Plans and Situated Actions · Lucy Suchman

A plan is not what people execute, but a resource they use to orient themselves while improvising inside a specific situation.

The idea

Suchman studied how people use a machine that expects them to follow a procedure. Her conclusion is that a plan does not describe the action: it is a resource somebody consults while deciding what to do in a situation the plan never fully anticipated. The machine, by contrast, interprets the deviation as a user error.

Why it matters to us

We build workflows and agents — that is, executable plans. Every exception that reaches a person is a situation the plan did not contemplate, and the book explains why that list never closes: it is not a defect of the modelling, it is the nature of real work.

What we question

The book describes the problem very well and offers few tools for building. We still have to decide which steps are fixed and which are left open, and there ethnographic observation is no substitute for an architectural decision.

What changed

We changed how we treat the exception. It stopped being a process error and became a first-class state, with an owner, a context and a deadline. And every resolved exception is reviewed as material for the next version of the rules.

What it connects to

It connects to the question of how you design an exception that no rule had anticipated, to the agents and orchestration solution, and to the way we collaborate with the people who operate the process.