The costs
The cheapest claims to settle
No measurement to design, no values to reconcile. Just somebody saying a true thing. So why were four of five never said?
Claims this part is about, and what each was answered with
The travel time and fares fall entirely on the employee
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudChildcare was arranged around the pattern now being changed
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudTwo people moved house on the basis of the previous arrangement
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudThe journeys of the people setting the rule are the shortest on the team
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudThe lease runs to 2031 and the rent review falls next year
Interest→A statement about who paysSaid once, in a finance update
five claims · five interest · none of the answered ones was answered in the wrong kind · four were never answered at all
All five claims about who pays, from the twenty-four.
Of the three kinds, claims about who pays are by far the cheapest to settle, and they are the ones least often settled.
That combination is worth pulling apart, because it is the clearest case on this site of a problem that is entirely social rather than intellectual.
How cheap they are
An empirical claim needs a measurement that may not exist, may need designing, and may take months.
A value claim needs two people to find a trade, which may be impossible and is never quick.
A cost claim needs one person to say a true thing about a document or about their own life. The lease: open it. The journey: state it. The childcare: describe the constraint. Each takes under a minute and nobody has to be persuaded of anything.
| Kind | What settling requires | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Empirical | A measurement, possibly new | Weeks to never |
| Value | A trade both sides accept | Weeks, often never |
| Interest | Somebody saying it | Under a minute |
Why they are not settled
Because the cost is not in the difficulty, it is in the saying, and the saying has a price that the table above does not show.
Stating a cost that falls on you reads as asking for relief from it. Stating a cost that falls on your organisation reads as admitting your real reason. Stating a cost that falls on somebody else reads as speaking for them.
Three ways to say it, three ways for it to land badly, and no fourth option.
The way round
The phrasing exists and is set out elsewhere on this site, but the structural point is simpler than any phrasing: somebody has to go first, and it should be whoever can most afford to.
On this record that was the organisation. Naming the lease would have cost them a suspicion they were already under and would have licensed four other costs to enter. Nobody did it, and the four stayed out.
What an argument looks like with the costs in
Shorter, and more negotiable.
Once the costs are stated, the discussion acquires objects that can be traded: notice periods, which days, how long the arrangement holds, whether there is any contribution, what happens to the people who moved. None of those requires anybody to change their mind about anything.
Compare that with the discussion as it actually ran, which was about whether offices are productive, conducted with studies, for eleven weeks, ending in an announcement.
The practical summary
If you are in one of these arguments and want to do one thing:
Find the cheapest claim in the room — the one that somebody could settle by stating a figure — and state it, with the no-request clause attached.
It will be a cost. It is the only kind of claim that one person can settle unilaterally, in a sentence, without anybody's agreement, and on this record four such sentences went unsaid for eleven weeks and took the outcome with them.
The exception: costs that are genuinely contested
Most cost claims are facts. A few are not, and it is worth separating them so that the general point is not overstated.
"The building is costing us four million a year" can be contested: what is in the figure, what would be saved by subletting, what the exit costs are. That is a real empirical dispute with an accountant at the end of it.
"My journey is ninety minutes" cannot be contested in the same way, and attempting to is corrosive.
So the rule is slightly narrower than the page suggests: a cost somebody bears personally is settled by them stating it. A cost borne by an organisation may need working out, and that is ordinary analysis rather than an argument about values.
Why that distinction is worth holding
Because it is where the two sides most often talk past each other on this particular kind of claim.
Somebody states a personal cost and gets questions about methodology, which is both inappropriate and infuriating. Somebody states an organisational cost as a flat fact, and the other side treats it as unquestionable, when it is in fact an estimate with assumptions in it.
The usable version: personal costs are testimony, organisational costs are analysis, and each should be received in the appropriate register.
The claim that is cheapest of all
Of the five, the cheapest to settle was the one about who was setting the rule.
Nobody had to read anything or calculate anything. The three people writing the policy knew their own journeys, and stating them would have taken fifteen seconds and established the one fact that contextualised everything else in the discussion.
Fifteen seconds, never spent, over eleven weeks.
The general lesson about cheapness
There is an inverse relation in this material that is worth stating plainly: the cheaper a claim is to settle, the less likely it is to be settled.
Empirical claims are expensive and get argued about at length. Value claims are impossible and get argued about even longer. Cost claims are nearly free and get skipped.
The reason is that the expense of a claim and the awkwardness of stating it are unrelated, and it is awkwardness rather than expense that determines what gets said. Nothing on this site is a better summary of what went wrong in eleven weeks than that sentence.