CHURCHILL'S approach to leadership was his ability to switch tracks in an instant and focus earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial. Depending on one's perspective, this was either an endearing trait or a bedevilment. To Churchill, everything mattered. On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to add a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day.
Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title "BREVITY," the minute began: "To do our work, we all have to read a mass of paper. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has been spent in looking for the essential points."
He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs." If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix.
Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire "consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed."
Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. "Let us have an end to phrases such as these," he wrote, and quoted two offenders:
"It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations ..."
He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational."
The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking."
Erik Larson
The Splendid and the Vile
People do not want to re-organize their firms. More particularly, they do not know how to do so. More precisely still, they have no tools or means of description which would enable them to work out a new mode of organization as distinct from a reshuffle of responsibilities. We can hardly go on unless we agree that a new language and a new model (something different from the archetypal organization chart) are required... Things may go more slickly; the firm may even save some money (though this is little more than a pious hope in most standard applications), but the human filters remain, and they remain the limitation.
If the distinctions we currently use are wholly arbitrary and indeed archaic (first objection), and if they are constrained by human limitation in a way which modern facilities falsify (second objection), then there is no guarantee that what really matters in modern management can be expressed like this at all. It is, after all, one thing to express something ineptly, and quite another to have no way of drawing attention to it at all. But this latter tragedy is quite possible, and often happens with any grossly simplifying language.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Economic transactions are purchases and sales of knowledge. Even the hiring of an "unskilled" worker to pump gas involves the purchase of a knowledge of the importance of dependability, punctuality, and an ability to get along with customers and co-workers, quite aside from the modest technological knowledge required to operate the gasoline pump. The abstract existence of knowledge means nothing unless it is applied at the point of decision and action.
More complex operations obviously involve more complex knowledge-often far more complex than any given individual can master. The person who can successfully man a gas pump or even manage a filling station probably knows little or nothing about the molecular chemistry of petroleum, and a molecular chemist is probably equally uninformed or misinformed as to the problems of finance, product mix, location, and other factors which determine the success or failure of a filling station, and both the manager and the chemist probably know virtually nothing about the geological principles which determine the best way and best places to explore for oil-or about the financial complexities of the speculative investments which pay for this costly and uncertain process.
We are all in the business of selling and buying knowledge from one another, because we are each so profoundly ignorant of what it takes to complete the entire process of which we are a part.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn’t work out, whether through luck or misjudgement. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle... Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
The production process is arbitrarily conceived to begin at a point after many prerequisites have already been assembled, and only those people actively involved beyond that arbitrary point are conceived to be involved at all (or "really") in causing the result desired by the consumer. Those involved earlier, before the arbitrary point at which the story was begun to be depicted, then appear at the end-as if for the first time-as recipients of unearned proceeds. Aside from ethical questions about using such a depiction, intellectually it is essentially a linear picture of a circular process...
Given the highly fragmented nature of knowledge, those who have mastered the complexities of the production process have seldom also mastered the very different complexities of inventory management and numerous other services performed by middlemen in the process of relocating things in time and space. Consumers typically lack both the knowledge and the economies of scale needed for low cost inventory storage.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Writing software is not a variable cost, but it's not really a fixed cost either. Writing software is an ongoing, revenue-generating operation of the company, and it is not the same as constructing a factory. The expensive craftsmen who build the factory leave and go to work on some other job after the building is erected. Programmers are far more expensive than carpenters or ironworkers, and they never go away because their work is apparently never completed...
Programmers' salaries appear to be a variable cost from an accountant's point of view, but they are much more like a long-term investment - a fixed cost. Reducing the cost of programming is not the same as reducing the cost of manufacturing. It's more like giving cheap tools to your workers than it is like giving the workers smaller paychecks. The companies that are shipping programming jobs overseas in order to pay reduced salaries are missing the point entirely.
