Fairly / Process and Outcome

A fair method can produce a result that stings

Good procedures do not promise you will like where they land.

Two friends want the same seat by the fire. They flip a coin. One of them loses and spends the evening in the draught, and if you ask that person whether the outcome was fair, the honest answer is often no, even though they proposed the coin themselves. This is not confusion. They are answering a different question from the one being asked. The method was fair by any definition you like. The result gave one person the cold seat, and no property of the coin makes the draught warmer or the disappointment smaller.

It is worth separating the two judgements permanently, because conflating them produces bad arguments in both directions. People defending a decision say the process was fair, as if that answers the complaint about the outcome. People attacking a decision point to the outcome, as if a bad result proves the process was rigged. Neither follows. A sound method will sometimes deliver results that look lopsided, and a poor method will sometimes stumble onto results everybody is happy with. Judging the process by a single outcome is like judging a recipe by one dinner where the oven was faulty.

The practical upshot is modest but real. When you set up a method, say clearly in advance that it may produce a result you dislike, and that you are choosing it anyway because the alternative is deciding case by case with everybody arguing their own corner. Saying this beforehand costs nothing. Saying it afterwards, to someone in the cold seat, sounds like a lecture. Groups that name the possibility of an unwelcome result before running the process are noticeably better at absorbing the result when it arrives, which is most of what procedure is for.