This post is all on the topic of Hino, and is only in specific response to one post by Elder Haman. This feels like a largely philosophic argument.
Anyway, now that I'm home, I figure I ought to respond more carefully to the argument that we should not tell Hino about the changes in circumstances.
My primary view on this is, we're giving the Nagoya teams updates every single day. The Nagoya teams will be reporting back to Hino every single day. Does Hino want us to constantly have us bothering her with things that we're also passing through her on-site teams on a daily basis?
She's a governor, not a sergeant. She gets constant reports from everything going on in her domain all the time. If we are demanding her time to let her know things, it ought to be for matters critically important to her, and that can't be relayed through channels that she's already going to be hearing from anyway.
Or, if you want a different analogy, she's more of a CEO who needs to focus on the high-level events, not a middle manager who needs to be fed TPS reports to keep her occupied.
Suppose that 5 days into the month they contacted us and told us that due to new information, they no longer felt that they needed all our forces and that we could reassign some of them to normal actions for the rest of the month.
Would we be offend by that? Is anyone here going to say they would be offended?
I actually would be a bit miffed. In that scenario, they came to us, convinced us to participate in an incredibly dangerous situation, we rearranged schedules to free up a huge chunk of manpower, and then 5 days later: "Whoops! We were wrong!" Like, it took you 5 days to figure out that your entire strategy and need for manpower was a complete lie? You couldn't have done that
before you came asking for us to for help? And not only do you not need our help, you're not even going to use the manpower we provided, making it a complete waste of effort on our part?
Maybe we get the manpower back, but it also shows that we were just completely played by someone who didn't even spend a minimal amount of time on due diligence. I may be fine putting the manpower to other use, but I would
not be inclined to help them again, at least not on short notice; let them do a bit of grunt work before asking next time.
Compare that with the opposite action. Suppose that Nagoya found out they didn't need all our support, but decided not to tell us, and we wasted massive amounts of our resources on something that was not needed?
Would we be offended? I certainly would. Because it would be showing enormous disrespect for us. I would probably refuse to aid Nagoya next time they asked for help.
It depends on how certain they were that the
actual need would not arise at all. In our current situations,
we do not know that. If the situation changed multiple times during the month, forcing them to redesign their plans every time, then the fact that they may not have used our manpower by the end of the month is not necessarily a black mark against them.
It would be annoying, yes, but if there's uncertainty at each stage, it's better to have the backup ready and not need it, than need it and not have it.
I mean, I have to work with different departments in my work all the time. Sometimes someone is seconded to my department to work on a project with us to do some certain portion of it. I can't just decide to reallocate those resources to some other portion of the project without checking with the other departments manager first. (Unless there is a deadline of some sort requiring an immediate decision.)
This analogy I would equate to discussing matters with the team leaders on the Nagoya side, not Hino. Going to Hino is like going to the CEO, or at least the division manager, not the other project managers. Do you ask the CEO every time you need to adjust resources?
I mean,
@Kinematics that's the bit I don't get
at all. Maybe, maybe we don't
need to contact Nagoya, but why is heaven's name would they get
offended by us contacting them about these things?
I would not object to keeping her updated to major changes in the campaign, on a periodic basis, particularly if it involves a lot of info that we're not normally providing to the on-site teams (and if we're not telling their teams about our changes in overall strategy, then we're really being stupid).
However Hino has placed her trust in our judgement to manage this campaign. If we send their teams home, and then next week another adaptation happens that leads to the flee pattern we were worried about, we look incredibly foolish, stupid, and untrustworthy, by being blindered by the short term 'easy' mode, and not having proper safety precautions in place for the long term risks, particularly when we were
given the resources for those exact risks.
In terms of possibly changing what role they play, we have to discuss that with the Nagoya teams
anyway. Which means that that again is going straight to Hino, after passing muster with the people who actually have to make a judgement call on whether they're willing to participate at the given risk. If we regularly ask them to do things that they feel are too risky, I'm sure Hino will be giving us a call soon thereafter to ask exactly what we're thinking. But that's a leader-to-leader discussion, not a tactical issue, and the type of thing that is
expected. Likewise, if we ask the Nagoya teams to do certain things, and they
don't (and not because of objecting to the risks), then that's a reason to call Hino, as that's a real matter that requires her involvement to resolve.
However Hino is not a middle manager. Remember when Mami went to convince her of the scheme in the first place? We got bumped from their business manager up to Hino herself, because it was
important. There's a bureaucracy there, because Hino cannot personally supervise some 400-ish magical girls plus a dozen vassal states.
I see it as, every time we consider taking something to Hino, needing to ask, "Is this something we
need to talk to Hino about (ie: is this a concern at her level of authority), or is this something that can just as easily be handled by someone else with appropriate authority? Someone who has actually been granted that specific authority (and who is also going to be passing this info on to Hino anyway), and might not be pleased about you always going over her head? (Because Hino also isn't the only person in the entire Nagoya organization.)
Hino is not "in the field", the way Mami is. Her organization is too large for that (and Hino's powers may not be suited for it), and the dynamics of interacting with her and the others in her organization are likewise different. Mami is very close to everyone in our organization. There is very little bureaucracy, and everyone talks to whoever they need to, directly. Nagoya is bureaucratic and segmented (partly due to the manner in which it was formed), which means it has a lot more vertical authority chains.
If Hino was part of another organization just like ours, I would expect to speak with her directly, because she would be directly connected to everything going on, and likely also giving direct orders in a lot of cases. But she's not.
