The manuscript now opens naturally at Chapter Five.
This is beginning to concern everyone.
Blottisham: I've been thinking about yesterday's discussion.
Quillibrace: My sympathies.
Blottisham: If institutions are organised around uncertainty...
why are they so fond of procedures?
Surely procedures exist because uncertainty has already been removed.
Quillibrace: An understandable assumption.
Entire bureaucracies have been constructed upon it.
Stray: The manuscript says something rather different.
It suggests that procedures exist because uncertainty cannot be removed.
Only managed.
Blottisham: That sounds suspiciously convenient.
Quillibrace: Does it?
Imagine two surgeons confronted with the same operation.
Would you prefer each to improvise according to temperament?
Blottisham: Certainly not.
Quillibrace: Quite.
The procedure does not abolish uncertainty.
It ensures that uncertainty is encountered in roughly the same order each time.
(A pause.)
Stray: That's a lovely way of putting it.
The uncertainty is still there.
The procedure simply gives everyone the same map.
Blottisham: So procedures aren't answers.
They're routes.
Quillibrace: Better.
They are agreed routes through territory that remains partly unmapped.
Blottisham: Then why do people become so attached to them?
Quillibrace: Because familiarity is reassuring.
One may traverse an uncertain landscape with considerable confidence if the footpath is well worn.
Stray: The manuscript also observes that procedures often survive the circumstances that produced them.
Blottisham: Surely not.
Quillibrace: Frequently.
Institutions possess unusually long memories.
Sometimes longer than their reasons.
(Blottisham looks thoughtfully at the ceiling.)
Blottisham: That would explain several forms I completed last week.
Quillibrace: It may explain civilisation.
(A brief silence.)
Stray: I liked another sentence.
"A procedure is institutional memory disguised as present necessity."
Quillibrace: Ah.
That is rather good.
Blottisham: Is it true?
Quillibrace: Often.
Someone once made a mistake.
The institution remembered.
Eventually the memory acquired a form.
Future generations inherited the form without necessarily inheriting the story.
Stray: Which is why people sometimes ask,
"Why do we do it this way?"
and no one can answer.
Quillibrace: Precisely.
The explanation has retired.
The procedure has remained in post.
(They laugh.)
Blottisham: That's absurd.
Quillibrace: It is administration.
The distinction is occasionally difficult to maintain.
Stray: So perhaps institutions don't preserve certainty.
They preserve successful ways of living with uncertainty.
Quillibrace: Yes.
Until circumstances change.
At which point they continue preserving them with admirable determination.
Blottisham: That's rather unfair.
Institutions do change.
Quillibrace: Indeed.
Very slowly.
This prevents them changing every Tuesday.
Which would be exhausting.
(A thoughtful pause.)
Stray: The manuscript never laughs at procedures themselves.
Only at the belief that procedures somehow replace judgement.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
A procedure cannot decide whether this is the occasion on which the procedure ought not to be followed.
That responsibility remains stubbornly human.
Blottisham: Then judgement survives all bureaucracy.
Quillibrace: It had better.
Otherwise bureaucracy would require another bureaucracy to supervise it.
Blottisham: Surely no civilisation would...
(He stops.)
Quillibrace: Quite.
(A silence of unusual quality settles over the room.)
Stray: I think I'm beginning to understand the manuscript.
Every institution seems to consist of two things.
Its procedures...
and the quiet judgement required whenever the procedures prove insufficient.
Quillibrace: My dear Miss Stray...
I rather suspect that is why institutions continue employing people.
The discussion concluded after a prolonged attempt to determine whether the College's procedure for revising procedures ought itself to be revised.
The existing procedure was retained pending further procedural review.