This framework is useful to get a conversation going about how people talk about their work. and how others tell others what to do and on what basis they make these demands. You can use it to explore:

• the gap between people’s experience of work, and what they say about it in public;
• how managers use their imagination to narrow this gap; and
• how this always incomplete understanding, is used to develop rules and policies about how work should be done.

This approach helps people be curious about the way people talk. An approach that means paying attention to what is left out and therefore who or what is at risk of being silenced (and by what means this silencing is archived) in everyday conversations.