Thirteen steps that stand clear

Twenty-three of the thirty-six steps stand in at least one ring. The other thirteen stand in none, and they are not the thirteen anybody would guess.

What the thirteen cost and how long they keep

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

Eleven steps drawn; two of them keep for good.

Eleven of the thirteen. The solid bar is the waiting; the bracket above it is how long the thing then stays good, and an open arrow means it never expires.

The list

All six papers brought from home are here. So is the last step in the map, which waits on eight things and is waited on by nothing. Teams dealing with repeated queues and handoffs can review the service directly, then evaluate whether the resulting evidence actually reduces delay or ambiguity.

What they have in common

Nothing, except position.

Standing clear of every ring is not a property of a step's subject, its cost or its importance. The passport copy is clear and it is the most-required step in the record. The next file is clear and it waits on more things than all but one other step. The fee is clear and five things wait on it. Additional public research relevant to complex systems and work can be found at UN Development Programme.

What they share is that no chain of dependencies leaves them and comes back. That is a fact about the drawing, not about the errand.

A step outside every ring can still be slow, perishable and load-bearing. What it cannot be is impossible to reach.

Three ways of standing clear

Three of the thirteen wait on nothing, so no chain can return to them. They are the floor of the map.

One of them is waited on by nothing, so no chain can leave it. That is the next file lodged in time, which sits at the top of the map and is the whole purpose of everything below it.

The remaining nine are in the middle, and they are clear for the less tidy reason that their predecessors and their successors happen not to meet. A record of the partnership waits on the birth record and the passport copy, and is waited on by the translation. Nothing that the translation leads to leads back to the birth record, so nothing closes.

The thirteen are not the easy part

Ten of the thirteen expire. Five of them keep for only ninety days, and one — the fee — for sixty.

Done one after another they account for a hundred and seven days of waiting, and the three slowest of them are brought papers: a record of having no convictions at twenty-eight days, and the birth record and the record of the partnership at twenty-one each.

So the clear steps are not the quick ones. Entanglement and delay are independent quantities in this map, and treating them as the same thing is the commonest way to misread it.

Why this list is the useful half

A plan can be made for these thirteen. They sort into an order, they can be started in that order, and the only thing that goes wrong is that some of them go stale while something else is stuck.

For the other twenty-three, no plan exists in the strict sense. There is no sequence, and what people actually do instead — enter a ring at its softest point, do something provisionally, and repair it afterwards — is the subject of a later part of this record.

The honest division in this map is not between hard steps and easy ones. It is between the thirteen that can be put in an order and the twenty-three that cannot.

The leaves

Four of the thirteen are leaves: steps that nothing at all waits on, or that lead nowhere further.

The next file lodged in time is the clearest. It waits on eight things and is waited on by none. It is the top of the map, and the only reason anything below it exists.

A letter from whoever owns the place, a showing of savings held and the kept record of coming and going are each waited on by exactly one step, and that step is itself close to the top. They are strands hanging off the knot rather than part of it.

A leaf is the safest kind of step. Whatever goes wrong with it affects one thing, and whatever it waits for will eventually arrive.

The only completely safe steps in this map are the ones that matter least, which is not a coincidence: a step nothing depends on cannot be part of a circle.

What the panel shows

Eleven of the thirteen are drawn above: the solid bar is how long the step takes to get, and the bracket above the bar is how long it then stays good. Two of them end in an open arrow instead of a bracket, because they never expire at all.

The two not drawn are the kept record of coming and going, which costs no waiting time, and the next file, which closes the map. Both would have added a row and said nothing, and a panel that pads itself to look complete is worse than one that says what it left out.