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🎵Imagination is funny, it makes a cloudy day sunny.🎵
No. No. No. No. No.
Thoughts of sunshine on a cloudy day are a total failure of imagination.
Imagination makes a cloudy day... fish! Or maybe: a microwave electro-thermal water plasma thruster.
If you look at clouds and think of sunshine you must be in love, trying to write a song that will score big on easy listening radio, or severely challenged when it comes to the whole inventiveness thing. Any which way, you're going to be pretty dull company...Honey.
Ditto if you start asking the old bellis perennis what to do. 🌼
Eh?
Please don't strike up a conversation with a daisy about what to do. Try asking it about Dadaism instead. At least you'll feel vaguely...self-referential. *shrug*
Oh, and I'll tell you who else lacks imagination: Legislators, that's who.
And they're not alone.
No.
Regulators. Companies. Boards. They're all at it--reductionism.
LIFE is open-textured and we understand it not at all. That should be a joy, but what it turns out to be is FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt.
So, let's say there's a Thing that comes at us full tilt: scandal, fraud, abuse, a situation, an issue, a novel development....whatevs. And we, the vast collective Stakeholder-y, have to decide what to do about it. Chances are, people will stumble around in the dark bumping into all the angles of the Thing and wondering--with or without daisy input--what to do.
Sooner or later someone will point out that the situation calls for greater Scrutiny, increased Transparency or more Protection. They will cast around for ideas and alight upon "audit", say, or "governance" as recognizable representations of what they think the situation requires and hastily draft them into new law or regulation. And the fleeting opportunity to come up with imaginative, new concepts, tailor-made for just this situation, like "Scrupection" or "Progoviny", will have been lost. Subsequently, someone else will observe that, if you squint a bit and look sideways at the Thing, it vaguely resembles another Thing we're all quite familiar with, and at that point, everyone will huff a huge sigh of relief and map the Thing to the other Thing, problem-to-problem, solution-to-solution--even if it turns out to be, actually, a not-very-good fit--and then they'll turn their attention to the next Thing.
That's how it all works. Like True Love. Predictable, convergent and *spoiler alert* ultimately disappointing. (Hey, it's a heartache,* so sue me.)
Take financial benchmarks, for example. There was a crazy, earth-shattering scandal (or two) in the course of which we learned that banks were doing very bad things at the expense of the plumbing that underpins all our investments. Everyone said "we must do something", and policymakers said "Do something? Er, um, ok, how about a bit more scrutiny?" and legislators said "Scrutiny? Ok, done! We'll prescribe an audit." Then, regulators said "Audit? Ok, that sounds like an accounting firm" and company boards said "Did someone say "accounting firms"? Ok, we'll call in the Big 4". And so, a wholly new and disruptive mega-problem, which arguably called for a wholly new and disruptive mega-solution simply became another expensive supplement to the staid relationship between large financial organisations and the even larger accounting firms that appraise them. Was this inevitable? Not at all. Continued-private-sector-administration-with-additional-health-checks was not the only policy option; "audit" is not the only way to prescribe review or scrutiny; and a "benchmark audit" need not necessarily be conducted by the kind of firms that draw up the financial metrics in your annual report and accounts. (In fact, one might point out that the large accounting firms are not entirely free from scandal and conflicts of interest themselves.) Still, here we are.
Yes, here we are. And now legislators and regulators are on a rinse and repeat cycle with crypto-assets.
Crypto is the most potential-ery thing in our world. It can be anything or nothing: a joke, a coin, an asset, a licence, an account, a claim...your hell, your dream and everything in between.** How do you regulate something like that? Breathlessly, out on the edge, one step ahead when you can, two steps behind most of the time, balls to the wind, in perpetual dialogue, with the upper hand (you hope), using your big brain...on caffeine pills. How do you NOT regulate it? By pootling around, hoping something will soon look familiar, chipping off the most accessible growlers and then copying out a tranche or two of your old rulebook (mutatis mutandis) only to find that the iceberg you left behind is now a boundless, looming dark shadow of the melted bergy bits currently puddling at your feet.
No, you lean in. You embrace the vast uncertainty.
🎵Welcome to the end of eras.🎵
* Songwriters: Steve Wolfe / Ronnie James Scott. It's a Heartache lyrics © Universal Music - Careers, Penshurst Music, Lojo Music Ltd
** With apologies to songwriters Shelly Peiken and Meredith Brooks. Bitch lyrics © Sushi Too, Sushi Too Music
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