Alan Cooper
<a href="/node/12698">The Inmates really are running the Asylum</a>
In engineering... it surely does not often occur that there are two control centres governing a particular activity, one of which is especially concerned to stimulate and the other to inhibit. A competent engineer, who has access to the process involved, will assuredly coalesce these functions in a single control centre within a machine. Yet in management the tendency of a somehow basically inhibitory centre (such as an admonitory financial director staff or of a somehow basically stimulatory centre (such as an enthusiastic development division) to fall victim to ungovernable positive feedback often occurs. Human beings and social groups which are really effective tend, that is, to parody themselves. What began as financial prudence ends as a kiss of death; what began as innovatory keenness ends as profligacy. Hence it is altogether normal in management (in contradiction to some textbook utterances) to find that control of some function that is vital to the enterprise is not after all the province of one decision-taker, but of two.
Theorists say it must be wrong, and still seek explanations for this dire condition in "company politics'; they try to arrange matters so that authority resides with responsibility in one centre. But they themselves are wrong; twin centres of different tendency may turn out to be one of the necessary consequences of having a control system which is not fully specifiable.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
...the two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
[w:Rene Decarte]
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
Frank Tibolt
We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan for months.
[w:Michael Bloomberg] in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloomberg-Michael/dp/0471208884" target="_blank">Bloomberg</a>
An organization is a processing system that converts various resource inputs into product and service outputs, which it provides to receiving systems or markets. It also provides financial value, in the form of equity and dividends, to its shareholders. The organization is guided by its own internal criteria and feedback but is ultimately driven by the feedback from the market. The competition is also drawing on those resources and providing its products and services to the market. This entire business scenario is played out in the social, economic, and political environment.
Looking inside the organization, we see functions, or subsystems, which exist to convert the various inputs into products or services. These internal functions, or departments, have the same systems characteristics as the total organization. Finally, the organization has a control mechanism - management - that interprets and reacts to the internal and external feedback, so that the organization keeps in balance with the external environment. The intelligent use of feedback is at the heart of what has begun to be called the 'learning organization' (Senge, 1990).
Romer stressed not merely the calibration of labor costs and capital spending in a “production function,” but the transformative effect of ideas. “I think part of why this question attracted me was because of my background in physics, and to a physicist, the whole notion of a production function sounds wrong. We don’t really produce anything. Everything was already here, so all we can ever do is rearrange things. Think of conservation of mass. We’ve got the same amount of stuff we’ve always had, but the world is a nicer place to live in because we’ve rearranged it….” From this classical physics point of view, Romer thought about the structural or chemical changes that make up that “rearranging.” He realized, “It’s like cooking.” And here, Romer proposed, is where creation comes. Milk and other ingredients can be artfully brought together to “create something—a soufflé, which is really valuable, and gives us great pleasure when we eat it.” Clumsy or ignorant rearranging, on the other hand, leads to something worth less than what you started with: “sour milk.”
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
In human culture, we like to think of breakthrough ideas as sudden accelerations on the timeline, where a genius jumps ahead fifty years and invents something that normal minds, trapped in the present moment, couldn’t possibly have come up with. But the truth is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible; the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time... The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.
Steven Johnson
<a href="/node/14683">Where Good Ideas Come From</a>
For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph - a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.
[w:George Patton]
The movie 'Patton' (1970)
The difference between failure and success is the difference between doing something almost right and doing something right.
Ben Franklin
Hierarchies are very good at aggregating effort, at coordinating the activities of many people with widely varying roles. But they're not very good at mobilizing effort, at inspiring people to go above and beyond. When it comes to mobilizing human capability, communities outperform bureaucracies. This is true for several reasons. In a bureaucracy, the basis for exchange is contractual - you get paid for doing what is assigned to you. In a community, exchange is voluntary - you give your labor in return for the chance to make a difference, or exercise your talents. In a bureaucracy you are a factor of production. In a community you are a partner in a cause. In a bureaucracy, "loyalty" is a product of economic dependency. In a community, dedication and commitment are based on one's affiliation with the group's aims and goals. When it comes to supervision and control, bureaucracies rely on multiple layers of management and a web of policies and rules. Communities, by contrast, depend on norms, values, and the gentle prodding of one's peers. Individual contributions tend to be circumscribed in a bureaucracy - marketing people work on marketing plans, finance people run the numbers. In a community, capability and disposition are more important than credentials and job descriptions in determining who does what. And where the rewards offered by a bureaucracy are mostly financial, in a community they're mostly emotional. When compared with bureaucracies, communities tend to be undermanaged. That, more than anything else, is why they are amplifiers of human capability.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.
