Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin
At this point, you’ve examined your data at the strategic and operational levels.
So far, so good. But we still need to dive down to the operational level – the level of habits and reactions, the level of keystrokes and mouse clicks.
Operations begin as conscious, tactical-level actions.
For instance, suppose you’re learning how to drive a stick shift. At first, you have to consciously focus on pushing in the clutch, moving the stick shift to the next gear, then letting the clutch out again. You may even look at the clutch pedal or the stick shift.
After a short while, shifting gears becomes habit. You don’t think of it as a long set of steps – you think of it as “shifting gears,” and you may even stop noticing that you’re taking these steps. The steps have become operations, unconscious and habitual. And you’re free to focus on other things: instead of pushing in the clutch and moving the stick shift, you focus on driving.
But sometimes you encounter breakdowns, points at which your learned, habitual operations don’t work as planned. For instance, suppose that you rent a car, and the clutch is firmer than your own car’s – or maybe you’re used to driving a four-speed and the rental car is a five-speed. Worse, perhaps your clutch starts going out, so your car won’t stay in gear! So your habits don’t produce the usual results.
When that happens, you have to refocus on that which is usually habitual. You become conscious of the individual steps, and you have a harder time refocusing on the higher-level tasks you’re trying to accomplish (like driving).
We encounter breakdowns all the time. When you hit the wrong key, when you click on the wrong item with your mouse, when you reach for your coffee cup and discover it’s not there, those are all breakdowns. When you say “huh?” or “Uh oh,” that’s usually a breakdown.
Not every breakdown is important or illuminating to people’s work. People make mistakes. But when you find someone encountering the same breakdown repeatedly, or when several people encounter breakdowns dealing with the same artifact, that suggests that you’ve found a systemic issue or set of issues.
The ideal way to identify operations and their associated breakdowns is to collect fine-grained observational data. These might include
Unfortunately, these data collection methods are hard to pull off – they require special equipment and a high level of cooperation by your participants. You can still do these (see Spinuzzi 2003; Slattery 2007). If you can’t manage this level of data collection, though, you can use detailed field notes and look for
These usually involve diverging from the normal sequence – after all, when your participants encounter breakdowns, they must change focus so that they can recover.
So
You can see examples of operations graphs and matrices in my book Tracing Genres through Organizations and in Shaun Slattery’s article “Undistributing Work Through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Information Environments.” But if you’re gathering your operations-level data from field notes, I suggest something simpler. Focus on the breakdowns and what people did to recover from them – to refocus from their steps back to their work. The table below might be a good format to use.
Of course, not every breakdown is going to be significant. We make mistakes for all sorts of reasons, some of which are simply happenstance. But this table will alert you to some breakdowns that may or may not be part of larger, more integrated problems. We'll compare these to the disruptions at the other levels in our next model, the CDB table.