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So much of the chaos of day to day work is an inability of organizations to make decisions and even after making the decision, remembering enough of it the next

So much of the chaos of day to day work is an inability of organizations to make decisions and even after making the decision, remembering enough of it the next day or even next hour to use the information. When it comes to spreading that over a year or after someone departs, forget it. There is also enormous inefficiency caused by covering the same ground over and over again, but it happens quite frequently as nothing survives from one discussion to the next. In addition, lots of decisions get made in side Slack channels. There are some massive gains here to be had if this can be solved.

grncdr 5y ago
As a counterpoint, one can view this as a feature and not a bug. An organization that fastidiously remembers everything might soon drown itself in memories, as it attempts to fit every new piece of information into the context of all memories. Much like a human savant could end up effectively paralyzed by frequently recollections of irrelevant trivia. Obviously there’s a middle ground between the above and the “amnesia” that many orgs seem to suffer from, but digging into the actual causes of the amnesia and confusion often reveals it’s not due to missing tools (off either the software or organizational variety)
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Well this is part of the unsolved problem. How can you take notes and organize themin a high density way that you don't drown yourself in them?
  - grncdr 5y ago
    Fair, and it’s fun to imagine novel approaches to addressing it with tools. I guess I better start creating my own now…
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
True, both people and organisations have to remember things. But when it comes to organisations, I think the existence of a separate task called "note taking" is often a symptom of slow software development and data modeling. Individuals sometimes take notes to collect random ideas. That's fine. I do that too. No one other than myself could ever make sense of my notes though, and sometimes not even I can. When organisations take notes in prose form, it is unlikely that anyone will ever have time to read them in order the extract the parts relevent for a particular task. There are of course exceptions. Someone will surely read the FOMC minutes. There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking. In my view, it is this sort of ad hoc data modeling that is too inefficient right now. It's something I'm on working on, but I can't claim to have found any silver bullets yet.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking. This is one of those aspirational things that should exist, like automated testing. In practice, many places are just reliant on people knowing stuff.

grncdr 5y ago

As a counterpoint, one can view this as a feature and not a bug. An organization that fastidiously remembers everything might soon drown itself in memories, as it attempts to fit every new piece of information into the context of all memories. Much like a human savant could end up effectively paralyzed by frequently recollections of irrelevant trivia. Obviously there’s a middle ground between the above and the “amnesia” that many orgs seem to suffer from, but digging into the actual causes of the amnesia and confusion often reveals it’s not due to missing tools (off either the software or organizational variety)

MattGaiser 5y ago
Well this is part of the unsolved problem. How can you take notes and organize themin a high density way that you don't drown yourself in them?
- grncdr 5y ago
  Fair, and it’s fun to imagine novel approaches to addressing it with tools. I guess I better start creating my own now…

fauigerzigerk 5y ago

True, both people and organisations have to remember things. But when it comes to organisations, I think the existence of a separate task called "note taking" is often a symptom of slow software development and data modeling. Individuals sometimes take notes to collect random ideas. That's fine. I do that too. No one other than myself could ever make sense of my notes though, and sometimes not even I can. When organisations take notes in prose form, it is unlikely that anyone will ever have time to read them in order the extract the parts relevent for a particular task. There are of course exceptions. Someone will surely read the FOMC minutes. There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking. In my view, it is this sort of ad hoc data modeling that is too inefficient right now. It's something I'm on working on, but I can't claim to have found any silver bullets yet.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking. This is one of those aspirational things that should exist, like automated testing. In practice, many places are just reliant on people knowing stuff.