Henry Ford
The beginning of an architecting project is orientation, or determining where you are and where you want to go. This refers both to the architecture project as well as the underlying, assumed but not yet existing, system development project. Orientation is less technical and more business. It's intent is to insure that the architecture effort can proceed for at least one iterative cycle in an organized fashion. Orientation leads to core architecting, which is characterized by purpose analysis, problem structuring, solutions structuring, harmonization, and selection-abstraction.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
Problem structuring is where we organize elements of the problem space with a primary focus on a "value model." The value model is an explicit model of the most important stakeholders preferences, and it is intended to capture them without regard to consistency. That is, we want to be able to assess alternatives in the value system of each major stakeholder, realizing that the resulting preference orderings will not be the same. Any reconciliation necessary among them will be conducted later. lts concern is on the problem side of the problem-system tension. It is a synthesis activity in the sense that we are synthesizing problem descriptions, preferably several, with somewhat different scopes. ln solution structuring, we synthesize models of solutions, multiple solutions that should differ in scope and scale. The heuristics that apply are drawn from those that cover modeling, aggregation, and partitioning.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
Harmonization is a preparation for selection and abstraction. Selection is easy to understand; it is picking answers. An important distinction between the approach of systems architecting and most decision analysis ... is that we do not assume when we enter selection that there is a unitary exclusive decision to make. At some point in the process, if the overall goal is to build a system, we must clearly make a decision about a preferred configuration. But we must might travel down this process road many times before reaching such a unitary decision. Along the way we may wish to hold onto multiple solution configurations, classes of solution configurations, and multiple problem descriptions. We make no decision before it's time.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
A good architecture is one that successfully addresses the concerns of its stakeholders and, when those concerns are in conflict, balances them in a way that is acceptable to the stakeholders.
Rozanski, Nick and Woods, Eoin
<a href="/node/16461">Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders, Using Viewpoints, and Perspectives</a>
Plans are nothing; planning is everything.
<p>- [w:Dwight Eisenhower]</p>
Certainty is a good thing, up to a point. When looking through a marketing magazine once, I saw an advertisement with the maxim Never Doubt Your Beliefs, and Never Believe Your Doubts. It's excellent advice for salesmen who meet tough resistance from customers every day, but I don't want a person who adheres to this maxim to be in charge of deciding when to put a new machine into service.
The contemporary insult "clueless" is directed at people we see as completely out of touch with important events. If you adapt that word a little, we come up with the new insult of "doubtless", meaning a person who is rock-solid certain he knows all he needs to know and believes that nothing can go wrong. Being doubtless is as dangerous in its own way as being clueless.
A child of four or five who has been repeatedly called to the house by his mother with no apparent response on his own part, was asked if he did not hear her. He replied quite judicially, "Oh, yes, but she doesn't call very mad yet."
[w:John Dewey]
The kernel is organized into three discrete areas of concern, each focusing on a specific dimension of software development... as follows:
Customer: Software development always involves at least one customer for the software that it produces. The customer perspective must be integrated into the day-to-day work to ensure that an appropriate solution is developed. The customer area of concern contains everything to do with the actual use and exploitation of the software system to be produced.
Solution: The goal of software development is to develop a working software system to solve some problem. The solution area of concern contains everything related to the specification and development of the software system.
Endeavor: Software development is an endeavor of consequence that typically takes significant time and effort to complete, affects many different people, and involves a development team. The endeavor area of concern contains everything related to the development team and the way they do their work.
