Summary
The IT department lost the device war in 2010. They’re about to lose the software war.
Highlights
id993109644
For thirty years, the CIO has been the Le Corbusier of the corporation. They look at the messy, organic ways employees actually work—the sticky notes, the frantic emails, the spreadsheet hacks—and they try to bulldoze it all. They implement a Master Plan: a monolithic ERP system that promises to unify every workflow into a single, efficient grid. And every time, the users revolt. They don’t revolt with picket signs. They revolt with desire paths. In urban planning, a desire path is the dirt trail worn into the grass by pedestrians who refuse to take the paved walkway because the architect’s design didn’t match their actual destination. In the digital world, the desire path is Shadow IT—the marketing manager who exports CRM data to a rogue Excel sheet, the HR director who bypasses the hiring portal for a Trello board, the engineer who spins up a clandestine AWS instance because the internal provisioning ticket takes three weeks. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, gave this phenomenon a name: Mētis—the practical, local, in-the-fingers knowledge that can never be fully captured by a central plan. When IT departments try to crush Shadow IT, they are trying to crush Mētis. They are declaring war on the local knowledge of their own people.
Metis, esto es lo que más temo en la implementación de nuevos sistemas de gestión. Ese miedo de alguna manera me paralizó cuando pensaba en las resistencias al completo rollout de Notion en una institución con bastantes personas no computinas, y creo que lo estoy superando exitosamente en el uso de planner en el proyecto Apoyo SLEP. Es un buen nombre para un fenómeno importante en consultoría y gestión del cambio organizacional. La imagen de los “caminos libidinales” trazados en el pasto como atajos también está buena.
id993109887
Carl Jung warned that the Shadow is simply the part of the psyche we refuse to acknowledge. Suppressed, it becomes dangerous. Integrated, it becomes the source of creativity. Shadow IT is the organization’s suppressed creativity. Force it underground, and it becomes unmonitored and risky. Integrate it, and it becomes an asset.
Súper buen uso de Jung para revelar un aspecto poco considerado de esta resistencia. Tiene su razón de existir, vinculada al saber hacer natural de las personas. Intentar exterminarla a la fuerza es una receta para la generación de “síntomas psicoanalíticos” en la organización (en el sentido del conflicto entre lo reprimido y la censura). Es algo de lo cual hay que ser bien consciente y con lo que se debe ser cuidadoso.
id993110132
“Vibe Coding” is simply the latest, most powerful form of the satellite city. The tools of 2026—Replit, Cursor, Lovable, Claude Code—allow the local expert to pave their own walkway. The marketing manager no longer needs to export to Excel; they can ask an AI to build a custom dashboard that visualizes the data exactly how they need to see it. The users are not breaking the rules because they are malicious. They are breaking the rules because the Master Plan has no room for their reality.
Esto lo relaciono con otro artículo que no recuerdo, en donde se planteaba que la IA venía a llenar todos esos pequeños molestos recovecos de interacción entre estos procedimientos idiosincráticos, ecuménicos, y los monolíticos flujos de las plataformas propietarias. Al hacerlo, ofrece la oportunidad de resolver este clásico nudo mediante vibe coding. Esto, sin embargo, requiere de desarrollo de competencias en el uso de la IA.
id993110304
In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed “The Extended Mind”—the thesis that the human mind does not stop at the skull. When a tool is integrated deeply enough into our workflow, it becomes a functional part of our cognitive process. If we think through our tools, then the design of the tool shapes the structure of our thoughts.
La mente extendida es un súper buen concepto para pensar en la fuerza que une a la persona con sus herramientas habituales: son básicamente una extensión del self.
id993110440
I know this because I’ve stopped tolerating it. I was telling a friend recently that whether it’s accounting, marketing, or writing, I simply never want to use someone else’s software again—not in a world where I can describe a workflow to an AI agent and have it build me a tool that fits the exact shape of my thinking. I no longer want to adapt how I behave to suit someone else’s intellectual paradigms. Once you feel that freedom, you don’t go back. You can’t. The generic tool starts to feel like wearing someone else’s glasses.
Este es un ideal, pero requiere de un gran desarrollo de capacidades. Siento que me estoy acercando a ello en el trabajo que hago con mi par Obsidian+Claude Code, al cual le tengo que poner nombre.
id993110676
This is the hidden driver of the Vibe Coding revolution. When a strategist prompts an AI to build a custom research tool, they are doing what Galileo did. They are grinding their own lenses. They are rejecting the generic 3x magnification of standard software in favor of a tool that fits their specific problem perfectly.
Estoy de acuerdo con que la persona que detenta estas capacidades se vuelve radicalmente más eficiente que sus pares.
id993110805
The IT department is now facing a choice. They can continue to act like a General Contractor, insisting that they alone are allowed to pour concrete. This is the Plan Voisin approach. It fails because it is too slow, too expensive, and too sterile. No central team can anticipate the specific needs of a thousand different experts. By the time the official app is deployed, the business problem has already changed. Or, they can become the City Planner. The City Planner does not build the houses. The City Planner provides the Enablement Layer: the sewage, the electricity, the roads, and the zoning codes. “You can build whatever structure fits your needs, as long as it connects to our grid safely.”
Esto es más o menos en lo que estoy pensando cuando hablo de “desarrollar una estrategia de IA” tanto en GE como en otras instituciones: desarrollar principios y capacidades que permitan que cualquier miembro del equipo genere aportes que se integran de manera armoniosa con el rizoma de procesos que es la institución.
id993110995
The marketing manager who builds a bespoke sentiment analysis tool at 2 a.m. is not a threat. They love the problem. They understand the nuance of the customer in a way no professional software engineer ever could. When they use AI to manifest that understanding into code, they are not creating Shadow IT. They are creating Vernacular Software—built on the grammar of the grid, but shaped by the mind that needs it.
Me encanta que use el concepto “gramática”, porque es en el mismo sentido que el concepto de gramática escolar, el cual siento que aplica perfectamente.