The Report Nobody Read

The report was finished in March and circulated the same week. It was twenty-two pages long, it had a summary on the first page, and the summary said in three sentences that the second pump would fail within two years if it was not replaced.

It was read by nobody. That is not quite fair: it was opened by four people, and one of them replied to say thank you. But the recommendation was never put to the committee, because the committee only considered what appeared on its agenda, and agendas were built from requests, not from reports.

Priya had written it in her second month. She assumed for a while that silence meant agreement and that the work was already being planned. By the autumn she had assumed something else, and by the following spring she had stopped assuming anything at all.

The pump failed in November of the second year, on a Sunday, which meant that two people were called in and the whole line stood still until Tuesday afternoon. The cost of that was written down somewhere and was larger than the cost of the replacement would have been.

Halvard, who chaired the committee, found the report afterwards while looking for something else. He read the summary, then the date, then the summary again. What he said in the meeting was that the process had worked as designed and the design was wrong.

The change he made was small and slightly embarrassing. Any report with a recommendation was from then on to be accompanied by a single question on the agenda: has this been decided, yes or no? It cost nothing, and it has caught four things since.