Organisational Concept Mnemonics

Context: The Future Of Work Will Be Told In Pictures

Organisational principles or methods are certainly facillitated by visual mnemonics, but the process is lossy – useful or important information is always lost in translation. A perennial problem in this (or for that matter – any) aspirationally optimal method of concept communication is that for each phase or stage of efficiency and concept compression, assumed or stored knowledge as (externally-located) information libraries or resources tends to expand in direct proportion to the degree of compression.

The 12-principle Agile Manifesto is (for instance) admirably concise but proceeding to unpack, interpret, contextualise and apply it must bring an inevitable information, energy and work overhead. Mathematical theorems are concise until you consider all the external information necessary to decompress them into (useful) knowledge. We all become attached and entrained to our models and abstractions of organisational order but would also do well to acknowledge from the outset that there is no one, single or most efficient (provable) truth or method for guaranteeing efficiency of either concept communication or of organisational structure and process. Organisational practise in many ways precisely is the successful conceptual communication of that practise.