Another form of reification is creeping into the workplace in the guise of
'process'. The industrial process is being invested with roles, beliefs
and rituals that tend to make these super 'knowledge artifacts'.
Consider a supermarket transaction. You are positioned alongside 'pick me
up articles' to increase you likelihood (or your children's or spouse's)
of an impulse buy. You are offered (or enticed by rebates) to proffer a
store card to capture your demographics so the store can enhance their
psychographics and sell your purchasing information back to merchants.
Just think of the energy, thought, technology and human investment tied to
that transaction. There is the cashier taking your money, the scanner
taking your information, the data warehouse technician crunching your
impulses, the store wide analyst pondering your buying rules, the
logistics manager ordering replacements, the shelf packer filling the gap,
the chain buyer trying to second guess your next visit and purchase......
We are witness to the rise of the reified process, the super knowledge
artifact, we embed our learnings, infuse it with our ideas, invest it with
our time, depend on it for survival, become constrained by our role. We
rely on it for our identity and identify with it for our meaning.
We praise, curse, abuse, invent, deny, co-evolve and conspire with this
complex, highly connected, ethereal thing. We invest energy, identity and
being, perform rituals, make meaning and reify process.
We make knowledge artifacts!
--Denham Grey <dgrey@iquest.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>