Sheltering is not commanding
A structure that oversees others is often seen as a floor above: the one that decides, arbitrates, allocates. That reading is incomplete, and it suits everybody. What rises towards a parent company is not only authority. It is also weight.
To oversee is first of all to accept answering for what you shelter, including where you do not control the daily detail, and above all in that case.
Responsibility does not stay where it starts
An activity that goes wrong commits the whole. A delay, a failing, a badly sized promise never stay confined to their own perimeter: they reach the shared name, and that name belongs to all the others.
This is why a parent company cannot simply set objectives and wait for results. It must know each activity well enough to know what can reasonably be asked of it, and at what point the request becomes a difficulty imposed.
What is owed to those you shelter
Protection from permanent urgency. Time when time is genuinely needed. Means that do not vary with moods or quarters. And above all constancy: those who work under a structure should be able to count on it without having to ask each time.
This calls for a restraint that is harder than it sounds. Intervening too much prevents. Intervening too late abandons. The right level is rarely where you think it is, and it is discovered more than decreed.
IRRINIUM: holding without holding the hand
IRRINIUM connects activities that share neither trade, nor audience, nor rhythm. It does not direct them in detail, and this is not a renunciation: it is the condition for them to remain competent in their own field.
What the structure brings lies elsewhere. Continuity, a frame that does not move, a shared standard bearing on the way of working rather than on the content of the work. The rest belongs to those who do it, and must remain theirs. It is the same concern for proportion described in Human Scale.
A responsibility that cannot be delegated
A task can be delegated, a budget, a decision, sometimes even a direction. What cannot be delegated is having agreed to shelter. It is the one thing a parent company keeps in all circumstances, whatever happens below it.
Sheltering commits more than directing. That is probably why the word chosen to name it, in French, is the word for house.
Yannick Costechareyre