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman
<a href="/node/14941">The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel</a>
An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point—an “interface” in today’s terms—between an “inner” environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an “outer” environment, the surroundings in which it operates. If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose.
A theory of the airplane draws on natural science for an explanation of its inner environment (the power plant, for example), its outer environment (the character of the atmosphere at different altitudes), and the relation between its inner and outer environments (the movement of an airfoil through a gas). But a theory of the bird can be divided up in exactly the same way
Given an airplane, or given a bird, we can analyze them by the methods of natural science without any particular attention to purpose or adaptation, without reference to the interface between what I have called the inner and outer environments. After all, their behavior is governed by natural law just as fully as the behavior of anything else (or at least we all believe this about the airplane, and most of us believe it about the bird).
In very many cases whether a particular system will achieve a particular goal or adaptation depends on only a few characteristics of the outer environment and not at all on the detail of that environment. Biologists are familiar with this property of adaptive systems under the label of homeostasis. It is an important property of most good designs, whether biological or artificial.
[w:Herbert Simon]
<a href="/node/16184">Sciences of the artificial</a>
Initiative, creativity, and passion are gifts. They are benefactions that employees choose, day by day and moment by moment, to give or withhold. They cannot be commanded. If you're a CEO, you won't get these gifts by exhorting people to work harder, or by ordering them to love their customers and kill their competitors. You'll only elicit these capabilities when you start asking yourself and your colleagues: What kind of purpose would merit the best of everyone who works here? What lofty cause would inspire folks to give generously of their talents?
A moral imperative can't be manufactured by speech writers or ginned up by consultants. It can't be cobbled together in a two-day offsite. Rather, it must grow out of some genuine sense of mission, possibility, or outrage. A moral imperative is not something one invents to wring more out of people. To be regarded as authentic, it must be an end, not a means... Beauty. Truth. Love. Service. Wisdom. Justice. Freedom. Compassion. These are the moral imperatives that have aroused human beings to extraordinary accomplishment down through the ages.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
A boundary is a formal way of dividing authority in an organization. There are two ways of communicating boundaries inside the organization. Unfortunately, the most common approach is trial and error. Some people refer to this as discovering the location of the invisible electric fences... There are two practical problems with using trial and error. First, from a technical perspective, it is slow. Second, touching electrical fences does not encourage the team to use initiative in making decisions.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
It is interesting to begin the analysis of hierarchical control structures by asking about the basic decision elements of which ranks and orders of command are in general composed. In nature, if we consider that most sophisticated control system, the brain, this element might be identified as a single nerve cell or neuron. In industry or government indeed in any strongly cohesive social group the element is some sort of manager.
Both the neuron and the manager have one really basic task to perform: to decide. In the neuron's case, a pulse must either be triggered down the output nerve or not. For the manager, the fundamental task is also to say yes or no. It true that managers do not spend their lives uttering these two words; they may never utter them. None the less, this is their task, and the subtleties, the nuances, the might-I-suggests and the perhaps-you-woulds are really socially intricate ways of saying yes or no.
In order to reach a binary decision, the decision element has to establish a threshold of decision. We may think of it as saying 0 until it is prompted to say 1 instead. This would be a permissive kind of management, in which the decision element does nothing until activated. It must not be activated by any stray impulse or noisiness that happens to be floating around the system, and this fact establishes the need for a threshold. Over-sensitive neurons would soon send either men or firms mad. When things really begin to happen, the decision element accumulates its evidence. When it is sure that there is real evidence demanding action, which is to say when the sum of inputs exceeds a threshold value, it fires.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Any sub-process within product development can be viewed in economic terms. The total cost of the subprocess is composed of its cost of capacity and the delay cost associated with its cycle time. If we are blind to queues, we won't know the delay cost, and we will only be aware of the cost of capacity. Then, if we seek to minimize total cost, we will only focus on the portion we can see, the efficient use of capacity... This explains why today's product developers assume that efficiency is desirable, and that inefficiency is an undesirable form of waste. This leads them to load their processes to dangerously high levels of utilization...
