Why do tools that look good during demos fail to deliver in practice?
Donald Schön described this as the difference between the high ground and the swamp.
On the high ground people create methods and tools that are rigorous and research-based to solve manageable problems.
In the swamp are the messy and confusing problems humans have to deal with daily.
Tools that work for manageable problems struggle when facing messy ones.
SaaS demos look great with clean test data.
But they run into trouble when we try and use them to solve our particular problem in our particular context.
AI now makes it possible to create customised solutions that will do exactly what we need.
If they work, that shifts the complexity elsewhere.
Governance. Control. Reliability. Repeatabilty. Integration. Understanding.
The complexity doesn’t go away. We never get to drain the swamp.
Instead, we get to work on what needs to be done next.
Here’s what we really need from the systems we deploy.
They should make it easy to do the easy things.
And they should make it possible to do the hard things
Handcrafted insight 