Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Workplace as Information station

Aug 09, 2003 23:25 pm / Add a comment

Shimazaki-san gave us so many good source of dis­cus­sion, I think we will accu­mu­late enough writ­ing on those topic to pro­duce sev­eral dis­ser­ta­tions! One dis­cus­sion he and I had was about the mean­ing of work­place. He sees it as “ba” which infor­ma­tion flows. I agree, but I com­mented that these infor­ma­tion will only flow when peo­ple communicate.

As the group talked about under­stand­ing the pros­per­ity of two ice­cream shops at a beach, we agreed that the eco­nom­ics model can only be con­sid­ered when we build the model with the assump­tion every­thing else but the loca­tion being equal. But the fact of the mat­ter is, any­thing but the dis­tance is never equal between two ice­cream shops, and the source of the dif­fer­ence is in the end, peo­ple. (Com­plex­ity, Con­scilience, Out of Con­trol express this con­cept so elo­quently.) It is the same with infor­ma­tion. I do believe math­mat­ics is the lan­guage of the uni­verse that expresses the state of any­thing. How­ever, it can only expresses all of past, present, and future state that has no mind or spirit, and humans are not so. There­fore, the math­mat­ics may express the past and present of every­thing includ­ing humans, but the future, I am doubtful.

Humans do sur­pris­ing things, and it is the same within work­place. When one wants to know how infor­ma­tion (par­tially knowl­edge) is cre­ated, han­dled, passes through within a work­place, first thing that one has to deal with the atti­tude and rela­tion­ship among peo­ple there.

Our talk took a turn to the trend among major com­pa­nies in Japan for the past cou­ple of years (because, every­body does it now!) which is to cre­ate a “ba” for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion. Com­pa­nies aver­age adults in Japan know by name are com­ing to me, ask­ing for assi­tance in cre­at­ing such “ba” to pro­mote knowl­edge share and com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Truth is, unless human fac­tors are first con­sid­ered and designed to change along with the design of a “ba”, it is doomed from the start.

Humans are the most com­pli­cated fac­tor in any­thing. But then that’s why there’s always a hope. Right, guys?

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