Repair technicians diagnose machines by constructing a coherent narrative that reconciles the machine's history, the symptoms, and the customer's account, not by applying a decision tree. Diagnosis is treated as the work of making the situation make sense, so the directive documentation that assumes well-defined problems fails precisely because real faults arrive ambiguously described.
Technicians circulate 'war stories': detailed accounts of specific past repairs that encode hard-won diagnostic knowledge in memorable, situated form. These stories serve simultaneously as a technical database, a way of establishing competence among peers, and the raw material from which collective expertise accumulates faster than any manual could capture.
Orr recounts a technician facing an intermittent, undocumented machine fault that the diagnostic manual could not explain; over a shared meal he and a colleague swapped accounts until the pattern matched a story one of them had heard, locating the cause. The breakfast and coffee-break talk, not the formal service call, is where the fix actually originated.
Seen through the daily practice of its service technicians, an organization's real work and knowledge live in improvisation, talk, and relationships with customers and machines, which are largely invisible to the formal descriptions management uses to plan and measure that work. Looking at what practitioners actually do, rather than what procedures prescribe, reveals a gap where the official account systematically underestimates the skill involved.