So watching those Richard Cook videos from the Velocity conference really set me thinking.
What I’m talking about all the way through what I’ve been writing about “some” and “all.” Is the difference between the system as imagined and the system as found. The system as imagined is the symmetrical system - it’s an instantiation of ideas. The system as found is the asymmetrical system - it’s a “mess”, it’s “chaotic.” The pictures that Cook uses as part of his presentation is a rat’s nest of wiring going in every direction.
But then I was talking to a friend of mine who was trying to explain what the value of doing anthropology is in real-world contexts, like workplaces. This is a big question, to put mildly. So I took a run at it in a couple of ways.
Firstly, you could answer it by looking at the work of people like Gary Klein. The way that people do things in work environments involves expertise and a lot of expertise is tacit. What he found from doing a lot of studies of firefighters is that it’s not just that the people who are performing with a high degree of expertise aren’t saying what they know, it’s that they can’t say what they know.
A second way to think about this is that any situation where you have more than one person is a social situation. And social situations have (or might have) all the things that social situations have, they have their own argot (specialist language). Social situations have hierarchies, they have territories. They have taboos.
They have morals, mores, practices, ethics. Which is both the way we do things around here and the way we all agree that things should be done around here.
So I suppose one of the things that an Anthropologist can do in a work setting is point out what this particularly society is like. Of course, doing this is philosophically and ethically fraught. How is it possible for someone from one culture to explain another culture?
So one reason that the “System as Observed” looks “messy” and “chaotic” is that we don’t understand what’s going on socially. But there’s also another reason, which is certainly a huge reason for software development. The system is a palimpsest.
palimpsest: noun a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing. something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
So this holds out some interesting ways in which the “chaotic” might be made either “complex” or “complicated” - to reach for the categorisations in the Cynefin framework. When you look at a “mess” one question that you can ask is “how” did it get like that?” Another thing that you can do is, this is a bit more tricky, but it’s a bit like the questions archaeologists have ask when the dig stuff out of the ground - “What’s if for?” and “How did it get used?”
OK, I’ll figure out the right way of referring to this accident/cost/work. But I’ve got the basic idea. And this works pretty well for software development, so I’m amazed that I’ve seen no one talk about it before - but of course, it could just be that I haven’t been paying attention.