The damage done by large batches can become regenerative when a large batch project starts to acquire a life of its own. It becomes a death march where all participants know they are doomed, but no one has the power to stop. After all, when upper management has been told a project will succeed for 4 years, it is very hard for anyone in middle management to stand up and reverse this forecast...
Our problems grow even bigger when a large project attains the status of the project that cannot afford to fail. Under such conditions, management will almost automatically support anything that appears to help the "golden" project. After all, they want to do everything in their power to eliminate all excuses for failure.
Have you had trouble buying a new piece of test equipment? Just show it will benefit the "golden" project and you will get approval. Have a feature that nobody would let you implement? Find a way to get it into the requirements of the "golden" project. These large projects act as magnets attracting additional cost, scope, and risk...
At the same time, large batches encourage even larger batches. For example, large test packages bundle many tests together and grow in importance with increasing size. As importance grows, such test packages get even higher priority. If engineers want their personal tests to get high priority, their best strategy is to add them to this large, high-priority test package. Of course, this then makes the package even larger and of higher priority.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
Separation of concerns: describing many aspects of the system via a single representation can cloud communication and, more seriously, can result in independent aspects of the system becoming intertwined in the model. Separating different models of a system into distinct (but related) descriptions helps the design, analysis, and communication processes by allowing you to focus on each aspect separately.
Communication with stakeholder groups: The concerns of each stakeholder group are typically quite different (e.g . , contrast the primary concerns of end users, security auditors, and help-desk staff), and communicating effectively with the various stakeholder groups is quite a challenge. The viewpoint-oriented approach can help considerably with this problem. Different stakeholder groups can be guided quickly to different parts of the AD based on their particular concerns, and each view can be presented using language and notation appropriate to the knowledge, expertise, and concerns of the intended readership.
Management of complexity: Dealing simultaneously with all of the aspects of a large system can result in overwhelming complexity that no one person can possibly handle . By treating each significant aspect of a system separately, the architect can focus on each in turn and so help conquer the complexity resulting from their combination.
Improved developer focus: The AD is of course particularly important for the developers because they use it as the foundation of the system design. By separating out into different views those aspects of the system that are particularly important to the development team, you help ensure that the right system gets built.
Nick Rozanski
<a href="/node/16438>Software System Archiitecture</a>
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
[w:Charles Dickens]
[w:A Tale of Two Cities]
After many years of working in product development, I have concluded that the idea of best practices is a seductive but dangerous trap. Best practices are only 'best' in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives. A change in either the context or the objective can quickly transform the 'best practice' into a stupid approach. For example, a dedicated prototype facility may be a superb practice in one business but an economic disaster in another... The great danger in 'best practices' is that the practice can get disconnected from its intent and its context and may acquire a ritual significance that is unrelated to its original purpose. This distortion appears to arise because of our tendency to start believing the label 'best' as an absolute judgment. Why would you choose not to do something the 'best' way? It requires great mental clarity to recognize that the label 'best' might be misleading.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
In general, a binary classifier (the 0, 1 receptor) halves the uncertainty with which it is dealing - if it is efficiently used. All problems, whether they are regarded as problems of recognition, or classification, or indeed decisions, are problems about uncertainty. High situations are hard to handle just because the measure of their variety is the measure of their uncertainty... However big the problem, its variety can in principle be halved by one decision element.
Take another example. You are looking for one person in a dance hall where five hundred couples are present. This represents a problem of variety one thousand; that is an uncertainty factor of 1:1000, or a probability of .001 of making a correct selection at random. That is the scale of the problem. But if you can find out whether the person you are seeking is a man or a woman the problem is halved forthwith.
