Chapter 11
Operational Control

Today, there are two entities that exist to ensure the proper functioning of individuals, businesses, administrations, and associations. On one hand, investigative journalism, whose role is to shed light on what was hidden without being of a private nature, that is to say, to fight against concealment. On the other hand, the police and justice system, whose role is to combat fraud.
We propose adding a third structure: operational control, whose purpose is to promote the application of best practices. Operational control fights against incompetence and decision-making based on flawed methodologies, as seen in chapter 4. It is the cornerstone of the whole structure.

Functioning

Operational control is conducted periodically on all organizations. It is carried out by a small group of external individuals, randomly selected while considering geographic constraints, among those who possess the required skills and who do not present a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest can be reported either by the person in control or by the organization being controlled. The control group must consist of 50% individuals who have already performed the activity of the organization being controlled, and 50% others.
The controllers may interview, in private if they deem it appropriate, anyone within the controlled organization.

The control aims to evaluate the following points separately:
1. The benefit to the community of the organization's purpose, as formulated by its president.
2. The completeness and sincerity of the content of the problem journal and the strategic reflections journal.
3. The alignment of activities and resources with the organization's purpose. This concerns the roles of the treasurer and the president.
4. Organizational effectiveness, especially via the problem journal. This concerns the director in particular.
5. Any possible transfer of work to third parties who are not compensated, for example, by imposing them with online data entry that cannot easily be automated, or by forcing them to come and retrieve the information themselves.
6. The allocation of resources for each strategic study that are proportionate to the stakes involved. This concerns the president in particular.
7. The quality of implementation of the results of strategic analyses. This concerns the director in particular.

Note that we deliberately used the term 'operational control' and not 'audit.' Indeed, the objective of control is first and foremost to check the relevance and methodological quality of the strategic analyses that have been carried out, not to carry out these analyses and propose solutions. The basis was described in chapter 7, in the section 'The conditions for a reliable decision-making process.' Nevertheless, it seems appropriate here to recall the following point, even if it means repeating: it is a methodological evaluation aiming to ensure that the four conditions for a serious line of reasoning have been met. In particular, the control must be very vigilant in considering as invalid all forms of methodological conformity. Methodological conformity means applying a method that does not work well, under the pretext that it is the standard, and hence 'we cannot be blamed for it.' It is also considered a form of methodological conformity to rely on social support to validate a solution that lacks solid justification. Finally, operational control must encourage reasonable risk-taking. The objective at this level is clearly to combat the myth that replaces reason, as described in the article by Meyer and Rowan mentioned in chapter 3.

Following the overall evaluation of the organization, the control group:
1. Awards grades to the strategic analyses, which adjusts the strategic rating of their authors. This is where the link is made with the reasoning method analysis we proposed in chapter 7.
2. May adjust the grades of older analyses based on their consequences once they become visible.
3. May decide on the mandatory allocation of resources to certain existing or newly added strategic questions.
4. May make improvement suggestions, but not merely for appearances.

It may decide, following a second control that confirms the conclusions of the first one:
5. To definitively remove the president, the director, or the treasurer.
6. To split the organization, if the single-tier management is not effective, the staff is large, and there is no obstacle related to a critical size necessary for the activity.
7. To dissolve the structure, in the case of major qualitative malfunctioning.
When the first control reveals serious shortcomings that could lead to the application of points 5, 6, or 7, the second control will be entrusted to people with a higher strategic rating. Just like in the case of an appeals court.
In addition, a second control is also conducted on a random sample of controls, to assess their quality.

Is it worth the candle?

When we combine the formalism of the strategic reflections journal imposed on each organization (previous chapter) with the organization of all the associated controls, we end up with something quite cumbersome to implement. It then becomes legitimate to ask the question: Is all of this really worth it?
To answer this, several factors must be taken into account. First, Marx already noted that industrialization generates much more complex interactions between organizations, a fact that is even more true after the second industrial revolution of the digital age. Therefore, weighing decisions carefully is more important than before, because the indirect consequences are heavier. This is why we have clearly emphasized that this new formalism must be enforced with more strength the greater the stakes of the decision to be made. In addition, at the beginning of this work, the chapter on cognitive dissonance showed that 'natural human reasoning' does not exist. This is even more true given that the people who perform best in management functions within current capitalist organizations are those who are more inclined towards action and power games than reflection. Hence the importance of imposing a mechanism that allows for an ex-post control of the argumentation leading to the decision and the establishment of the strategic rating of individuals, in order to ensure that decisions are indeed made as best as possible by the most competent.

Moreover, we greatly underestimate the effect of the second industrial revolution, that of the digital. In chapter 6, we saw that in Marx's time, the boss could get a fairly clear idea of the actual situation of his means of production simply by taking a walk through his workshop, but this is no longer the case once digital technology comes into play. In fact, with the massification of the digital, we have gradually shifted to a boss who makes decisions, often just by looking at PowerPoint presentations made by salespeople. Then, when concrete problems arise, he tells his employees that production must be delivered at all costs, so they must 'figure it out,' often backed by the specter of unemployment, that is to say, an argument that goes like this: if you can't manage it, others are waiting at the door to take your place. This is formulated with varying degrees of tact depending on each person's character, but always based on the same unacceptable premise: the dissociation of decision-making from the associated responsibility.
This drift can also be observed in the practice of operational goals that are requested from teams to achieve, or even to set themselves in advance in the most perverse management cases. An employee, as soon as they are subordinate, that is to say, does not make strategic decisions, is bound by a duty to provide the company with means, namely their labor power, time, knowledge, and loyalty. They cannot be held to a duty of results. Yet precisely, this unhealthy shift has occurred, albeit gradually, so that individuals have gradually resigned themselves to it as it progressed. However, although gradual, under the effect of the complexity of digital processes, the drift has reached a shocking level, so it is high time to put things back in order. One cannot ask people to assume the consequences of decisions that were made lightly, without taking into account the field reality, because after a while, trust in the social organization disappears, so does the return to every man for himself, to simple power relations, and finally to populism.
However, having people on the ground make democratic decisions, as in a cooperative company, or within the framework of participatory democracy, is not necessarily the general solution to this problem. Indeed, when the problems become complex, the operational personnel are not always mentally capable of anticipating future problems on paper. They are only capable of noticing them after the decision has already been made and the new system put in place. Hence the importance of ensuring that the decision will be made as a result of a study of an adequate level with respect to the consequences, by individuals who have demonstrated their specific ability to carry out strategic studies. The ultimate goal is clearly trust in the 'social contract' resulting from trust in the quality of the decisions made.

To return to the cost of the imposed formalism for strategic decisions and their operational control, the structure of the organizations we have described in the previous chapters also has the effect of limiting the undesirable effect of Parkinson's Law, namely the multiplication of unproductive hierarchical levels. Therefore, in the end, what we are doing is transferring a non-productive and confidence-destroying cost into a constructive cost, mainly by improving the indirect consequences of the decisions made in each organization.