EXHIBIT 01 / 29 JUL 2010
Don't make him the mascot.
A lecturer argued that I was more useful free enough to notice what everyone else, busy with their duties, could not.
Continuity / the career workbench
The career
wasn't
fragmented.
The vocabulary was. This started as a place to update a CV. Somewhere along the way it became a place to understand a life.
ORIGINAL TASK
Update
the CV.
the CV.
A perfectly sensible administrative request.
ACTUAL OUTCOME
Find
the
pattern.
the
pattern.
Slightly less administrative.
THE WORKBENCH
Evidence before explanation.
I stopped arranging experiences by employer. I started arranging them by the questions they left behind. Not a timeline. Not a CV. A bench full of things that kept pointing in the same direction.
first known sighting of the behaviour. ↙
EXHIBIT 02 / EVENTS
Everyone had a role.
I kept watching what happened between the roles.
EXHIBIT 03 / LEGAL + ADMIN
The document was never the whole experience.
Precision mattered. So did the person trying to understand what happened next.
EXHIBIT 04 / ARTS
1 × TICKET+ directions
+ uncertainty
+ excitement
+ “where do I go?”
The transaction was not the experience.
ordinary work. hidden knowledge. repeated attention. →
EXHIBIT 05 / HR
One employee. Many departments.
COMPLETE
For every function. Not necessarily for the person.
EXHIBIT 06 / SYMPHON
Memory isn't the work.
I thought I was building a task manager. I was trying to give remembering back to the system.
EXHIBIT 07 / NIL
Useful? Pointless?
Sometimes the question under the joke is the useful part. Sometimes not. Both are allowed.
EXHIBIT 08 / TODAY
I wasn't collecting jobs.
I was collecting perspectives.
apparently the workbench was the website all along.
STEP BACK / LOOK AGAIN
What stayed?
Not the title. Not the sector. Not the software. Not even the kind of problem.
maybe continuity isn't staying in one place.
maybe it's carrying the same curiosity into many places.
maybe it's carrying the same curiosity into many places.
THE QUESTIONS THAT RETURNED
The jobs changed.
The questions didn't.
None of these required a heroic identity or a perfect job title. Just the habit of looking past the assigned task and noticing the experience around it.
01
What is this like for the person going through it?
02
Who owns the seams?
03
What should the system remember instead?
04
Why are people absorbing the organisation's complexity?
05
What deserves protecting because the human effort is the point?
THE CONTINUITY
Still.
NOT ACCOUNTING
NOT LEGAL
NOT EVENTS
NOT HR
NOT IT
NOT COMMS
NOT WEBSITES
NOT SOFTWARE
NOT LEGAL
NOT EVENTS
NOT HR
NOT IT
NOT COMMS
NOT WEBSITES
NOT SOFTWARE
Those were places.
This was the continuity.
This was the continuity.
NOTICEUNDERSTANDSIMPLIFYPROTECTREPEAT
Still wandering.
Still building.
Still noticing.
The CV answered what I had done.
This answered why it kept looking like that.
This answered why it kept looking like that.
Want the boring CV?
ay@alphonseyu.com →Or the less boring conversation about any of this.