The exquisite art of Incremental Degradation

Incremental degradation was once explained to me by way of the analogy of a photocopier.
If you copy a document, the copy is marginally less clear than the original. Then if you copy the copy, it is again very slightly fuzzier. And so on.

It’s a physical representation of the game of Chinese Whispers. Each repetition makes small changes such that very often the end message is radically different from the initial version.
And to make things even more confusing, in this woke world, we are not supposed to call the game “Chinese Whispers”. The woke name is now  “telephone”.
 
But incremental degradation is far more prevalent than in the clarity of documents or the accuracy of spoken messages. It is all pervasive – that processes, and standards, degrade marginally with each repetition. And marginally with each repetition adds up to massive change over time.
 
A recent property Sale and Purchase agreement we signed was 44 pages. I looked back at some of the agreements we signed when we started in this industry. I found one of just 8 pages. And then I considered whether the extra trees milled, and the extra lawyerly time expended to produce all those extra pages, actually provided any greater protection or clarity for the parties involved in the transaction. The answer I came up with was very probably not.

Gradually changing the basic agreement over the years by adding in all the additional clauses probably only serves to add mind fog to most buyers/sellers who only very sporadically sign sale and purchase agreements, but adds to the workloads of accountants and lawyers. The incremental changes have served to confuse rather than clarify.
 
We have seen the phenomenon also in building maintenance. Similar to the “broken windows” philosophy, where leaving one window broken, or one wall graffitied, means more windows are likely to be broken, and more walls covered with graffiti. Buildings that are not maintained and/or cleaned regularly send a message to the occupants that accepting a lesser standard is acceptable. And then gradually over time, a building gradually degrades. Which of course has a major impact on it’s value.
 
The other side of incremental degradation is to do with increments.

Very often, adding more is actually a counter-productive action. As in, adding more bureaucrats actually degrades the quality of the service. We have seen with the current (likely for only a short time longer) government the exponential increase in the numbers of bureaucratic personnel.

But has this resulted in better outcomes? Quite the reverse. From a recent piece by Nick Mowbray: “In the year 2000 New Zealand had 1200 bureaucrats working in the Ministry of Education. We had 2800 schools and according to the M.o.E. we had 750,000 students. We ranked highly on international metrics such as the program for international student assessment (PISA). We were ranked fourth in reading, sixth in mathematics and fifth in science. Fast forward to today and student numbers have risen a little over 11% and the number of schools has decreased to 2600, but bureaucrats numbers have ballooned, nearly tripling, a rise of 166.7%. And what have we got for it? Nothing. In fact, we have gone backwards rapidly, now ranked 13^th in reading, 27^th in Math and 20^th in Science”.
 
Just as copying from copies, adding more whisperers in the chain and adding more pages to a contract actually confuse and degrade, so does bloating a bureaucracy actually produce less of an outcome.
 
For the future, we can envisage that AI is likely to be another excellent example of the art form of incremental degradation. Already generative AI models train on AI generated content – as opposed to content generated by humans. As AI generates more and more content, increasingly the human generated content is sidelined. With each generation of synthetic (or AI generated) data, outliers disappear and outputs less accurately reflect reality until what’s left is nonsense. Much as “Chinese Whispers” does.
 
As we come to recognise the damage done by the phenomenon of incremental degradation, how do we combat it?

Very often the answer is by taking a very simple approach. If you copy the original - rather than a copy – you will achieve a clearer result. If you ask the source – rather than someone who has heard from someone else - you will likely know a version closer to the truth.
 
We can recognise that there are many services, institutions, products, and even buildings, that do degrade over time. Often the only way to restore health and quality is to strip them right back to basics. And then re-build without the grime, tinkering and added baubles that have been added over the years. That can apply as much to industrial buildings as it does to government.