PS-CLS-020 · r4
CLASSIFICATION
OBSERVED
ENGAGED
CATEGORY BOUNDARY DISPUTE
One scale is laid across things that were never built against each other.
01 DEFINITION
Condition in which items originating in unrelated parts of a system arrive ranked on one scale, so their positions assert a comparability that was never established between them, and the person receiving them has only that scale to act on.
02 CONDITIONS
UNCERTAINTY
CONFLICTING
Each item carries a level, and the levels were set against different neighbours.
TIME PRESSURE
LOW
Nothing is urgent about the sorting; what fails is what the scale teaches over time.
ERROR ASYMMETRY
ASYMMETRIC
Ranking a serious thing low and a trivial thing high are not comparable errors.
OPERATOR STATE
CONCURRENT
The person meets the scale while doing something the scale knows nothing about.
03 WHERE IT APPEARS
MEDICALAlerts from unrelated devices reach one person on a single severity scale none of their makers agreed on.
ENERGYAnnunciations from separately commissioned plant arrive ranked together as though the ranks meant the same thing.
LOGISTICSExceptions raised by different systems are ordered on one list whose levels were each set locally.
PUBLIC SERVICENotices from separate bodies reach one person graded on a scale no single body owns.
FINANCESignals from independently built controls are presented in one order of seriousness.
MANUFACTURINGStation calls from lines commissioned years apart share one priority scheme.
04 WHAT AEON WORKED THROUGH HERE
Hundreds of notices from parts of the business that had never compared themselves had to be sorted onto one scale of urgency. Each already carried a level, and each level had been set against a different set of neighbours. The work went into what the top of the scale is reserved for and what that reservation costs everything below it, rather than into how many levels there should be.
What stays unresolved is who the scale is for — one coarse enough to hold everything puts things on the same rung that nobody would place together, and one fine enough to separate them is a scale no two parts of the organisation will apply the same way.