Safe/fair/done

From eg

In the living ontology pattern safe/fair/done, represented by Craig Hubley as a social tensegrity, every individual's notion of what is safe is considered explicitly in decisions to ensure that they cooperate in followup. Similarly, each faction's expectations of closure and what is done is considered: no issue can become a settled issue without for instance commitments and deadlines, e.g. as signalled "by". The dialectic between safety and closure is obvious and is very often debated in gender theory, management, sociology, and in political parties:

• the view that any decision is better than none values closure highly;
• the Precautionary Principle view values safety nearly infinitely

The now/later/done living ontology pattern converges as the individual makes similar decisions using less knowable criteria - but things get just as done.

Since the degree to which safety or closure concerns should be respected will vary widely with the situation (and the relative regret of the outcomes - see outcome variance), abstract expectations of what is fair usually come into play. These may originate in history, ideology, property rights or otherwise, and are not necessarily tied to any individual nor any faction.

The tensegrity is thus the balancing of three different overt dialectics:

• that between the abstract ideals of fairness and safety beliefs of persons
• that between the abstract ideals of fairness and closure needs of factions
• that between the safety believes of persons and closure needs of factions - see consensus for a more detailed review of this

In a "workplace democracy", this tensegrity is decided by consensus: nothing is done until it's fair. Fair?

If the abstract ideals of fairness are judged solely by one person that person can reasonably be called a king. If not, the bosses is a fair way to label those who set these ideals. In these cases the safe/done/fair order applies: it's the patience or the comfort versus urgency (leaning to urgency and closure for Meyers-Briggs "J" type personalities) that determines what's "done", and what's "fair" is defined post facto.

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