Week 3 Seminar: Records without capability

Documentation is a description of a practice, not a substitute for it. Completeness is not sufficiency.

8 March 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

Take the opposite failure from week 2: not an absent record, but a complete one that still doesn’t transfer the capability it describes. A procedure manual can pass every audit — every step present, every sign-off recorded, nothing missing that a reviewer would ask for — and still fail the moment someone who has never done the thing tries to follow it cold. The manual describes what a competent practitioner does. It was never written to teach the competence itself.

This week reframes “completeness” as a property of documents, not of practices, and treats “we have full records” as a claim about the archive, not a claim about what the organisation can currently do. The two claims get confused constantly, usually by the people relying on the records rather than the people who wrote them.

What we do in the seminar#

Bring a set of instructions you’ve followed that turned out to need something the instructions didn’t say — a recipe, an assembly guide, an onboarding doc. Identify the exact sentence where the gap was, and what kind of thing was missing: a judgement call, a piece of context, a physical skill, a corrective for when it goes slightly wrong.

One reading#

Polanyi (1958) — return to it here with week 2’s laser case in mind; the same argument reads differently once the pair of weeks are read against each other.

A question left open#

If a record can be complete and still insufficient, what would a record that closed the gap even look like — and is “more detail” the right axis to add it on, or the wrong one?