Four ways of seeing organizational information.
Each lens is a way of asking how context is doing — how organizations build it, maintain it, or lose it. They are not a methodology. They are instruments for noticing what's already happening. Click any lens for its definition, lineage, and the essays that develop it.
Data Metabolism
The rate at which an organization converts data into understanding into action. Most organizations are data obese. They have more information than they can process, more dashboards than decisions, more inputs than outputs. Data Metabolism is not a measure of how much information you have. It is a measure of how much of it becomes […]
Knowledge Turns
A metric for organizational understanding, modeled on inventory turns from lean manufacturing. Knowledge doesn’t move on its own. It moves when someone who needs it can find it, recognize it as relevant, and apply it to their current situation — and every one of those steps requires context. Strip the context and knowledge sits. It […]
Total Cognitive Load
What knowledge work actually costs, once task load, tool load, and mode-switching load are counted together. Every interruption destroys a working context. The developer pulled out of deep work by a Slack notification doesn’t lose thirty seconds — they lose the cognitive state it took twenty minutes to build. Organizations measure task load because it […]
Information Half Life
What survives, what decays, and what should. Information has a usable lifespan. Some of it is still true next year. Most of it isn’t. The problem is that organizations treat all information as equally durable — the policy written in 2019 sits in the same system with the same authority as the decision made this […]