The Subcommittee on Subcommittees
To cure its inefficiency, the committee bred seven new ones
Alarmed by a report that the Committee was inefficient, we resolved to address our inefficiency with the seriousness it deserved, which is to say, structurally.
The report, commissioned two years earlier and delivered eighteen months late, concluded that we spent too long deciding how to decide.
The Chair proposed that the matter be entrusted to a body dedicated solely to the improvement of the Committee's workings.
Thus was born the Subcommittee on Efficiency, whose first act was to observe that it could not function without subcommittees of its own.
Seven were duly created: on Scheduling, on Terminology, on the Scheduling of Terminology, and four others whose remits overlapped so exactly that none could act without the permission of another.
The Subcommittee on Scheduling met to schedule the meetings of the other six, and, finding no free date, scheduled a meeting to discuss the shortage of dates.
I was appointed secretary to all seven, a distinction that obliged me to take, simultaneously, seven contradictory sets of minutes.
It emerged that the Subcommittee on Terminology had renamed itself so often that the Subcommittee on Scheduling could no longer locate it in the calendar.
Each body reported upward to the Subcommittee on Efficiency, which reported to the Committee, which referred everything back down, so that no decision ever came to rest.
A circulated proposing a Subcommittee on Subcommittees, to coordinate the subcommittees now coordinating one another into .
The proposal was, with a I found almost beautiful, referred to a subcommittee for consideration.
Efficiency, meanwhile, declined at a rate the Subcommittee on Efficiency was too busy to measure.
Prewitt observed that we had built a machine of exquisite complexity whose only output was the maintenance of the machine.
He was thanked for his contribution and appointed to chair a new subcommittee tasked with reducing the number of subcommittees.
This body, the Subcommittee on , promptly spawned three working groups, and Prewitt was never seen at a general meeting again.
I calculated, in an idle moment, that to attend every meeting now required would consume more hours than a week contains.
When I reported this arithmetic, it was referred to the Subcommittee on Scheduling, which convened to consider the impossibility of convening.
The Chair congratulated us on our thoroughness, noting that no organisation had ever examined itself so exhaustively while accomplishing so little.
A citizen wrote to ask whether the pavement, still tilted, might soon be corrected.
Her letter was logged, acknowledged, and forwarded to the Subcommittee on Correspondence, which had not met since its formation for want of a .
The could not be reached because its members sat on other subcommittees that were, at every proposed hour, already in session.
Someone suggested dissolving the whole structure and simply doing the work, and was gently reminded that , too, would require a subcommittee.
We had achieved, I noted in the margin, a perfect machine: one that consumed all available effort and returned it, unspent, as procedure.
The tree of subcommittees had grown so tall that its roots, the original grievance, were no longer visible from the .
At year's end the Subcommittee on Efficiency issued its findings: the Committee was inefficient, and a body should be formed to look into why.
I filed the report beside the forty others it exactly resembled, and understood that we had not solved the problem but successfully housed it.
For a does not fail to remove an obstacle; it promotes the obstacle, gives it a secretary, and files its objections in triplicate.