At an organization that had better remain nameless, one time sysadmin broke the web site which we were supposed to use to submit trip reports after travel. No one cared. Well, that let the cat out of the bag about that particular process.
(By way of contrast, there were certain other things that when sysadmin broke them, they had a company vice president screaming at them over the phone very quickly.(*))
(*) no chairs were thrown across the room, however.
Then there’s the category of things where your research division is like “oh, that’s going to be a train wreck. Please can we be allowed to record the chaos so we can write a paper about it.” No, research was not allowed to write that paper.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us “The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.”
When you move upwards in a hierarchy of purposes it usually does not end but disperses into an ecosystem of synergistic and conflicting purposes some of which could be called mundane and others which could be designated as higher.
All those purposes are somehow stakeholders in a given activity such as implementing a policy, running a business/a government agency/an NGO or leading a personal life.
When you try to optimize for any particular purpose you usually run into conflict with other purposes in the ecosystem.
Gregory Bateson made the point that ecosystems are harmed and skewed if any particular purpose gets to dominate the other purposes.
In political theory the dream of having one particular higher purpose eliminering the others is totalitarian.
In economics it is the dream of optimization.
There will always be the dream of cleaning up a messy world.
That is one of the purposes in the ecosystem. That purposes is supposed to be there alside all the others. A wish to clean up the mess as an integral part of the mess.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind is recommended reading
At an organization that had better remain nameless, one time sysadmin broke the web site which we were supposed to use to submit trip reports after travel. No one cared. Well, that let the cat out of the bag about that particular process.
(By way of contrast, there were certain other things that when sysadmin broke them, they had a company vice president screaming at them over the phone very quickly.(*))
(*) no chairs were thrown across the room, however.
Then there’s the category of things where your research division is like “oh, that’s going to be a train wreck. Please can we be allowed to record the chaos so we can write a paper about it.” No, research was not allowed to write that paper.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us “The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.”
When you move upwards in a hierarchy of purposes it usually does not end but disperses into an ecosystem of synergistic and conflicting purposes some of which could be called mundane and others which could be designated as higher.
All those purposes are somehow stakeholders in a given activity such as implementing a policy, running a business/a government agency/an NGO or leading a personal life.
When you try to optimize for any particular purpose you usually run into conflict with other purposes in the ecosystem.
Gregory Bateson made the point that ecosystems are harmed and skewed if any particular purpose gets to dominate the other purposes.
In political theory the dream of having one particular higher purpose eliminering the others is totalitarian.
In economics it is the dream of optimization.
There will always be the dream of cleaning up a messy world.
That is one of the purposes in the ecosystem. That purposes is supposed to be there alside all the others. A wish to clean up the mess as an integral part of the mess.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind is recommended reading