Papers brought and papers made

Twelve of the thirty-six steps are paper. Six of them are fetched before leaving and six are made afterwards, and the two halves behave so differently that it is worth setting them side by side.

The six brought

Three of the six wait on nothing. None of the six stands in a single ring. Twenty of the map's ninety-four dependencies point into this family, which makes it the second most waited-on family in the map. Managers examining repeated handoffs may compare Monitask reports for hybrid teams with the map, while keeping activity signals separate from judgements about quality.

The six brought papers are, in other words, the easy part. They are slow — a record of having no convictions takes four weeks — but they are slow in a way that can be started on any day and then forgotten about. Readers looking beyond this abstract map can compare it with material published by RAND.

Nothing in the brought family is tangled. Everything in it is merely late.

The six made

Only ten dependencies point into this family, the joint fewest in the map. But four of its six members stand inside a ring, and that ring is the strangest object in the record.

The ring that is only paper

Four of the made papers form a closed chain of four: the translation waits on the stamp, the stamp waits on the sworn copy, the sworn copy waits on the certification, and the certification waits on the translation.

It is the only ring in the map that contains no money, no place and no part of the file. It is entirely a matter of one office wanting a document another office has not yet produced.

It is also shut at every joint. All four of its dependencies are hard, which means there is no step in it that can be done roughly first and corrected later. Going round the chain costs forty-seven days of waiting and arrives back where it started.

A ring made of four pieces of paper is harder to explain to anybody than a ring made of a bank account and a lease, and it is the same object.

Why the two halves differ

The brought papers are produced by places that already hold a record about the person. Nothing needs to be established first; the record exists, and getting a copy of it is an errand.

The made papers are produced by places that are attesting to something about a document, which means each of them needs the document to be in a particular state already. Attestation is inherently sequential, and sequences that are specified by different offices do not have to agree with one another. Where they disagree, a ring appears.

That is the general mechanism behind most of this map, and the paper ring is its purest case, because nothing else is going on in it.

What the halves share

Both are entirely about documents, and in both the clock matters more than anybody expects. Of the twelve paper steps, nine expire: five at a hundred and eighty days, two at ninety, one at three hundred and sixty-five. Only three never do.

A paper fetched at the start of a long stay, and then held while a ring upstream of it resolves, can quite easily be out of date on the day it is finally handed over. The map's clocks section takes this up in detail; here it is enough to say that nine of the twelve papers in this record are perishable, and that the two halves perish at different rates for no reason connected to their importance.

What the made papers cost in days

The four steps in the paper ring take five, seven, ten and twenty-five days. Walking the ring once therefore costs forty-seven days, and arriving back at the start means arriving at the step that was done provisionally — except that none of the four can be done provisionally, because all four dependencies are hard.

So the forty-seven days are theoretical. Nobody walks this ring; they get round it some other way, and the other way is not in the map.

Compare the brought papers, which cost between one and twenty-eight days and wait on nothing but each other and a photocopy. Eighty-six days of waiting, entirely orderable, with no circularity at all.

The papers that take longest to obtain are the easy half. The ones that take a week each form a wall.

What the division is for

It is a reading convenience and nothing else. No count on this map is produced by the families, and no result changes if the families are abolished.

They are kept because the two halves answer different practical questions — what to do before going, and what to expect on arriving — and because the contrast between them is the clearest short argument that the trouble in this map is not the documents themselves. The brought six are the slowest paper in the record and the least troublesome. The made six are faster and form a wall.