The Tragic Insufficiency of Good Intentions

Imagining that people are doing the best they can might be comforting as I peer out across society and look for an acceptable moral arc. Feeling like I am doing the best I can might make me less terrified of the mediocre outcomes that I’m achieving, or less invidiously comparative against my way better future selves that don’t seem to be coming into being. Here’s the problem: I’m absolutely not doing the best I can. At anything. Neither is anyone else. That’s not a moral judgment or deeply cynical; it’s two sentences that come from my profound belief in the potential for me and others to improve. Hope might be the correct (saccharine?) adjective for it. If we can improve, perhaps the moral imperative is that we must. If good intentions are bound to fail, is there a way to design one’s life, relationships, and thoughts to actually create good outcomes?

I think so. As annoying as it is to refer to the property acquisition strategies of feudal lords of modernity, Amazon (the company, though I think the rainforest and river have figured it out better and we just don’t know the language yet) has figured some of this stuff out and turned it into language. Amazon’s “mechanisms” are meant to create what are called “complete processes” to convert an action-burst of good intentions into long-term better and better outcomes. Complete processes are ritualized action/communication bundles that reinforce and improve themselves while creating the desired outcome with or without sweet intentionality. Charlie Kindel writes both concisely and completely about mechanisms above, I will not attempt to paraphrase any further, but will continue assuming you’ve spent at least five minutes getting familiar with his article linked above (or at least keep it open in another tab and flip back and forth). I’ll encourage adoption by referring to elements without defining them, but I’m not Google so I won’t be able to inspect for compliance. Should have made one of those deals with the Adwords devil.

Relationships (I’m using the broader definition of this word, not the one that refers exclusively to romantic partnerships) seem to be one of the components of human existence that we value the highest, while outsourcing their quality and improvement to good intentions so blithely. We complain that they stagnate. We blame ourselves and those we have relationships with for their bad intentions when they deuterate (I mean deteriorate, but the Wikipedia distraction that misspelling created I’d like to share with you) and collapse. It’s time to stop wailing against the supposed half lives of every human connection and start doing something. That something is building mechanisms.

So what is a relationship complete process? It’s one (only one) of the members defining, driving adoption of, auditing, and inspecting the mechanism. The mechanism owner can change, and probably should from time to time, depending on the mechanism.

I have to go respond to some work mechanisms now (after completing my morning hygienic complete process, of which I remain the weary owner after so many years). More thoughts to follow about what exactly a relationship mechanism is (metaphors galore to look forward to, to be sure), what kinds there are, and how applying these in one’s life won’t turn that life into a mundane software engineering project.