PROTOCOL 23 – PUBLIC RESEARCH DIVISION
The Annual Review
A yearly state of the bond, played straight
- Materials
- two subjects, calendars, a beverage with some sense of occasion
- Objective
- Review the fiscal year of the bond: what compounded, what depreciated, what deserves budget next year. Businesses review annually and they're only moving money. You're moving a life.
Procedure
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Convene somewhere with table service or its domestic equivalent. The review is serious; the format should be pleasant. That contrast is the whole trick.
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Old business – each subject reports:
- Highlight of our year that would not appear in the photo archive.
- The hardest stretch, and one thing the other party did during it that helped more than they knew.
- A habit we built this year worth keeping. A habit we drifted into worth dropping.
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New business – jointly resolve:
- One thing to do next year that we keep saying "someday" about. Assign it a month. "Someday" is not a month.
- One recurring friction to run the Repair Protocol on properly, at last.
- One thing each subject wants more of, stated plainly, without apology.
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Adjourn with a toast to the year under review. Minutes may be kept. Bonds with minutes outperform; the Lab declines to explain why it knows this.
Expected results
The year turns out to have been fuller than either subject remembered. At least one "someday" now has a month attached. Reconvene in twelve; the compounding is the point.
Findings worth keeping? Some of what surfaces in a protocol – the story, the detail they'd be embarrassed you noticed – is exactly the raw material the synthesis division turns into a finished song about them. The Lab merely notes the pipeline exists.
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