John Seely Brown tells a nice story about a lesson he learnt when he first joined Xerox. He gives this account of an interview with one their leading trouble-shooting maintenance engineers. It revolves around a discussion of how to identify an intermittent copying problem. The trouble-shooter tells Seely Brown about the laborious, bureaucratic process that Xerox lays down and then goads him into coming up with a better solution. The answer, it turns out, is to look in the nearest waste paper basket. Here is a short extract, but read the whole thing, a lesson worth learning:
“And he said, “You know, John, what do you do if you discover a copy quality problem? You know, you don’t classify it as a copy quality problem. You classify it as a damn, damn bad copy and you throw it away. So why don’t you let the world do a little bit of the work for you. Why don’t you work with the world, and see that there’s a natural way to have the world collect this information for you. Just step back and read the world a little bit.”
Now maybe you can see where I’m heading with you. ‘Read the world a little bit’ is almost a kind of judo, or a better term from the French, bricolage. And so he said, ‘This waste basket was ready at hand. It was already there. It was already full of this stuff. Learn to work with the world, and you’re going to find your life a lot simpler.'”