Priced before it can be lost

Shape

Two futures get grieved in the same voice, and one of them had edges. A plan has edges because somebody drew them: said what was inside it and what was left out on purpose, put a figure on the inside, and handed the whole thing to a second person who was free to say no. A wish needs none of that and is better without it.

A wish only has to be pleasant to hold.

I worked in an arrangement that had a product line in its future. It was the thing that would sell without my hours inside it, and it was spoken of as if it were on its way. Before a thing can be lost it has to have been made, and making comes down to a few operations, each of which leaves a mark that somebody outside the conversation can check afterwards.

• A price, said as a figure, to a person who could refuse it.
• A scope: what is in, and the part that is knowingly out.
• Terms on paper, or at the least said to a second person who said them back in their own words.
• A test: one buyer, one delivery, one thing that came back wrong and got fixed.
• A way of taking the money that has taken money at least once.

The product line had none of them.

Something sits under all five, and it is not the money. Every item on that list hands the thing to a second person who is free to put it down. What the five share is the transfer, not the paperwork: the thing leaves the head that wants it and lands in a head that owes it nothing, and it comes back changed or it does not come back.

So what sits under them is a refusal that was available in fact, to somebody, and not only in principle to a person nobody asked. Until that has happened once, calling the thing early or underfunded gives it a standing it never had. It is unmade.

A future that went through none of this is a projected future: thrown forward from a want, with no ground under it. A claim of loss made on a projected future is what the record calls an unfounded claim. The word does not say the claim is false.

It says the claim stands on nothing that was made, and that changes what I ask the grief when it comes. Nobody can answer whether that future would have come true. What it stood on I can answer in a minute, and the answer is nothing.

Price

Pricing looks like the last step of making something, the tidy-up after the real work. It is the first step, and it decides whether the thing is in the system at all. I had the order backwards for years.

What a Price Puts into the System

A price is not a valuation. It is an entry. It puts the thing on a page, with an owner and a figure that sits next to other figures, and from that moment other people have to work around it when they plan their own week.

Unpriced value sits outside the system: absent, not undervalued. There is no line where it would appear, so no meeting weighs it against anything else and no decision has to allow for it before going ahead. A person carrying unpriced work believes the work is underpaid.

It is not paid at all, in the sense the system uses the word, because the system holds no evidence that the work happened. Undervalued would have been better news. An undervalued thing is on the page with a low figure beside it, and a low figure can be argued up.

A system reads transactions and nothing else. Work that ends in a sale makes one. Work that stops a failure before it happens makes none, so the first kind is seen and the second is not, whoever does it and however well it is done.

And where two positions have fused into one, nothing measures who carries what, so an uneven load there is not small. It is undetectable.

This is why the sequence matters more than the number. The figure can be wrong by a wide margin and the entry still works, because a figure can be corrected a year later against what actually happened. Nobody can correct an absence.

There is nothing there to hold the correction, no line to write it on, and the person who knows what the work took is alone in the room in seeing the gap where the line should be. That person can describe the gap. Describing puts nothing into the system.

I learned that slowly, one conversation at a time.

Describing without an Entry

I spent years explaining what the arrangement cost me. I did it well, I think. I had the description ready, in detail, and I said it plainly, more than once.

It produced nothing, because a cost said out loud stays a description, and I was describing an object with no entry anywhere in the business. Every time I said it I was arguing about the weight of a thing no page carried. You cannot make a number heavier by repeating it.

The same sentence carrying a figure, said at the start, would have been an offer. Years in, it was an appeal, and an appeal is answered by mood.

Enter It Early

So the figure goes on early, while being wrong about it costs nothing. At that stage no one has put anything in and no one is owed, so a bad price is only a bad price. It is not a claim against a friend.

Later the same figure has to be pulled out of somebody’s hands, and by then it is not a price, it is a demand with a history behind it. I rewrote the arrangement later, and the whole rewrite came down to one act, done identically on every item. Enter it.

The origination gets a figure and the build gets a fee. Delivery gets its share, and keeping the thing alive afterwards gets a standing fee agreed before it is needed. The terms get their price too, while no grip has formed yet and nobody is attached to the arrangement in the shape it happens to have.

None of this takes anything back from anybody. It puts the thing there for the first time.

A thing worth building gets its figure before it gets its plan.

Loss

Grief needs a shape to close on. Not a fair shape and not a generous one. It needs edges, so the mind can go round them, find them the same as they were yesterday, and file the thing as finished.

An unmade future has no edges to go round.

Nobody was ever asked to pay for the thing I am grieving.

I needed a while before I could use that sentence. It reads cold for a long time, and then it reads like a description of where I actually am. The kind of loss it names has a handle: unfalsifiable loss.

Nothing about the lost thing was put in a form that could be checked, so nobody, me included, can show it was not going to happen. Income that did not exist cannot be proven absent from a future that did not exist either. There is no test, so the story survives every test, and a story that survives every test is not a memory.

It is a fixture. It is not a lie either, and that is the trouble with it.

It comes when I am already short. There is no malice in the timing. A tired mind reaches for the story that explains why it is tired, and the foregone thing is right there, in perfect condition, untouched by a single buyer.

Get it wrong and it is paid in the same currency, over and over. Each remembering costs what the first one cost, because the last one finished nothing. Attention that had a job goes into an argument about a future, the argument cannot end, and in the morning there is less of me for the work that does have a buyer.

I have paid that many times, for a product line that did not once carry a price.

