ake a nuclear weapon and the "fudge-factor" -- the memory of last minute tweaking and intuitive short-cuts that made some of the nation's 1,000 or so nuclear weapons tests work."Nuclear-weapons design was then [when Dr. Richter was a young apprentice Ph.D. at Los Alamos] taught in a kind of medieval apprenticeship. Dr. Richter hung around one or two bomb designers to see how they did it. 'You worked for those guys until you didn't need them anymore,' he says. "The quicker you did that, the quicker you could do more things on your own." 4What's needed in any organization is a way to capture the "fudge-factor"; to save and store what was said and done and acted upon outside of formal documents and procedures -- a way to manage not just explicit documents and events, but tacit events and actions as well. ...