The distinction between yes and no, between 0 and 1, is the element of decision. Managers may evade responsibility by giving equivocal or bogus decisions, if they wish, or by making qualified utterances, but when the crunch comes the answer is binary. And in fact managers do use the process of dichotomous classification (which has just been described) though rather informally. A managerial problem may have hundreds of possible solution and the manager may refuse to do more than say that he thinks the answer will be towards one end of a scale rather than the other. This sounds extremely vague but in fact he is dividing the possibilities into two groups which may not be of equal size, and leaving the threshold between the two. His people will go along with this for some time, performing actions which tend to push the situation in that one direction rather than the other, and trying to avoid the doubtful zone. But sooner or later they reach a point where they cannot decide what to do, and the manager is presented with a narrowed-down uncertainty.
And so the process goes on, effectively splitting the universe possibilities into two parts, until one day the manager is faced with saying yes or no to some final proposition. It can be shown mathematically that the most effective way of going through a sequential set of decisions of this kind is to divide the possibilities exactly in half each time, but it does not matter much if the division is not in fact equal. One may have to use an extra receptor (which entails taking an extra decision) beyond the number which is strictly necessary but the general procedure holds.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Orientation is one of controlling, with certainty, prediction and risk aversion being core values. A focus on internal structures results in rigid long lasting management layers focused on coordination, monitoring by highly organized individuals who want to know as much detail as their time will permit. Command and control anti-patterns become prevalent in low-trust environments that are highly political, or where catastrophic loss is highly possible. Defense contractors are likely to exhibit a hybrid of hierarchy attributes blended with market features due to their highly competitive environment which interfaces at multiple levels with governmental entities. Changing these organizations typically happens when geopolitical events or national crises occur that result in macro policy changes.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
A view is a representation of one or more structural aspects of an architecture that illustrates how the architecture addresses one or more concerns held by one or more of its stakeholders....
An individual blueprint is only a partial representation of the building ; you have to look at - and understand - the whole set of blueprints to grasp the facilities and experience that the whole building will provide...
A complex system is much more effectively described by a set of interrelated views, which collectively illustrate its functional features and quality properties and demonstrate that it meets its goals, than by a single overloaded model.
Nick Rozanski
<a href="/node/16438>Software System Archiitecture</a>
The product architecture will create needs for more intense communications around the undefined interfaces within the design. The less well-characterized the interface, the more likely we are to have questions about it. Thus, an architectural interface will act as a region of the design which requires heightened and accurate communications. This heightened communications cannot be achieved if we place such an interface at either an organizational boundary or a geographic boundary. Communications will be worst if we compound the problem by placing and undefined interface on top of both an organization boundary and a geographic boundary.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.
[w:Thucydides]
It is the result of the practice choices that are made within an endeavor that determine the inputs to the toll-gates that will be assessed by the various delegated fiduciaries on behalf of the investor. While it is tempting to prescribe these inputs on the basis of convenience, such an approach runs counter-culture to all but Hierarchy organizations. More importantly, focus drifts from the processing of information that making critical decisions to the document container that houses data information. A far better strategy is to be able render views of data that address the complex governance issues at each gate. Such a data-centric vs document-centric stance enables far more delivery intelligence due to the temporal and dynamically changing nature of the project ecosystem than the batching that occurs within documents. The general function of the work product output of a practice should be the focus, not the form, and practice equivalence and variability should be embraced.. The investment situation should drive the utility of the various themed periods of time, the meaningful toll gate questions, the various key performance indicators, the intelligent fiduciary delegation and the efficient and effective practice choices that realize these various of the management interface.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Brooks observed that "men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them." With software, where every project is different and the tools are in constant flux, each time you add a new member to a team, the veterans must drop what they are doing to bring the latecomer up to speed, and everyone needs to pause to reapportion their tasks to give the newcomer something to do. Before you know it, you're even further behind schedule. In the worst cases, Brooks saw, this set up a disastrous loop of delay, a "regenerative scheduling disaster" in which each resetting of the schedule triggers the hiring of more bodies, forcing yet another new schedule into place. Brooks quailed at that prospect: "Therein lies madness." ...
