Thanks Dawn Ahukanna, Iris Meredith for sharing great resources!!

These are some readings associated with work associated with Decision KP Maps

  • Who has permission to know things? - Iris Meredith. Touching on Knowledge and power. I have been thinking about this post a lot since I first read it a few months ago. Meredith argues sudden workplace “explosions” stem from “corporate epistemology,” where knowledge is largely defined and controlled by those in power, often disregarding the insights and experiences of minority groups or those lower in the hierarchy. This systemic invalidation of legitimate knowledge from marginalised individuals creates an environment of structural violence, leading to frustration and resentment when their expertise is ignored, even when it pertains to objective facts. Some notable quotes:

While poisoning one’s superiors isn’t quite so common in corporate settings, this kind of sudden flash of anger often comes up in the workplace

So, what do we find when we look at the average corporate environment? It certainly isn’t that knowledge is built from evidence and reasoned discussion.

this experience and information that I have, thanks to my position in the hierarchy, didn’t count as knowledge.

  • Interpretive Labour: Bridging the Gap Between Map and Territory by Shauna Gordon McKeown Interpretive labour is the work of bridging an abstract model and the underlying reality. Privilege and power determine who does that work. The post argues that while this labour is unavoidable, it becomes dysfunctional when it prevents feedback about systemic problems from reaching those who can implement change. The post is rather long, which can be feel like a bit of a commitment, I think it raises some interesting points tho.

  • Overcoming Alert Fatigue — how to bring reliable observability to an already running production system by Maxi Goschin. The authors highlight three main reasons for this fatigue: annoyance, mental load, and interruptions, all of which desensitise teams to actual issues. Their solution involved a two-pronged approach: firstly, treating every alert as an internal incident requiring immediate action or alert adjustment, drastically reducing “noisy” alerts; secondly, a structured re-evaluation of their observability strategy.

  • Critical Software Redesign: Creating the Environment for Large Scale Change by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock & Mathias Verraes - Since leaving Thoughtworks Rebecca’s writing has gained further momentum and aren’t we lucky! The post discusses how to approach major software redesigns within an existing product. Rebbecca and Mathias then proceed to highlight signals, subtle indicators of stress on the system’s design. These should trigger experiments rather than immediate, costly projects. The experiments are great for information gathering, building support, and creating / changing the culture to be more receptive to change, even if they seem unconventional. The post advocates for proactive design leadership ,this is a style of leadership that embraces iterative improvements and continuous experimentation, and also recognises when a fundamental “shift” to an entirely new model is necessary, requiring buy-in across engineering, product, and business visions. This post is followed by a few posts where different people react to signals

  • Silence Isn’t Consent By Terrence Eden - The gist of the write up is a discussion about how True consent must be enthusiastic and explicit, not assumed from a lack of objection. The core issue is then applied to the digital realm, specifically the behaviour of AI bots that scrape website content for training data.

To read later

These are some posts I’ve been meaning to read in more depth but didn’t get to yet

Updated:

You May Also Enjoy