I’ve had an insight into what “cope” really is. It is the process of finding and correcting outpoints without ever discovering a WHY and without organizing any return to the ideal scene.
A coper goes “outpoint found — correct it; outpoint found — correct it; outpoint found — correct it.” This perpetual cycle never finds or corrects WHY these outpoints. So it just gets worse and worse and worse.
If you start spotting outpoints and correcting them you are not dealing with the Why but with the symptoms only. So an executive gets on a cycle of outpoint spotted, corrected, spotted, corrected, spotted, corrected. With no WHY located it will just wind up in a collapsed mess of cope.
If all one ever did was handle despatches one would really get into a mountain of overwork while stats stayed down.
The WHY we face now is absence of recruiting, lack of full hats with checksheets and packs.
The Why of that was failure to make the materials filed accessibly and collatable. So it’s a snake eats its tail. No hats then brought a condition of no data available in files. A true dwindling spiral.
And no hats traces to the introduction of ethics into HCOs and that it is easier to assign a condition than to compile or check out a hat. Hats went out when ethics came strongly in. Without ethics in HCO, HCO can only make stats recover by org form and hats.
Ethics has a role — after all else fails.