Brooks' Law implies that the ideal size for a programming team is one: a single developer who never has to stop to communicate with a colleague. This approach streamlines everything, and it also provides insurance that the project will retain what Brooks calls "conceptual integrity": the alignment of all its parts toward the same purpose and according to a harmonious plan. Indeed, the history of software is full of breakthroughs made by lone wolves.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
CHURCHILL'S approach to leadership was his ability to switch tracks in an instant and . earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial. Depending on one's perspective, this was either an endearing trait or a bedevilment. To Churchill, everything mattered. On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to add a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day.
Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title "BREVITY," the minute began: "To do our work, we all have to read a mass of paper. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has be spent in looking for the essential points."
He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs." If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix
Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire "consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed."
Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. "Let us have an end to phrases such as these," he wrote, and quoted two offenders:
"It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations ..."
1 The spe
"on, MOON, LOVELY MOON"
"Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into ef fect..."
He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational."
The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking."
That evening, as he had done almost every weekend thus far, he set off for the country. The private secretary on Chequers duty that week end was John Colville, who rode in a separate car with Clementine and Mary. Other guests had already gathered at the house, or soon would, including Anthony Eden, Pug, and two key generals, who all converged to dine and sleep. Churchill also invited First Sea Lord Dudley Pound but failed to tell anyone else, which, as Colville noted, "occasioned some hectic rearranging of the dinner table." After the meal, Mary and Clementine left the dining room, as per
custom and Clementine's preference.
Among the men, the talk turned to the threat of invasion, and to measures taken to defend England. Anti-tank mines had been secreted along many of the country's beaches, and these, wrote Colville, "had been shown to be most devastating." Indeed, he noted, they had claimed the lives of a number of English citizens. Churchill told the story, possi bly apocryphal, of an ill-starred golfer who managed to direct a golf bal onto an adjacent beach. Colville summarized the denouement in his di ary: "He took his niblick down to the beach, played the ball, and all tha
remained afterward was the ball, which returned safely to the green. After dinner, Churchill, the generals, and Admiral Pound moved the Hawtrey Room, where large timbers had been installed to brace th structure against explosion. Within the room were innumerable tre sures, among them a book dating to 1476. Meanwhile, Colville re
memoranda and arranged the papers in Churchill's black box. At one point, a German aircraft flew overhead. With Churchill int lead, the group charged out into the garden to try to catch a glimpse
the plane. the To the amusement of all, Admiral Pound tripped while descend steps. Wrote Colville, "The First Sea Lord fell down first one flig igked himself up disconsolately, he tumb
It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise - this thing gives out and [it is] then that 'bugs' - as such little faults and difficulties are called - show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure
[w:Thomas Edison]
Letter to associates, 1884
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status
Lawrence J Peters
The importance of innovations, as Peter Drucker has stressed, is not their efficiency but their effectiveness.15 They do not do existing jobs better; they redefine the work. They don’t do things right; they identify the right things to do. Innovations are not linear but saltatory... The manufacturer of carriages or vacuum tubes or typewriters did not fine-tune components in the adjacent possible. He conceived a new system. The automobile or transistor or computer absorbs any existing components into an altogether higher-level machine. Indeed, as Drucker has written, to replace an existing system, a new invention must be at least ten times better.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
As an essential part of the management decision process, a business case should not be viewed simply as a way to justify a particular effort. Rather, it should help the decision maker decide which approaches, if any, should be evaluated further. Therefore, a good business case considers several modernization approaches and contingencies, along with the technical and economical justification for selecting a particular approach. In general, a good business case should provide information about the project purpose and objectives, a description of the current system and current business process, a description of the future system and future business process, a cost estimate, a cost-benefit analysis, a risk assessment, a change analysis, and measures of performance. Change analysis includes changes to personnel, equipment, software, hardware, and support. Measures of performance are used to assess achievements, effectiveness, and efficiency. It is crucial to understand stakeholder requirements to build an accurate business case.
