Fascinating take on aspects I hadn’t fully worked out. I guess ethnography can work through multiple observational lenses.

In point of fact, I do the vast majority of my own work directly on my PC. I, too, am a great fan of outliners and of mindmapping, both of which allow me to “see” my work as it evolves. The particular example I shared above was drawn from a colleague who remains more comfortable with paper. I’ve also used the technique when developing a presentation with a team. I also storyboard presentations on whiteboards to help focus on high level structure and story line questions.

I particularly like your point that different ways of handling your work in progress can trigger different paths forward. Something worth mulling over.

I really understand how, for you, you start off with something in your head, and you end up with something in a document, but in between you put bits of it on paper, and you spread the pieces out all over the place, and show some of the pieces to other people. And you have a tacit understanding of your own way of working which lets you intuitively convert spatial arrangements into temporal arrangements: you can look a sprawl of papers and see ‘work in progress’, and you know how far you’ve got and how far you still have to go.

This is one of my favourite parts:
When an executive takes a set of paper slides and rearranges them on a conference room floor, a hidden and compelling story line may be revealed. You can see, and learn from, this fresh point of experience. That’s lost when the same process occurs at a laptop keyboard at 35,000 feet. The gain in personal productivity occurs at the expense of organizational learning.

I can discover a hidden and compelling storyline on a laptop. I fell in love with a product called PC-Outline in 1988, and I’ve worked with outliners ever since. I can look at a directory listing, and see work in progress. But I get that you can’t . For you, paper is really grounded. It’s down there on the floor. And computers are the opposite – they’re way up in the sky, literally above your head, 35,000 feet.

When we talk about the visibility of knowledge work, this is the exactly the kind of thing that needs to be made visible. Not that paper is good and software is bad, but that the act of handling paper triggers all kinds of tacit knowledge inside you that greatly enhances your personal productivity, and you haven’t yet found a way to get those triggers from working with a screen.

Jordan Frank brought this all to my attention today when I was mentioning a focus today on the concept of Apparitions — a different (and yet more prevalent) form of transparency (similar to another comment): businesses operate on unvalidated myths that often turn out not to be true at all, even though they pay people to manage/defend the apparitions. It’s mindboggling.

Making work visible would indeed debunk these productivity draining boondoggles.

I agree that grand attempts to replace email with something new and better aren’t likely to be very fruitful. Further, I am suspicious of all claims of “silver bullet:” technology solutions. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about notions like “visibility” is that they are independent of technology and can be pursued at both an individual level and a team level without needing permission and without requiring tool changes. Perhaps if we start focusing on the behaviors that help we will start to see knowledge workers begin to make more effective use of the tools they currently have and more thoughtful about what kinds of improvements to those tools they could take advantage of.

You might want to take a look at a follow up blog post on my personal blog where I try to point to some of the discussions elsewhere that these notions have sparked. You can find it at Observable work – more on knowledge work visibility

But realistically it doesn’t really matter since email is here to stay (at least for the near future) and is the tool of choice for most knowledge workers. So why not take what we know and try to blend email and social media. I think Google Wave is an interesting attempt in that direction.

Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase

Work groups and teams that have successfully adopted tools like project blogs and wikis also appear to experience a significant drop in email traffic as well. It’s certainly a slow process, especially given the most people give little thought to these problems in the pressures of getting things done.

Another option is to rethink email – extending the email metaphor to make it more appropriate for knowledge work – a kind of “business class email”. Complementary to regular email and similar in look-and-feel, but tuned for managing knowledge processes, not just one off messages. Done correctly it can provide users with the visibility you advocate within a familiar email metaphor. I wrote about this here: http://blog.actionbase.com/human-process-management-and-the-email-filter-failure-problem

Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase