The enterprise is a richer source of possibility than it knows.
A sociotechnical practice at the boundaries where registers meet. The capacity is already there. The build is rarely what's missing.
Practice
"Exaptation is the least risky way to innovate." - Dave Snowden
Engineering, research, design, and commercial teams each maintain their own register - their own vocabulary, their own logic, their own artifacts. At the boundaries between them, those artifacts change hands - and at each crossing, the capacity for something different closes down rather than opens up. The problem isn't poorly designed hand-offs. The problem is the model.
Situational awareness is the starting position - continuous, multi-register sensemaking rather than a fortnight of discovery that produces a report. Scout before soldier: reading what's present, what's governing, what's available but not yet legible.
Working at the register boundaries. Building the vocabulary and instruments for what's present - inside the enterprise and beyond it - to expand its capacities: to affect, and to be affected.
Current instrument
Writing
All writing →Precedents
Work graph infrastructure for the temporal organisation - people, projects, skills, decisions, held in relation to each other across time. We were building memory for a brain that hadn't been born yet. The LLM arrived four years later. The architecture was right; the moment wasn't.
Data is critical design material. But to work with it, designers had to ask data scientists - and what came back arrived in a mathematical register that narrowed the options before design could begin. Jabe Bloom's sense of designerly: not computation, but material to think with. The hypothesis: if designers could work with data in their own register, the capacity for early-stage work would be fundamentally different. A transduction problem. What needs to change is the relationship with the data and who gets to work with it.
Analytical methods treat customer signal like an autopsy - they disassemble to understand, and disassembly is one-way. Each handoff discards a layer, so that by the time feedback reaches the backlog, what was generative about it has been translated away. Stratum holds the layer the analytical stack was never designed to keep.
A practice cartography expressed as form. Practice areas as nodes, intellectual sources as corroboration, connections as the argument - built using UCLAB Potsdam's Linked Lists framework, exapted for a different purpose. Abandoned as the front door because the lineage was performing rather than serving. The argument still stands. The visualization is embedded below. To be continued.
Desirability, feasibility, viability - held simultaneously on the same structure, before any crossing forces a choice between them. Not a Venn diagram on a whiteboard. A live instrument that keeps all three constraints in productive tension long enough for the right answer to emerge rather than the fastest one.
Six conditions for transformational change - Appetite, Aptitude, Aircover, Airtime, Access, Autonomy. Developed in 2016. If anything, more necessary now than when they were sketched. Multi-disciplinary because transformation doesn't belong to any single tradition.
Not Snowden's three A's - Assemblage, Affordance, Agency. Those are ontological categories describing how complex systems are structured. These are diagnostic conditions describing what an organisation needs for transformation to land. Related terrain, different work.