On understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design

Winograd, Terry; Flores, Fernando

doi:10.1016/0004-3702(87)90026-9

Cited by 653 publications

(735 citation statements)

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“…This led us to further review the literature, seeking insight into what characterized and triggered breakdowns and settlements. We found interesting connections with research on elite settlements (Armstrong 2005;Burton and Higley 1987), provisional settlements (Girard and Stark 2002), genre stabilization (Schryer 1993;Yates and Orlikowski 2007) and practical breakdowns (Agar 1986;Suchman 1987;Winograd and Flores 1986). A third round of axial coding (Strauss and Corbin 1998) fleshed out the characteristics and enablers of these dynamics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

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Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Kaplan

Orlikowski

2013

Organization Science

437

458

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This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible and acceptable, otherwise breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change. Temporal Work in Strategy Making-1 -A fundamental challenge for managers making strategy is coping with an uncertain future. In studying strategic change, scholars have emphasized the importance of sensemaking as a collective and often conflictual interpretive process for dealing with uncertainties about the business, the market, and the environment that lead to breakdowns in understandings and require cognitive reorientations to move forward (Balogun and Johnson 2004;Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991;Gioia et al. 1994;Kaplan 2008b;Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010;Rouleau 2005). These studies suggest that linking across interpretations of the past, present and future make action possible, but have left unexplained how and why some linkages work and some fail in practice, and, for those that do work, why some lead to the status quo and others produce change.Our study of strategy making in practice offers some answers to these questions. We found that managers -through a set of practices that we call "temporal work" -come to settle on particular strategic accounts that link interpretations of the past, present and future in ways that appear coherent, plausible and Settling on a strategic account, even if provisional, allows actors to shift from disagreeing or deliberating about meanings to implementing strategic choices, thus enabling the organization to move forward in the face of uncertainty. If a settlement breaks down, further temporal work is required in order to reconstruct a new str...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Research suggests that stabilized settlements can become a relatively unquestioned part of doing business and invoked habitually. Yet, when settlements are no longer useful in making sense of the world in which participants operate, they fall apart (Agar 1986;Suchman 1987;Winograd and Flores 1986). At CommCorp, breakdowns were precipitated in multiple ways.…”

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confidence: 99%

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Kaplan

Orlikowski

2013

Organization Science

437

458

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“…Fortunately, the last several decades of research in computer science and other disciplines have resulted in a number of well-developed approaches to representing processes, such as flow charts and data-flow diagrams (e.g., Yourdon 1989), state transition diagrams (e.g., Lewis andPapadimitriou 1981, Winograd andFlores 1986), Petri nets (e.g., Peterson 1977, Holt 1988, Singh and Rein 1992, and goal-based models (e.g., Yu 1992). These approaches have been used by many organizations to map their own specific processes, and some have used them to represent widely-used generic…”

Section: The Key Intellectual Challenge: How To Represent Organizatiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

et al. 1999

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T his paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line "process handbook." The handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesign existing organizational processes, (2) invent new organizational processes (especially ones that take advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organizational practices.A key element of the work is an approach to analyzing processes at various levels of abstraction, thus capturing both the details of specific processes as well as the "deep structure" of their similarities. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. A primary advantage of the approach is that it allows people to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed. In addition to describing this new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical feasibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study.

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“…Rowley points out that most commentators have suggested that understanding is not a separate level [3], while Frické simply notes that it is not typically included [4]. And certainly, understanding is not a distinct state, divorced from the others: as Winograd and Flores put it, "what we understand is based on what we know, and what we already know comes from being able to understand" [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information and the gaining of understanding

Bawden

Robinson

2015

Journal of Information Science

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link Information and the gaining of understanding David BawdenCentre for Information Science, City University London, United Kingdom Lyn RobinsonCentre for Information Science, City University London, United Kingdom AbstractIt is suggested that, in addition to data, information and knowledge, the information sciences should focus on understanding, understood as a higher-order knowledge, with coherent and explanatory potential. The limited ways in which understanding has been addressed in the design of information systems, in studies of information behaviour, in formulations of information literacy, and in impact studies are briefly reviewed, and future prospects considered. The paper is an extended version of a keynote presentation given at the i3 conference in June 2015.

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On understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design

Cited by 653 publications

References 2 publications

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

Information and the gaining of understanding

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