Transactions v Interactions

Matt Ballantine – mmitII

Transactions are bounded, manageable and measurable, which makes it makes them appear easy to improve and easy to tell whether some forms of improvement have been achieved. The temptation which results is to focus on improving transactions and, more subtly, on making more things more like transactions. There are some advantages in doing that, which is why it is so often done. But the more things are transactions, discarding the rich messiness of human variability, the less they are interactions.

That’s the starting point for a post which turns out to be about something rather different: how do organisations best support collaboration and effective team working. The connection is that while transactions are readily scalable – that’s almost the point of them – interactions aren’t. So in a world where organisational change tries to make things more transactional in contexts where interaction is vital, working out how to scale and systematise interaction without killing it off in the process becomes particularly important.

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