Week 1 Seminar: What would it mean to lose a capability

Losing a capability is not the same as losing its records, and the distinction is the whole course.

22 February 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

An organisation can hold every drawing, every specification, every report it ever produced about how it once did something, and still be unable to do that thing. That sentence sounds like a contradiction the first time you hear it. It isn’t one — it’s just two different facts wearing the same word.

“We know how we did it” can mean “we have the file,” or it can mean “we could do it again tomorrow.” Most institutions, most of the time, cannot tell you which one they mean, because nobody has ever had reason to ask until the capability is needed and turns out not to be there.

This course is a method for telling the two apart, tested against eleven cases where an institution found out the hard way. Nothing here is about your own habits or your own memory — the subject is institutional memory, at the scale of an organisation, argued from documented cases rather than from personal experience.

What we do in the seminar#

Read the syllabus against itself: for each of the eleven cases ahead, guess in one sentence whether you expect “documentation problem” or “capability problem,” before you’ve read anything about it. Keep the guesses — week 12 asks whether the guessing got easier.

One reading#

Polanyi (1958) — the source of the distinction this whole course rests on, read before any case so the cases can be read against it rather than the other way round.

A question left open#

If a capability and its record can come apart, what would it take to notice the gap before you need the capability and find it isn’t there? Week 10 comes back to this directly; for now, just sit with the fact that eleven of the twelve cases in this course were noticed too late.