Source
Woods, David. (2002). Steering the Reverberations of Technology Change on Fields of Practice: Laws that Govern Cognitive Work. 10.4324/9781315782379-10.
TL;DR
The law of stretched systems: every system is stretched to operate at its capacity; as soon as there is some improvement, for example in the form of new technology, it will be exploited to achieve a new intensity and tempo of activity.
Summary
Technology often promises a reduction in worker toil and an opportunity for employees to pursue higher level thinking in this reclaimed time. The reality is that the introduction of new technology:
- Demands new worker capabilities and raises the tempo of operations
- Introduces new complexities
- Induces worker adapations to handle the complexity while meeting operational goals
- Produces failures that break through the evolving adapations
- Provides opportunities for uninvolved members to attribute failures to human error
While the stated intent of the technology is to improve productivity or efficiency, “[u]nder pressure from performance and efficiency demands, advances are consumed to ask operational personnel “to do more, do it faster or do it in more complex ways””
Promises about how technology will impact the work are hypotheses, and they are often wrong. The typical mistake is assuming perfect substituability between technology and people. That the system will be unchanged by replacing one work agent with another. This is the Substitution Myth. (Which is nearly identical to economics’ Perfect Substitute Goods).
This myth is both empirically unsupported and unproductive, as it actively impedes understanding how cognitive work is actually done. Woods and Dekker propose a set of Laws to help us improve at evaluating the future of cognitive work. The Laws that Govern Cognitive Work (or generalizations) presuppose co-evolution of agents and environment. They are as follows:
- Laws of Adaptation : how cognitive systems adapt to the potential for surprise in the worlds of work
- Laws of Models : how we understand and represent the processes we control and the agents we interact with
- Laws of Collaboration : how cognitive work is distributed over multiple agents and artifacts. The primary shift here is that cognition is fundamentally social and interactive, not private.
- Laws of Responsibility : people create, operate, and modify these artifacts in human systems for human purposes
- Norbert’s Contrast: “Artificial agents are literal minded and disconnected from the world, while human agents are context sensitive and have a stake in outcomes. The key is people and computers start from different opposite points and tend to fall back or default to those points…”
These “Laws” can be broken, but doing so inevitably produces undesirable consequences. Adhering to the laws when building systems is most likely to support people’s ability to express their expertise.
Notable Quotes
References
See also Ferd’s The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems
Attributions
Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash