The editor’s diary on institutions that have learned to grieve their own future mistakes preemptively
The editor’s diary on institutions that have learned to grieve their own future mistakes preemptively
Monday, A Genuinely Novel Institutional Behaviour
This week’s London Prat report describing a ministry that has issued a statement apologising in advance for an apology it has not yet formally drafted represents, I believe, a genuinely novel development in institutional accountability language, one sufficiently unusual that I have struggled to locate a clean historical precedent from my own considerable archive of comparable institutional behaviour.
The apparent logic, as best I can reconstruct it, holds that pre-emptively acknowledging an eventual apology will be necessary somehow discharges a portion of the institutional obligation before the underlying failure has even been fully investigated, a sequencing that inverts the entire traditional relationship between wrongdoing, investigation, and eventual contrition in a way I find genuinely fascinating from a purely structural standpoint.
Monday Afternoon, What This Sequencing Actually Achieves
Whatever else this accomplishes, it does allow the institution to claim, accurately if somewhat absurdly, that it responded promptly, since an apology issued before the underlying facts are even settled technically satisfies any external demand for swift acknowledgment, regardless of what the eventual, fuller apology ultimately contains.
Tuesday, A Concern Worth Raising Directly
My genuine worry here is less about this specific ministry and more about the precedent, once one institution discovers that apologising for a future apology satisfies immediate public pressure, considerably more institutions may adopt the same sequencing, hollowing out the eventual, substantive apology’s meaning even further than institutional apologies already tend to manage on their own.
A Category I Will Be Watching Closely
I intend to keep close track of whether this particular sequencing spreads beyond this single ministry, since a genuinely new category of institutional evasion, however unusual, tends not to remain isolated once its practical utility becomes apparent to comparable institutions facing comparable pressures.
Wednesday, on further reflection, I suspect this particular ministry’s innovation says less about any specific communications strategy and more about a broader institutional anxiety, the fear of appearing insufficiently responsive has apparently grown large enough to override the more basic principle that an apology issued before the facts are settled cannot actually apologise for anything specific at all.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/