Start with the work students already know.
Authentic assessment runs on their own projects: the trade-offs, decisions and consequences a tidy case study never has.
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What I think
the work is for.
A project is a promise about the future, made by people who will carry it whether or not it holds. I spent years on the conditions under which they do. What occupies me now is quieter, and harder to put a number on: what the work does to the mental health of the person doing it.
A few borrowed ideas have done most of the shaping here. Amy Edmondson named the thing I had been circling for years. A team is psychologically safe, she wrote in 1999, when it holds a shared belief… that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking
. She was watching hospital teams, but on a construction site it explains the silence: not that people have nothing to say, but that saying it costs something.
Which leads somewhere uncomfortable. Our surveys ask people to do the very thing the environment has taught them not to do. Daniel Kahneman is why I have never much trusted a clean dataset: We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
If that is true of us, it is true of the instruments we build. So I go looking in the messier material: the chatter and the open text, where people are talking to each other rather than to a researcher.
None of which tells you what to do about it, and that is where the work gets hard. Our incentives, mine included, reward finding that something is wrong and stop there. Jordan Peterson puts the obligation plainly: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Building something is slower, and easier to be wrong about in public. That is a reason to try it, not to avoid it.
Teaching is where I practise building.
If the work is to build, not only to find fault, teaching is where I practise that: postgraduate, online-first rooms where people bring live projects and professional judgement, not tidy cases.
Point feedback toward the next attempt.
My work on feedforward agents and chatbots asks how personalised guidance can stay useful across large cohorts.
I began by setting out foundations in Kumasi. I now teach project management in Canberra. In both places the same thing is true: the people doing the work know how it is going long before the rest of us do.
We count the hours and the budget and the things that leave a mark. Measuring what the work quietly costs the person doing it is newer, harder, and a long way behind. But if a project can take something out of someone that it never gives back, whose business is that?