#29: On boundary objects

In building my own boundary objects and enabling others to do the same, I have become increasingly infatuated with Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice and the characteristics that enable particular artefacts to act as boundary objects

The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across a set of intersecting but necessarily incomplete perspectives.

For those that aren’t familiar, a boundary object is an artefact (thing, concept, discourse, process, etc.) that can hold a diversity of incomplete perspectives and enable communication and collaboration amongst those stakeholders despite that incompleteness.

What I've come to recognise as core to my practice is the challenge of taking an extraordinarily complex, integrated, incomplete problem and wrapping my arms around it conceptually in a way that helps and empowers practitioners to actually do things about it.

I’m sure that a strange land is possible in which we would all have access to the tools and practices to help us respond to the challenge of incompleteness, but I, for one, have not come across it yet.