Brown, John Seely

2006-03-12 

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 72: ... good office design can produce powerful learning environments. But much of that power comes from incidental learning. For example, people often find what they need to know by virtue of where they sit and who they see rather than by direct communication. ... offices involve much more than the simple flow of information. Office space is not neutral ground. Everyone who works in one knows that, for better and for worse, offices are dense with highly charged social relations. Power, tension, authority, and insecurity are all closely interwoven. They can help get work done, and they can hinder it. ... forward looking companies are finding that designing a new company and designing its offices are intricately related processes, with each feeding off and onto the other. ... such design reflects the social character of work - the way in which people act as resources for one another, rather than just as one another's information provider. Given the nature of this resourcefulness, severing the ties that bind people together in work may be as damaging as binding them together more tightly. Finding the balancing point between the mix of centrifugal and centripetal forces needs to be the goal.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 77: ... office help systems ... are not limited to manuals, vendor web sites, IT departments, or on-line files. The office social system plays a major part in keeping tools (and people) up and running.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 82: trying to transform the way work is done and simultaneously save money is usually a mistake, even when moving from cost-laden atoms to near-free bits. The demands of turning work that has been well supported by the local social system into work produced without most or any of that system requires a commitment to transformation, not a commitment to cost cutting.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 95: ...BPR has had less success in the parts of organizations that are less linear and less clearly defined by process and information. Management ... R&D. in such areas, life is less linear; inputs and outputs are less well defined; and information is less "targeted". These are, rather, areas where making sense, interpreting, and understanding are both problematic and highly valued - areas where, above all, meaning and knowledge are at a premium. ... Etienne Wenger ... found that many of the problems faced by the health-insurance claims processors he studied could be traced to clashes over meaning and sense making ... focusing on individuals, process accounts overlook social resources that people in similar occupations provide one another.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 99: the company tried to provide the reps with the targeted information they would need. First, it provided training courses to familiarize new technicians with the company's machines and to familiarize established technicians with new machines. Second, it provided them with documentation to do the job. ... the information and training provided to the reps was inadequate for all but the most routine of the tasks they faced. Although the documentation claimed to provide a map, the reps continually confronted the question of how to travel when the marked trails disappeared and they found themselves surrounded by unmarked poison oak. ... large machines, comprising multiple subsystems, are not so predictable. Any one machine may have profound idiosyncrasies, for each inevitably reflects the age and condition of its parts, the particulars and patterns of use, as well as the distinctive influences of the environment in which it sits - hot, cold, damp, dry, clean, dusty, secluded, in traffic, and so forth. ... while everyone else assumes each machine is like the next, a rep knows each by its peculiarities and has to sort out general failings from particular ones. ... directive documentation, however, wasn't designed for sense making. It was designed for rule following.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 102: this sociability wasn't simply a retreat form the loneliness of an isolating job. At these meetings, while eating, playing cribbage, and engaging in what might seem like idle gossip, the reps talked work, and talked it continuously. They posed questions, raised problems, offered solutions, constructed answers, and discussed changes in their work, the machines, or customer relations. In this way, both directly and indirectly, they kept one another up to date with what they knew, what they learned, and what they did. ... chat continuously but almost imperceptibly adjusts a group's collective knowledge and individual members' awareness of each other. Providing information directly is a little like the chiming of an alarm clock. This constant chatter is more like the passage of the sun across the sky, a change hard to see directly yet one that continuously reorients people to the progress of the day. ... the reps' chatter stood out, however, because the process view assumed that they worked alone and had adequate resources in their training, tools, and documentation. Time spent together would, from the process perspective, be non-value adding. ... but, as Orr showed, the reps provided much more than comforting noises. They were critical resources for each other.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 105: Orr's study suggests that a process view of work can result in similar displacement, cutting off lateral ties in the name of cross-functional efficiency. The result is quite disempowering and inefficient, burdening people with individual responsibility that is better shared by the group. ... to get around this problem [lack of expensive replacement parts], the reps implicitly formed a collective pool of parts, so that each could draw readily on the other in times of need, and the necessary parts were always available. ... shared knowledge differs significantly from a collective pool of discrete parts. In this pool of knowledge, where one person's knowledge ends and another's begins is not always clear. In the example we gave above, it took the collaboration of two technicians working together to come to a coherent conclusion. But neither had a decisive "piece" of knowledge. Nor was the final solution the property of either one. It was a collective process that created an indivisible product. ... watercolor painting. As each new color is added, it blends with the others to produce the final effect, in which the contributing parts become indivisible.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 106: stories are good at presenting things sequentially. They are also good for presenting them causally. Thus, stories are a powerful means to understand what happened and why. And so storytelling is indispensable for the reps for whom what and why are critical matters yet often hard to discern. ... more generally, people tell stories to try to make diverse information cohere. ... stories, then, can be a means to discover something completely new about the world. The value of stories, however, lies not just in their telling, but in their retelling. Stories pass on to newcomers what old-timers already know. Stories are thus central to learning and education, and they allowed the reps to learn from one another. ... stories, moreover, convey not only specific information but also general principles. These principles can then be applied to particular situations, in different times and places. ... while it may appear at first that the reps used stories to circulate information, they were actually doing much more. For it is not shared stories or shared information so much as shared interpretations that binds people together. In their storytelling, the reps developed a common framework that allowed them to interpret the information that they received in a common light. To collaborate around shared information you first have to develop a shared framework for interpretation. ... learning to tell war stories, then, was a critical part of becoming a rep. it allowed newcomers to see the world with a rep's eyes. And it allowed all to share in their major resource - their collective, collaborative wisdom.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 108: ... the reps' work has a clear improvisational component. Though they are supplied with routines and information, they have to rely heavily on improvisation to close the gap between the world as they find it and the inevitably limited model of that world embedded in routines and processes. ... people in organizations continuously wrestle with the problem that, while their organization may be a haven of routine, the rest of the world is not. ... the gap to be bridged lies between reality and process, and it is bridged by the improvisation inherent in practice - so deeply inherent that the practitioners themselves are barely aware of it. ... you don't get very far into an organization until you fill out the forms or answer the questions - in short, till you make yourself formulaic. Everyone knows what it is like not to fit within the standard form that gets things going. And everyone knows, too, the value of the skilled representative who understands how to fit you into the form and the firm without causing problems for either. ... "practical 'subversion' taken up in the name of getting work done".

