The course's vocabulary, in one place. Every week links at least one entry here; no entry sits unreached.

Tacit knowledge

What a practice requires that its documentation does not, and often cannot, state — because the person who wrote the documentation didn't need to state it to themselves. Polanyi's term; Collins' laser is the course's clearest demonstration of it.

Capability

The ability to actually do a thing, as distinct from the record of how it was once done. The course's central move is refusing to treat these as the same fact.

Reinstatement

Deliberately rebuilding a capability an institution let lapse. Rarely free: reinstatement has a cost, and that cost is evidence the capability was really gone.

Deskilling

The reduction of a worker's skill and judgement as an organisational choice, usually made for efficiency or control — not, in Braverman's argument, an accident of technology.

Automation surprise

The moment an automated system hands control back to a person who has not had to exercise the underlying skill in years, at precisely the moment that skill is needed most. Bainbridge's irony, named.

Institutional memory

What an organisation still knows how to do, carried by the people and routines that do it — not by its filing system. The course's subject, and the thing the site's own name mocks by pretending an institution could simply teach a seminar about losing it.