“…The underlying idea of relaxing a system of N -simplex equations in the above way, by introducing an objectR, such that consistency imposes the (N + 1)-simplex equation on it, is the "obstruction method" in [25,44,73,74,75,77,82]. Also see [9,50,51,58,93] for a formulation in the setting of 2-categories. Indeed, the obstruction method corresponds to the introduction of laxness ("laxification" [93]).…”