Mark

Three bodies of work sit under this, and none was written about grief. The first came out of Kurt Lewin’s group in Berlin, where the question started with a waiter who could hold a long unpaid order exactly and lost it the moment the bill was settled. Bluma Zeigarnik took that into a laboratory in 1927: about twenty short tasks, clay shapes, puzzles, small sums, some of them allowed to run to the end and the rest stopped partway, then a question about which ones came to mind.

The interrupted tasks were named roughly twice as often as the finished ones, and that ratio is what the Zeigarnik effect names. What it says is that an open task goes on occupying capacity in the head that began it, well after the hands have left it. Later attempts to reproduce the memory result came out uneven, and what held is the intrusion.

Masicampo and Baumeister showed in 2011 that writing a plan for an unfinished thing, when it would be done and where, stopped it pushing into unrelated work, and the thing itself was still not done. The missing work is not what keeps it there. The head was simply not told, by anything outside itself, that the task is over.

I took something narrow from it. A projected future is an open task and nothing else. It cannot be finished, because nothing was specified to finish.

It cannot be abandoned either, because abandoning needs an object too, and a price, a date or a refusal would each have been that object. The product line had none of the three, so the grief over it has no outside event to close on.

The second is the endowment effect, the name Richard Thaler put in 1980 on a plain observation: a person weighs a thing already in hand above what the same person would pay to get it. The study everyone cites came ten years after that, when Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler gave out mugs to half a room of students and opened a market between the two halves. The ones holding a mug asked roughly double what the ones without one would pay for it, and where the theory said about half the mugs should change hands, most of them did not move.

The field has read it as loss aversion since, the reference point doing the work rather than the object, and later work found the gap narrows in people who trade a thing for a living. I work with a narrower reading, that the effect runs on a missing price. No figure is quoted against what is already held, so nothing pulls the holder’s own figure down.

A projected future is held in the same way. Everything I have made and sold was marked down by something on the way: a buyer who wanted less of it, a fault that only showed in use. The product line met none of them.

It sits in my head at a value no made thing of mine could reach.

The third is Chris Argyris, who spent the 1970s with Donald Schön on why units full of able people stop learning, working from transcripts of real meetings rather than from a theory of them. One exercise out of that work has a person write what was said in one column and what was thought and not said in the other. The second column is where the undiscussable sits: the matter everybody in a unit knows about and nobody will put on the table, kept there by a second silence over the first one.

Organisational learning has run on that vocabulary since. In the same reading an undiscussable lasts for as long as no page exists on which somebody would have to answer it. I assumed at first that this one was not mine, because my cost was no silence.

I had talked about it for years. It was mine in full. Talk forces nothing.

A figure handed to a person who is free to refuse it forces an answer, and the answer arrives with a date on it.

A thing has to be in the system before it can leave it.

The three do not resemble each other by accident. They are one mechanism met in three places. In a head, an unmarked task stays open; in a holder’s hands, nothing from outside pulls the figure down.

A unit is the same shape again: what no page holds, nobody has to answer, however long it is carried and however well it is described. The mark itself is small. A figure, a date, a signature, a no.

Accepting it cost me the claim, because a plan taken from me leaves somebody owing, and a wish with no mark on it leaves nobody owing anything. What none of the three tells me is whether a task that two seats opened can be marked closed by one of them.

Argument

The sentence I keep is not a rebuttal. There is nobody to hand it to. The seat that fronts is not running this story.

It runs by itself, inside my head, and it opens with a question about a future that cannot be answered, because nothing about that future carried a date.

What would that line be earning by now?

When the story comes, it meets something already decided, and it does not get decided again by whoever happens to be awake.

I had to write off one version of the argument completely. Work I built goes out under the fronting seat’s name, and the audience of that seat will not find out whose hands made it. I do not sell to that audience and would not want to, so a correction made there has nowhere to be spent, and the capacity that went into rehearsing one went nowhere.

The attribution wound does not get repaired by correcting anybody. It gets repaired by the backlog: the projects I parked and the product line itself, each carrying my name and a figure from its first day, so the thing is in the system before anybody has to be told about it.

The backlog is my own work, and I have to read its history as plainly as I read the arrangement’s. Every delivery I ever made was held by a counterparty, and the counterparty held a date. My own things had neither, and the measure of that is how long they stayed parked while client work shipped around them.

The record’s name for the condition is an operator with no owner. The seat that builds is staffed. The seat that asks for the thing, holds the date and can refuse the result stands empty.

On client work the client sits in it. On the product line no seat in the arrangement sat in it, which is how a thing can be wanted by everybody near it and made by nobody.

So I put an owner into that seat the one way I have seen a seat hold: by contract. Hours booked each day for my own work are a term and not a virtue. One seat books them, the other delivers them, and both seats are mine.

I follow contracts. With an owner in place, each unknown in my own work gets an instrument and each instrument gets a date, and results come back on a schedule, in weeks and not in years. A result with a date on it can come back wrong, which is the exact opposite of an unfalsifiable loss.

I can afford wrong. A founder who stands on money gets a couple of tries before the money is gone. I stand on what I can do, and a failed try does not use that up.

I do not know yet whether that seat stays filled on the days when nobody outside is asking for anything. It has not been tested. It is being tested now, with no client’s date standing in for mine.

The product line can still be made. Priced, scoped, sold once to one person who was free to say no. Then there is something to lose, and if it goes, it goes on a date.