La Bourse / Volume I / Nº I.07 / Quiz, reflection, essays

A woman and a man talking across a small white table over lunch, a bare wall and a bright window beside them. — Plate I.07 · Quiz, reflection, essaysThe Third Chair.The third chair is the one that decides. A room with two people in it is a conversation. A room with three is a practice that can continue without any particular one of them.

ASSESSMENT · Chapter I.07 — The Second Circle

Three instruments: a ten-point quiz, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts. The quiz checks comprehension rather than recall. The reflections are private and first-person. The essays are arguable from more than one side.

THE QUIZ — ten points

Four on recall.

1. Distinguish a simple contagion from a complex one, and say which category a change in working practice falls into.

A simple contagion transmits on a single exposure — news, a price, a rumour, a virus. A complex contagion requires reinforcement from two or more independent contacts before a person acts, because acting carries a cost in time, standing or risk. A change in working practice is always complex. One mark for the distinction, one for the word independent — two signals from the same person are one signal.

2. Give Rogers' five adopter categories with their shares, and say which one the second adopter comes from and why it cannot be the first.

Innovators 2.5 %, early adopters 13.5 %, early majority 34 %, late majority 34 %, laggards 16 %. The second adopter comes from the early-adopter band. It cannot be another innovator because at 2.5 percent you need forty people before a second innovator is even expected, and in any group that fits round a table there is only one. Credit also: Rogers holds that innovators are cosmopolite and marginal to the local system, so their endorsement carries little local weight; early adopters are the people others check with.

3. Name the four governance provisions that constitute the minimum for a new circle, and say where they come from.

Clearly defined boundaries; collective-choice arrangements; monitoring; graduated sanctions. They are four of Ostrom's eight design principles for enduring common-pool institutions. The other four arrive later, once the group has something substantial to defend.

4. State the three conditions under which a circle survives its founder's attention moving elsewhere.

A named successor who is already doing the job — chairing alternate meetings, named on artifacts. A written minimum somebody else can point at. And a split rule agreed in advance: at what size the group divides, and who decides.

Four on application.

5. A colleague reports proudly that the initiative's mailing list has grown from 12 to 200 and attendance at the monthly briefing has tripled, but that nobody outside the core has changed how they work. Diagnose it.

It is a star. Everyone knows the organiser; almost nobody knows anybody else. Each member has exactly one adopting contact, so a second independent reinforcing signal cannot arrive, and adoption among the spokes stays at zero however many spokes are added. The stronger answer notes the specific danger: every visible metric — reach, attendance, awareness — improves while the thing dies, so the measurement system reports the opposite of the truth. The repair is introduction, not recruitment: put members on shared work in pairs, without the founder present, and track the reinforced-member ratio instead of the list size.

6. Two teams are surveyed. Team X's members report needing, on average, 5.5 colleagues to be doing a new practice before they would join. Team Y's report needing 2.6. Which team will adopt, and what else do you need to know?

You cannot tell from the averages, and that is the point of the question. The outcome depends on whether the distribution has a gap — a threshold value at which nobody sits. The chapter's circle B has a mean of 2.583 against circle A's 5.500 and never moves, because no member has a threshold of 1 and there is therefore no route from one adopter to two. Full marks require asking for the distribution, not the mean, and naming the gap as the thing to locate.

7. You have identified the gap in your own team's distribution at threshold 2, and you have two candidates: an enthusiastic junior who already agrees with everything you have said, and a sceptical senior engineer whom people consult before making decisions. Who do you recruit, and what is the risk in each case?

The engineer. The junior is at threshold 0 — another innovator — and adds no information to observers, because their agreement was available without the evidence. The engineer sits near the local norm and is checked with, which is what makes their adoption a signal. The risk with the engineer is that they are genuinely at threshold 4 or 5 and will not move yet, in which case you have spent a month; the risk with the junior is that you feel you have made progress and have not, which is more expensive because it is invisible. Credit any answer that also names the third criterion: whoever you recruit must be visible to the next person you recruit.

8. Your circle has reached fifteen people and meetings have become presentations. Your sponsor proposes adding a facilitator and lengthening the meeting. What do you propose instead, and on what grounds?

Split it. At fifteen there are 105 pairwise channels and four minutes a head in an hour; the group has passed the point where it can hold its own decisions, and a facilitator manages the symptom while the load keeps growing as n². Divide into two circles, clone the charter, name a second and third owner in each, and tie the halves together with two or three overlapping members rather than merging them. Credit any answer that cites Buurtzorg's cap, the n² versus n argument, or the multiply-don't-widen pattern in AA.

Two that require the arithmetic to be done.

9. An eight-person team has thresholds 0 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 — that is, one member will act unprompted, two will act once two others have, and so on. How many end up doing it? Then find the single smallest change to the team that takes it to eight of eight, and show your working.

