Turning Cobwebs into Walls: The Causal Attribution Journal as a Tool to Combat Mission Drift

Bureaucratic institutions tend to become rigid and self-justifying. The thoughtless separation of routines from the goals they were once supposed to pursue is a kind of mission drift, and the way this process is seen, or not seen, is a kind of perceptual drift. The fictional world of Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed illustrates how perceptual drift can reinforce inauthentic governance, and what might be done about it. Using the experiences of the book's main character as our primary "data," we introduce an analytic tool-the causal attribution journal-that makes visible what perceptual drift obscures. The journal method is a phenomenological tool that promotes clarity and agency by bringing common but often obscured patterns into view. It illuminates the vital role of perceptual dynamics in efforts to secure democratic governance.