Nope, I wouldn’t get that either! But my dentist’s brain seems to have adapted to most of his customers, at some point, sounding as though they’re in a cardboard box full of cotton wool. Open-wide mouths, some filled with metal probes, he knows the risk when he places his customers in `The Chair’ – there’s little chance of gratifying conversation – instead he explains what’s happening as he goes along.
At the same time as guiding a new assistant for quality control whilst translating the procedure, he’d however underestimated the risk of his dental dictionary being stretched too far. Re-framing the language for me, there was no risk to it not making sense, however, what hadn’t been thought through was the potential for his patient to choke…. with laughing: ‘I’ll tart it up using a Tarting Tool’.
Business and work environments are full of problems, many attributed to the grating that happens between rules and practice. For some, whose situations involve being their own managers, there are additional challenges to working autonomously without specific or clear rules available; conditions are defined using personal, sometimes unreliable or inflexible, values, which in turn makes the creation of a structure, to measure competency, ever more challenging. And, when a situation arises, when there isn’t a specific rule or working practice that offers conclusive direction, discretion, as part of a business practice, or system becomes stressed.
Holes, like rules, have a life cycle. For discrepancy the tarting tool needs discretionary usage.
Following the financial crisis explosion, the FSA (now FCA) announced, that it would undertake a review, MMR (mortgage market review): to deliver ‘a sustainable market for all participants’ and to be ‘flexible for consumers’. Its recent implementation has created headlines in respect of the assessment of borrowers’ income. In essence there were ‘holes’ which needed addressing and to prevent consumers being trapped, now places responsibility with the lender.
Figuratively, in the shoes of someone who fell through such a hole is Alice. Contemplating her situation (‘…she was considering…. making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies), she weighs the benefits to her fiscal position (this might be for a property or her business) against the effort that’s required. A White Rabbit (financial product headline rate) intentionally runs close by. Alice’s time is consumed and because she hasn’t a discretionary ‘system’ available, the labyrinth of challenges for discrepancy she’s facing isn’t considered as she follows the white rabbit…. down the hole.
There are some super-massive black holes in finance provision; similarly there are massive holes in business and for business, with property purchase and property sale, and, when they come about from discrepancies merging together, it isn’t all black …. its liquorice.
Tarting a cavity with a tarting tool has no effect when the discrepancy has come about because risk wasn’t measured with discretion.
