Rebuilding the Room

Four essays have made a single case from four directions. Organisations appoint on the certificate because it is legible, train by the fortnight because it produces a document, hand the result machines that reward obedience, and sometimes select against the very people who would have argued. Twice I have promised that the remedy costs less than the certification budget and considerably more trouble. This essay makes good on that promise, and most of it is given to practice rather than argument, because the argument has been made.The remedy is not a course. An organisation that answers this series with a module in critical thinking or a certificate in psychological safety will have reproduced the error it set out to correct, and will have a document to prove it. Nor is it to hire better people, which is the [[10-19 Areas/11 RW Ink Column/11.01 Published/The Saviour-Industrial Complex|saviour’s answer]] to every institutional failure. The faculty of judgement, as Edmund Burke…