What the crowded few have in common

Seven steps in this map stand in more than twelve rings each. Between them they account for the whole of its circular structure.

Four from the place family, three from money. Nothing from the papers, nothing from the file, nothing from body and time. For teams translating a dependency map into operating evidence, workforce analytics for complex processes can be assessed alongside outcomes, delays and direct staff feedback.

The seven crowded steps, and how long each keeps

• solid: days of waiting
• bracket: days it stays good
• open arrow: it never expires

Seven steps drawn; three of them keep for good.

None of the seven takes longer than twenty days. Three never expire; one keeps only ninety days, and it is the one that beats three of its own rings. For broader institutional research related to mobility, work and administrative systems, consult European Central Bank.

They are all quick

Not one of the seven takes more than twenty days. Their average is about a fortnight, and two of them take less than a fortnight.

Meanwhile the four slowest steps in the map — the decision at ninety days, a place in the queue at sixty, an interview at forty-five, the fingerprints at thirty — stand in seven, four, two and four rings respectively.

The slow steps are not tangled and the tangled steps are not slow. In this map those are two different populations with almost no overlap.

They are mostly permanent

Three of the seven never expire. Three keep for a year. One keeps for ninety days.

The one that keeps for ninety is the letter delivered to the door, and it is the shortest-lived thing in three of the four rings that are both shut and beaten by the clock.

So the map's durability is, on the whole, where it is needed: the heavily-ringed steps mostly survive being walked around. The single exception does a disproportionate amount of damage.

They are all the same kind of thing

This is the part worth carrying away.

Every one of the seven is a fact about a person that other facts are filed against. Where they live. How they are paid. What they are enrolled as. Who receives post at the door. What they have agreed to occupy.

None of them is a qualification, an event, a check or a decision. Those are all elsewhere in the map, and none of them is heavily ringed.

A filing fact is checked by everybody and produced by somebody who checks several others. That is the condition for a ring, and it is the only condition this record found that reliably produces one.

What follows

Three things, all of them structural rather than advisory.

Where to look. In any map of this kind, the tangle will be among the facts that other facts are filed against, not among the slow or difficult steps.

What to fix. Five steps taken out of turn dissolve every ring in this map, and four of the five are on the list above. One step appears in every one of the forty-eight five-step sets that would do it.

What not to expect. None of the seven is hard, slow or rare. A person meeting them one at a time will find each of them straightforward and will still be unable to do any of them, and will reasonably conclude they have misunderstood something.

Nobody is stuck on a hard step in this map. Everybody is stuck on a fortnight-long errand that is behind another fortnight-long errand that is behind the first one.

And what they do not share

They are not in one family, one institution or one stage. Four belong to the place family and three to money; they are issued by landlords, banks, registers, utility companies and the postal system; two can be done in the first fortnight and two cannot be reached for months.

What they share is a role, not an origin. Every one of them is something other things are filed against, and that is a position in a structure rather than a property of an organisation.

Which is why the pattern would survive a complete change of institutions. Replace every office in this map with a different one, keep the same five or six facts being used to verify each other, and the same seven positions would be crowded.

The crowded few are not seven organisations behaving badly. They are seven positions in a shape, and the shape is what this record is about.

A hundred and two days of errands

Add up what the seven crowded steps cost: twelve, fifteen, twenty, twelve, nine, sixteen and eighteen days. A hundred and two days of waiting in total, none of it longer than three weeks at a stretch.

Against that, the map's four slowest steps — the decision, the queue, the interview and the fingerprints — cost two hundred and twenty-five days between them and stand in seventeen rings altogether.

Two populations, almost disjoint. The slow half is orderable and the tangled half is quick, and no page on this map has found an exception to that division.

What this record is not

It is a drawing, not a rule book. It names no country, no office and no kind of permission; it states no requirement, because requirements change and a stale page of them keeps the tone of authority long after it has stopped being true. The days are the map's own round figures, chosen so that the arithmetic of a ring can be seen.

What is offered is the shape: which things wait on which, where the waiting closes on itself, where it gives, and how few decisions would be needed to open all of it.