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 109: ... to survive in a changing world, organizations also need to improvise ... improvisation, however, inevitably disrupts routine. Consequently, all organizations have to balance routine and improvisation. ... some people are expected to improvise. Others, like the reps, are not. ... attempts to disguise unauthorized behavior so that it looks authorized, to justify improvisation in terms of routine. Employees negotiate the gap between their actual practice and recognized routines and process by making the former appear to be the latter. ... in all walks of life, 'processing' provides a screen between what people do an what people say they do. It helps turn unauthorized practice, however effective, into authorized routine, however inept. It makes us all appear "rational" and rule governed to the world, even though a great deal of what everyone does is, of necessity, guesswork and intuition. Most people, indeed, are not even aware of the implicit improvisation they engage in to bridge the gap between these two. They simply assume that what they do and what their job description says are one and the same. ... improvisation, for example, can be a useful indicator of problems or change in the environment. The greater the improvisation, the less adequate the routine. But routines and processes encourage employees to hide their insights and improvisations.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 113: identity, as we argue in chapter 5, provides a key aspect of work, learning, and understanding. Orr's work and the reps' response to Eureka emphasize the way in which the reps find their identity: ... to a significant degree through peer recognition.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 114: ... our view attempts to see the strengths that come from balancing the two, favoring neither but balancing both formal and informal, structure and spontaneity. The process view is important, giving shape and direction to an organization. It always risks, however, ... cutting [people] off from their "lateral" resources ... practice suffers from the opposing danger - of allowing itself to evolve too independently and so become too loosely "coupled" to the organization.

