The Presence and Absence of Competence
An ARGUS Inquiry into Governance, Visibility, and Institutional Decision-Making
An accident occurs.
Questions follow.
Interpretations emerge.
Authority responds.
And gradually, the original event becomes something else entirely.
In The Presence and Absence of Competence, Wilhelm Haberkorn presents the first volume of the ARGUS-VIREX Inquiry, an institutional case study examining how organizations make decisions, exercise authority, preserve records, and sometimes lose sight of the people whose experiences initiated the very conflicts they seek to resolve.
What began as a personal search for answers following an accident evolved into a far-reaching examination of governance, due process, fiduciary responsibility, executive leadership, institutional memory, and the nature of competence itself.
Using the ARGUS framework, the book follows twelve critical decision points-called Junctions-through which a private organization moved from uncertainty to permanence. Along the way, the inquiry explores:
• How institutions define problems
• How interpretations become accepted narratives
• How speed influences judgment
• How visibility narrows as complexity increases
• How due process functions as a system of understanding
• How governance decisions become difficult to reverse
• How organizations remember outcomes while forgetting origins
• How competence can be present, absent, delayed, ignored-or lost entirely
At its heart, this is not a book about one organization.
It is a book about institutions.
Boards.
Executives.
Members.
Managers.
And the enduring challenge of making consequential decisions while remaining connected to the people affected by them.
Drawing upon concepts such as Visibility Preservation, the ARGUS Governance Standard, the Third Timeline, Fact-Finding Competence, and Institutional Memory, The Presence and Absence of Competence offers readers a new way to evaluate leadership, authority, and organizational behavior.
Written in the tradition of institutional history and governance analysis, this volume will appeal to:
• Directors and board members
• Nonprofit leaders and executives
• Attorneys and mediators
• Governance professionals
• Students of organizational behavior
• Anyone interested in how institutions function under pressure
The deepest competence failures do not always occur when institutions make incorrect decisions.
They often occur when institutions gradually lose sight of the people whose experiences gave rise to those decisions.
Every institution keeps a record.
Not every institution remembers.
Volume I of The ARGUS-VIREX Inquiry.
