“ My notes and other stuff”
One of the most interesting concepts I learned about while studying Resilience Engineering was the distinction between Work-as-Done (WAD) and Work-as-Imagined (WAI). This concept was mentioned in all sorts of texts, but with almost no references to where it would come from. This entry is a tour of the sources I checked to try and understand the concepts better.
The best blog post I could find on it is Steven Shorrock's The Varieties of Human Work, which further expands the definition to include:
The post goes into far more detail and I encourage you to read it, but I wanted to provide a quick summary for folks who won't. Basically, it's useful to consider these types of work as distinct, because people who study work have to consider multiple kinds. As Shorrock says:
The analysis of work cannot be limited to work as prescribed in procedures etc (le travail prescrit), nor to the observation of work actually done (le travail réalisé). Similarly, it cannot be limited to work as we imagine it, nor work as people talk about it. Only by considering all four of these varieties of human work can we hope to understand what’s going on.
