The axis is not paid against unpaid. It is chosen and bounded against obligated and accruing.

Every arrangement that cost me was mixed. Every one that worked ran one form, cleanly.

The reason a word matters here is that a warm word is not a name. Partner, friend, the steady one: each one arrives with duties already bolted on, and I had stopped doing those duties a long time before I stopped saying the words. I thought the lag was me being soft about it.

It was not. Dropping the word means dropping the duties one at a time, by hand, and each one has to be dropped against a claim I had agreed to at some point without ever writing it down. That is the part that costs.

I would reach for the old word, the whole set would arrive with it, and pushing it back felt like taking something off somebody who had not asked for it to be taken. The thought was finished weeks earlier. The guilt was not in the thought.

It was in the word, every time I used it.

I did not put a better word in its place. What went there was a line about supply: two engagements open, both paid, nothing else moving. A sentence like that carries no duty inside it, so nothing arrives that has to be pushed back by hand, and it tells me what I am doing on Monday, which the warm word never did.

Define the position by what flows through it, not by how it feels.

A count that runs unseen gets presented in the end. The presentation is the cost. Up to that day the arrangement runs on one set of terms, and after it there is a total in the room that only one side ever agreed, and no version of the arrangement carries across it.

Then insurance takes the position over, because stopping now would mean saying the total out loud, so you give again to hold what is left, and what the giving buys from there is the position and nothing else.