Things fall apart at the rate we stop noticing
Maintenance starts with noticing. You can’t repair what you haven’t seen. Like how a community fridge stays healthy because someone sees the spoiled produce and throws it out.
Open loops pave the way to innovation and (re)invention. Open them faster than you close them and everything risks staleness. Closing a loop is maintenance, and a retrospective to better, new open loops.
Design for noticing:
- Make decay visible. Stale things should look stale.
- Make the owner visible. Name the role beyond just the person, so it outlasts them.
- Make flagging cheap and routed. One step to raise it, one known path for what happens next.
- Put checking on a rhythm. Noticing shouldn’t depend on luck.
Most systems budget for building. Budget for noticing too, and give whoever notices the power to repair.1
With the people closest to the decay? ↩︎