Game in the Brain

A lot of problems in both myself, my company, and in many other organizations and institutions fall under this quality metric: The Quality of their Memory. to organizations their memory is their processes.  

I realized this is one of many processes (in both an individual and organization) that needs fine tuning. Particularly in light of Normalized Deviance (when changes are so small, and beneath our attention that over time we may have changed significantly without noticing) and the Tons of Biases that affect our self perception, image, and shield me from the facts that may be too much for a part of me to operate.

I see the problem today in many current events. The effort it takes to google something may be 2 minutes with 8kbps (in the province with the 1-2kbps this slower to 5-10 minutes) . To get a more in depth answer and opening a handful of links and scanning key words would be about 5-10 minutes. In Lean Philosophy, information and transparency is ideally presented in a way that even a stranger to the business can see whats happening and can make decisions. If everything needed to make the decisions was kept less than a second, a glance away, from the work being done we would be doing business or our own work very differently.

The rising cost of evidence (information) is due to the complexity of our world and the scale of effect we have in it (by scale I’m using the Gaming definition by which the amount of effect on the world, or how far does the Pc’s actions ripple through their community or world).

The Work. So this is the problem of my organization but also the problem of many others. Having information accessible means re-engineering current processes, and for companies that do not keep process documents and actively use them, that means creating the institutional memory of processes and teaching people how to use Process Documentation. This is similar to training and teaching where there is a lot of repetition and going with the learners through the material in a great amount of detail and time. Time and Effort that is front loaded as the Process Documentation takes a life of its own and begins to store the Institutional Memory of the organization. Or we begin to teach ourselves to journal in a way that helps us improve ourselves.

The quality of Memory or Documentation (or Information management) says about an individual or an organization. For organizations: Documented Processes (ISO made simple is: Say what we do, Do what we say) are their memory.