He’s Just Had Coffee

Some notes I found in an old folder that I wanted to type up. I figured, why not share? It’s a couple of years old and a little rusty, and simplistic, but I’d love to hear feedback…

• Machines and people share some similar action patterns at the micro-level of mechanical action [1] and the macro-level of large enterprises, but at the in-between level of individuals and small groups, humans and machines are very different.
• IT design is micro/macro-friendly, but often fails at that middle, human scale.
• Don’t worry too much about what managers want (the workflow view) - it’s tame.
• Pay much, much more attention to the middles scale because if that doesn’t work, the system will fail. Software Fails Upward
• As information is passed around an organisation, it becomes decontextualised, by being separated from the people who held the knowledge of which it is a distillation.
• The key way to address this is to share knowledge, not information. The best way of sharing knowledge is by interacting with, perhaps shadowing and observing, a person who already has it [2]; not by asking them to write a whitepaper.

1. “The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do” (Harry Collins, Martin Kusch)
2. “Stolen Knowledge”, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.

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