Part III — Cultivating Flow · Chapter 22 · First Public Draft
Opening the Front Door
Cultivating interfaces that survive the person who built them.
An interface nobody can find is a person you have to know. Which makes this the most concrete cultivation in the paper — most of it is documentation, and documentation is the kind of work that never feels urgent and never stops paying.
What changes. You start treating “how do I use this” as part of the capability rather than as documentation about it — which means an interface nobody can find is an unfinished capability, not a communication problem.
Ask a newcomer to use something without asking anyone. Give a new starter a real task that crosses a boundary and watch where they have to go and ask. Every one of those is a missing interface, and they are invisible to anyone who already knows.
Name the front door for every capability. One route in, discoverable, that does not depend on knowing a person’s name. If the honest answer is “you ask Karin”, the interface is Karin, and Karin will eventually take a holiday.
Write the interface before the escalation path. Organizations build the escalation route first because that is what hurts. The escalation exists because the interface was never specified.
Extend it outward if anyone builds on you. A partner who has to ask how to use you will find someone easier to use, and they will not tell you why.
Make how to use it as easy to find as the thing itself, or you have built a capability that only works when the right person is available.