Start at 0 doing it. The one member at threshold 0 acts, so 1 is doing it. Now count members with threshold ≤ 1: only that same person. The count does not move. Equilibrium: 1 of 8.
The gap is at threshold 1. Replace the member at 7 — the least reachable — with a member at 1, giving 0 1 2 2 3 4 5 6. Now: 1 doing → the member at 1 acts → 2 doing → both members at 2 act → 4 doing → the 3 and 4 act → 6 → the 5 and 6 act → 8 of 8.
The mean threshold of the original team is 3.625; of the repaired team, 2.875. Credit any correct single substitution that fills the gap at 1. The teaching point is that one person changed, nobody's opinion changed, and the outcome went from one to eight.

10. Your organisation's median employee tenure is 3.9 years. Re-founding this initiative from zero, if it lapses, would cost £150,000. A charter naming two additional owners costs each of them two hours a month at a loaded £65 an hour, plus £2,000 a year of administration. Over a three-year term, does the charter clear? Show the arithmetic and state one assumption you are making.

Treat departure as a constant-hazard process: λ = ln 2 / 3.9 = 0.1777 per year. P(gone within 3 years) = 1 − e^(−0.1777 × 3) = 1 − e^(−0.5331) = 41.3 %.
Expected loss per year = 0.413 × 150,000 / 3 = £20,663. Charter cost = 2 × 2 × 12 × 65 + 2,000 = £3,120 + £2,000 = £5,120. Cover ratio = 20,663 / 5,120 = 4.04×. It clears. The second owner is bought for 25 percent of the risk it retires.
The assumption to name: a constant hazard derived from a median understates year-one departures and overstates late-service ones, and "attention moving" is broader than "leaving". The stronger answer also tests the conclusion's sensitivity — the charter still clears at any founder-loss probability above roughly 10 percent — and states it in the treasurer's register: this is not a working group, it is the retirement of a single-point-of-failure exposure at four-times cover.

REFLECTION — eight questions, for one person and a pen

These are not for a room. Write the answers by hand if you can; the slowness is the point.

Who agreed with you fastest on the last thing you tried to change? Write down honestly what their agreement was worth to anybody else, and what you did with the time you spent on them.

Name the person in your organisation whom others check with before deciding. Not the most senior, not the most enthusiastic — the one who is consulted. When did you last ask them for anything?

Draw the shape of your current circle on paper: who is connected to whom, with you removed. What is left standing?

Think of a practice you adopted yourself in the last two years. Who were the two people you saw doing it, and did they know each other?

What have you been doing alone that you have never asked anyone to do with you — and what, specifically, has stopped you asking?

If you were absent for three months starting on Monday, name the person who would chair. If you cannot name them, write down what would have to be true in six months for you to be able to.

Where have you been widening something that should have been split? What would splitting it cost, and who would you be worried about upsetting?

Write the four lines — who is in, how we decide, who watches, what happens when somebody does not do what they said — for a group you are currently in that has never written them. Then notice which of the four was hardest, and sit with why.

ESSAY PROMPTS — five

Each is arguable from more than one side. Each requires at least one source the chapter cites and at least one it does not.

1. The tipping fraction. The chapter reports an experimental tipping threshold near 25 percent and an agent-modelled one near 10 percent, and advises taking the larger where the stake is larger. Argue either that a single tipping fraction is a meaningful quantity that organisations should plan against, or that it is an artefact of particular experimental designs and network topologies and should not be exported to real institutions. Engage Centola, Becker, Brackbill and Baronchelli (2018) directly, and at least one published critique or replication attempt that the chapter does not cite.

2. Does redundancy have to cost efficiency? The chapter argues that the property making a network good at information — minimal redundant paths — makes it bad at practice, and that the two cannot be optimised at once. Take a position. Use Watts and Strogatz on small-world topology, and one source from organisational design or information theory that the chapter does not cite, on whether a network can be tuned for both.

3. Structurelessness, fifty years on. Jo Freeman argued in 1972 that a group refusing explicit structure develops an unaccountable informal elite. Argue either that the four-line governance minimum is a genuine answer to her critique, or that writing rules early formalises whoever happens to hold power at the moment of writing and therefore entrenches exactly what Freeman warned about. Use Freeman and Ostrom, and one account of a real organisation's constitutional moment that the chapter does not cite.

4. The case against splitting. The chapter's growth doctrine is multiply, do not widen, drawing on AA, Buurtzorg and the SDS collapse. Write the strongest case against it: that splitting fragments capability, loses economies of scale, duplicates overhead, and produces a federation too weak to negotiate with anything large. Then write the rebuttal. Conclude with which you find more persuasive and why. Polletta or Sale is the starting point; find at least one source on federated organisational forms that the chapter does not cite.

5. Compatibility versus evidence. Rogers' Peruvian water-boiling campaign achieved 11 adoptions in 200 households over two years, with a resident health worker and a correct scientific claim. Argue what this implies for a regenerative transition: either that compatibility with an existing way of life is the binding constraint and evidence is close to irrelevant until compatibility is solved, or that the Los Molinos case is particular to its setting and generalises poorly to organisations, where formal authority and measurement can substitute for cultural fit. Use Rogers, and one source on behaviour change or implementation science that the chapter does not cite.