PS-COO-147 · r2 COORDINATION OBSERVED ENGAGED

WATCHED BY ALL AND NO ONE

A surface everybody can see is a surface nobody is holding.

01 DEFINITION

Condition in which one display is put where several people can see it at once and none of them is operating it, so being seen and being attended to come apart, and each person reads the others' presence as the reason it is already handled.

02 CONDITIONS

UNCERTAINTY MISSING Nothing on the surface states whether anything has been taken up.

TIME PRESSURE MODERATE Things develop while everyone watches and nobody has begun.

ERROR ASYMMETRY ASYMMETRIC Two people acting on one item and nobody acting are failures of very different size.

OPERATOR STATE SUPERVISORY Everyone present is watching rather than operating, which is the whole condition.

03 WHERE IT APPEARS

MEDICALA ward display is visible to everyone on the floor and assigned to none of them.

ENERGYA control room wall shows network state to a room in which nobody is designated to act on any part of it.

MANUFACTURINGA line board is read by every passing person and is not on anybody's task list.

LOGISTICSA hub display carries exceptions that everyone can see and no shift has been given.

PUBLIC SERVICEA shared queue view is watched by a whole office where responsibility for any one item is unassigned.

CONSTRUCTIONA site board shows conditions to everyone arriving and belongs to no particular role.

04 WHAT AEON WORKED THROUGH HERE

The large display existed so that a room could take in the state of things at a glance, and it worked — everyone saw. What it never showed was whether anyone had picked something up. Each person read the others in the room as evidence that it was in hand. The work went into what a shared surface shows about attention rather than about state: what has been taken, by whom, and what is still only being looked at.

What stays unresolved is how a shared surface says who has it — naming a holder makes everyone else a spectator of something they can see going wrong, and naming nobody leaves a room full of people who all noticed.

05 LINKED TERMS

PS-DET-001 ALARM FATIGUE PS-SUP-083 PARALLEL AGENT SUPERVISION PS-SUP-088 STOP AUTHORITY CLARITY PS-COO-135 SETTLED ON ONE SURFACE PS-COO-138 ROLE OVERLAP IN CRISIS PS-COO-140 MULTI-OPERATOR DEADLOCK PS-REP-159 GROUP-LEVEL OPACITY PS-COO-171 ROLE-SPLIT SURFACE