2006-03-20 

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 119: ... three [generally accepted distinctions] strike us as particularly interesting. ... first, knowledge usually entails a knower. That is, where people treat information as independent and more-or-less self-sufficient, they seem more inclined to associate knowledge with someone. ... second, given this personal attachment, knowledge appears harder to detach than information. People treat information as a self-contained substance. It is something that people pick up, possess, pass around, put in a database, lose, find, write down, accumulate, count, compare, and so forth. Knowledge, by contrast, doesn't take as kindly to ideas of shipping, receiving, and quantification. It is hard to pick up and hard to transfer. ... third, one reason knowledge may be so hard to give and receive is that knowledge seems to require more by way of assimilation. Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold. It entails the knower's understanding and some degree of commitment. ... while it seems quite reasonable to say, "I've got the information, but I don't understand it", it seems less reasonable to say, "I know, but I don't understand," or "I have the knowledge, but I can't see what it means." ... information theory holds information to be independent of meaning.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 121: ... the information economy threatens to treat them as more or less interchangeable consumers and processors of information. Attending to knowledge, by contrast, returns attention to people, what they know, how they come to know it, and they differ. ... in all, the job of KM cannot involve just the protection and exploitation of patents. It must include the cultivation of knowledgeable workers. Focusing on information, however, makes this kind of cultivation difficult. ... unlike information, knowledge, as we said, is hard to detach. ...circulating human knowledge, these experiences suggest, is not simply a matter of search and retrieval, as some views of knowledge management have us believe. ... so learning, the acquisition of knowledge, presents knowledge management with its central challenge. The defense of intellectual property, the sowing and harvesting of information, the exploitation of intellectual capital, and the benchmarking of competitors' intellectual assets are all important parts of the KM game. But all of these are subordinate to the matter of learning. For it is learning that makes intellectual property, capital and assets usable.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 125: ... to understand how these best practices travel, this example suggests, requires looking not simply from knowledge to information, but from knowledge to practice and groups of practitioners. For it is the reps' practice shared in collaborative communities that allowed them to share their knowledge. ... in Orr's account, the talk and the work, the communication and the practice are inseparable. The talk made the work intelligible, and the work made the talk intelligible. As part of this common work-and-talk, creating, learning, sharing, and using knowledge appear almost indivisible. Conversely, talk without the work, communication without practice is if not unintelligible, at least unusable.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 126: ... Jean Lave ... and Etienne Wenger ... explain this sort of simultaneous working, learning and communication in terms of both the practice and the community. Learning a practice, they argue, involves becoming a member of a "community of practice" and thereby understanding its work and its talk from the inside. Learning, from this point of view, is not simply a matter of acquiring information; it requires developing the disposition, demeanor, and outlook of the practitioners. ... this description catches central properties of the community of practice. In particular, it notes how, in getting the job done, the people involved ignored divisions of rank and role to forge a single group around their shared task, with overlapping knowledge, relatively blurred boundaries, and a common working identity.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 128: ... they point to a distinction made by Jerome Bruner ... between learning about and learning to be. ... many people learn about a lot of things ... learning requires more than just information. It requires the ability to engage in the practice in question. ... [Gilbert Ryle] distinguishes "know that" from "know how". Learning about involves the accumulation of "know that": principally data, facts, information. Learning about does not, however, produce the ability to put "know that" into use. This, Ryle argues, calls for "know how". And "know how" does not come through accumulating information. "We learn how by practice". And similarly, through practice, we learn to be. ... it helps explain why the same stream of information directed at different people doesn't produce the same knowledge in each. If they are engaged in different practices, if they are learning to be different kinds of people, then they will respond to the information in different ways. Practice shapes assimilation. ... a good management theorist may explain the practice of management well, but never make a good hands-on manager. Similarly, and excellent manager may prove an inept theoretician.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 132: ... so instead of training courses, the sociologists suggested restructuring the phone center. They sought to draw on its reservoir of knowledge by putting all its operators in positions to learn from each other. ... the new plan also asked technicians to come in and take calls intermittently. As a result, operators could learn from them once again. ... both examples, the classroom and the workplace, indicate how the resources for learning lie not simply in information, but in the practice that allows people to make sense of and use that information and the practitioners who know how to use that information. Where in other circumstances knowledge is hard to move, in these circumstances it travels with remarkable ease.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 136: ... learning is much more demand driven. People learn in response to need. When people cannot see the need for what's being taught, they ignore it, reject it, or fail to assimilate it in any meaningful way. Conversely, when they have a need, then, if the resources for learning are available, people learn effectively and quickly. ... a demand-side view of this sort of knowledge theft suggests how important it is not to force-feed learning, but to encourage it, both provoking the need and making the resources available for people to "steal".

