88. Will Myddelton on moving from an oral to a written culture

In this episode, we talk to Will Myddelton, Product lead at Local Welcome, about moving from an oral to a written culture within an organisation.

"An oral culture has huge advantages in that it’s fluid, easy to pick up, and doesn’t require a lot of attention to processes. 

But it has a big disadvantage which is that knowledge is stored inside people’s memories, or embodied in the things that are made in specific contexts.

This creates problems when someone goes on holiday, and even worse when someone leaves.

It means people often spend time reinventing or duplicating things that have been invented before.

Stepping back, it often means there is no single view of the system that the company is operating, (which is why so many design consultancies start with trying to map the systems that a company operates).

Finally, lots of organisations are trying to automate business processes, but how can you automate a process that isn’t documented (which is why there are so many business analysts who try and retro-document the processes that exist and are in operation)."

Links:

Conway's Law: latency versus throughput by Mark Seemann

Will Myddelton on Twitter

Local Welcome

Notion

Pioneers, settlers, town planners