An independent inquiry into work & AI

From published work

  • What makes knowledge work good?from F1
  • What changes when an agent can pursue an assignment?from F1
  • Which practices transfer across different kinds of work?from S2
  • When does structure become overhead?from S2
  • How do we preserve discovery?from S2
  • What does systems thinking add?from S2

Backlog

Items not yet started. Each has a permanent URL and intended contribution.

What changes when AI can pursue an assignment?

A practical distinction among responding, following a workflow, and choosing steps toward a goal

How should people and agents share the work?

Collaboration patterns for exploration, execution, review, handoffs, and disagreement; attention to human attention and retained expertise

What does evidence actually establish?

Distinctions among source fidelity, truth, coverage, reasoning, and uncertainty; treatment of shared errors among reviewers

When is independent action justified?

A contextual delegation policy using demonstrated performance, consequences, authority, reversibility, review costs, and feedback

What makes knowledge work good?

Distinctions among accuracy, usefulness, originality, timeliness, consequences, and effort; who gets to judge

What is the relationship between information, knowledge, and work products?

An account of sources, interpretations, reusable understanding, and artifacts without assuming one universal definition of knowledge

How do we discover the question worth asking?

An approach to problem framing, ambiguity, reframing, and deciding what to investigate

How do we develop explanations and create alternatives?

Ways to move from observations to hypotheses, designs, and competing possibilities; room for creativity

How do we decide when evidence cannot settle the answer?

Distinctions among factual uncertainty, preferences, trade-offs, and responsibility; ways to judge when enough investigation has been done

What does an agent need to know?

A map of task context, domain context, preferences, history, permissions, and missing information; ways to obtain tacit context

How does shared knowledge remain useful as things change?

Practices for provenance, contradictions, freshness, revision, retrieval, access, and correction; an experiment testing reuse

How do we learn from outcomes that arrive late or have many causes?

Distinctions among artifact checks, experiments, forecasts, causal explanations, and decision quality

What changes when several people and agents work together?

An examination of coordination, incentives, authority, conflicting goals, local optimization, and process design

What is the smallest useful practice someone can adopt?

A repeatable starting method that fits one real assignment and avoids unnecessary overhead

When does structure help, and when does it become bureaucracy?

A comparison of effort, work quality, review burden, flexibility, and reuse across different levels of structure

What would make this an approach that others can learn and improve?

Conditions for transferring practices across contexts; ways for readers to contribute cases and challenge claims

The questions and concepts so far

Working definitions, the topic map, tensions, and gaps

What changed my mind

Earlier position, new evidence or experience, revised position, and unresolved uncertainty

One task, examined from beginning to end

A small investigation into what an agent needs—and where human judgment enters.

Compare two ways of delegating similar work

Compare an ordinary request with a lightweight explicit assignment. Record quality, total effort, review burden, failures, and any constrain…

Revisit work using preserved knowledge

Return to an earlier assignment after new evidence appears. Test whether retained sources, assumptions, and decisions help revision.

Return to a prediction or decision

Record a specific expectation, resolution conditions, assumptions, and decision rationale. Revisit when evidence arrives.