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 137: ... learning is a remarkable social process. Social groups provide the resources for their members to learn. Other socially based resources are also quite effective.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 138: ... learning needs to be understood in relation to the development of human identity. In learning to be, in becoming a member of a community of practice, and individual is developing a social identity. In turn, the identity under development shapes what that person comes to know, how he or she assimilates knowledge and information. So, even when people are learning about, in Bruner's terms, the identity they are developing determines what they pay attention to and what they learn. What people learn about, then, is always refracted through who they are and what they are learning to be. ... it's not ... the information that creates that background. The background has to be in place for the information to register. The forces that shape the background are, rather, the tectonic social forces, always at work, within which and against which individuals configure their identity. These create not only ground for reception, but grounds for interpretation, judgment, and understanding. ... so while people do indeed learn alone, even when they are not stranded on desert islands or in small cafes, they are nonetheless always enmeshed in society, which saturates our environment, however much we might wish to escape it at times.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 140: looking at learning as a demand-driven, identity forming, social act, it's possible to see how learning binds people together. People with similar practices and similar resources develop similar identities ... these practices in common ... allow people to form social networks along which knowledge about that practice can both travel rapidly and be assimilated readily. ... members of these networks are to some degree divided or separated from people with different practices. It is not the different information they have that divides them. Indeed, they might have a lot of information in common. Rather, it is their different attitudes or dispositions toward that information - attitudes and dispositions shaped by practice and identity - that divide.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 142: ... networks of this sort are notable for their reach ... information can travel across vast networks with great speed and to large numbers but nonetheless be assimilated in much the same way by whoever receives it. By contrast, there is relatively little reciprocity across such network; that is, network members don't interact with one another directly to any significant degree. ... communities of practice ... focus on subsections of these larger networks of practice ... they are relatively tight-knit groups of people who know each other and work together directly. They are usually face-to-face communities that continually negotiate with, communicate with, and coordinate with each other directly in the course of work. And this negotiation, communication, and coordination is highly implicit, part of work practice ... in these groups, the demands of direct coordination inevitably limit reach. You can only work closely with so many people. On the other hand, reciprocity is strong. People are able to affect one another and the group as a whole directly. Changes can propagate easily. Coordination is tight. Ideas and knowledge may be distributed across the group, not held individually.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 144: these two, networks and communities, produce areas marked by common identity and coordinated practice within any larger network. And as a consequence of these areas, information does not travel uniformly throughout the network. It travels according to the local topography. ... organization theory suffers from similarly homogenizing vision. It has been fashionable of late to talk of workplace culture or organizational culture as if these made organizations internally uniform. But divisions created by practice produce significant variation here as well. Within organizations as without, connections are dense in some places and thin in others. Sometimes these networks extend across the boundaries of the organization. Elsewhere, they may confront discontinuities within, where meaningful communication breaks down.

Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 145: new technologies may, though, spread these communities out more than before. The growing reciprocity available on the 'Net, while probably underused at the moment, is helping people separated by space maintain their dense interrelations. Yet for the sort of implicit communication, negotiation, and collective improvisation that we have described as part of practice, learning, and knowledge sharing, it's clear that there are advantages to working together, however well people may be connected by technology. Indeed, one of the most powerful uses of information technology seems to be to support people who do work together directly and to allow them to schedule efficient face-to-face encounters.