Seacord, Plakosh & Lewis
<a href="/node/15939">Modernizing Legacy Systems</a>
Cars which are very similar in the quality of ride, convenience of operation, or aesthetic considerations, may sell for very different prices if they differ substantially in their respective probabilities of continuous service-that is, if they differ in the frequency of breakdowns or the amount of maintenance required. These may be differences in brands of cars or differences in the same car purchased new and used. In either case, cars' price differences need not reflect transportation differences, but may reflect simply risk differences. As in the case of other kinds of risks, however objective the probabilities may be, the costs of risk are highly diverse with respect to individual situations and subjective preferences. An auto mechanic or someone else who is handy with tools may find the cheapness of a particular car more than compensates its special troubles, while a heart surgeon with no understanding of engines may find a car that won't start an intolerable problem when he has to rush to treat someone in the intensive care ward.
[w:Thomas Sowell]
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
[w:Mark Twain]
Even if our cognitive maps of causal structure were perfect, learning, especially double-loop learning, would still be difficult. To use a mental model to design a new strategy or organization, we must make inferences about the consequences of decision rules that have never been tried and for which we have no data. To do so requires intuitive solution of high-order nonlinear differential equations, a task far exceeding human cognitive capabilities in all but the simplest systems. In many experimental studies, including Diehl and Sterman, the participants were given complete knowledge of all structural relationships and parameters, along with perfect, comprehensive, and immediate knowledge of all variables. Further, the systems were simple enough that the number of variables to consider was small. Yet performance was poor, and learning was slow. Poor performance in these tasks is due to our inability to make reasonable inferences about the dynamics of the system, despite perfect and complete knowledge of the system structure
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Even if our cognitive maps of causal structure were perfect, learning, especially double-loop learning, would still be difficult. To use a mental model to design a new strategy or organization, we must make inferences about the consequences of decision rules that have never been tried and for which we have no data. To do so requires intuitive solution of high-order nonlinear differential equations, a task far exceeding human cognitive capabilities in all but the simplest systems.
In many experimental studies- the participants were given complete knowledge of all structural relationships and parameters, along with perfect, comprehensive, and immediate knowledge of all variables. Further, the systems were simple enough that the number of variables to consider was small. Yet performance was poor, and learning was slow. Poor performance in these tasks is due to our inability to make reasonable inferences about the dynamics of the system, despite perfect and complete knowledge of the system structure.
Today's development organizations are managed like centrally-controlled economies of the twentieth century. Resource is allocated by an infinitely wise centralized decision maker. There is no explicit cost for requesting priority or excess resources. In theory, the decision maker has the scarce global knowledge needed to allocate resources. In reality, this creates a massive incentive for projects to exaggerate their needs. Skillful lobbying can often get more resources than legitimate needs.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
The most stubborn habits which resist change with the greatest tenacity are those which worked well for a space of time and led to the practitioner being rewarded for those behaviors. If you suddenly tell such persons that their recipe for success is no longer viable, their personal experience belies your diagnosis. The road to convincing them is hard. It is the stuff of classic tragedy.
Jamshid Gharajedaghi
<a href="/node/2038" target="_parent">Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity</a>
Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
[w:Margaret Mead]
Considering that our recursive modeling procedure does not permit us to investigate the infrastructure of our three entities without changing the System-in-focus, quite a lot of managerially powerful conclusions are emerging. By treating the environment, the operations, and the management unit simply as 'black boxes', that is as opaque to analysis, and looking only at their interactions, we have been able to enunciate two Principles of Organization and to draw up an accounting of varietal interactions that conduce to homeostasis. If these listings have been conscientiously made, and the relevant amplifiers, attenuators, and technological generators considered in terms of Requisite Varieties, some telling discoveries about the viable system under study may have been made already.
The point is to draw a clear distinction between channel capacity and transduction capacity: they are not at all the same thing. People think too loosely about "communicating the message', as if any sort of connexion must be able to do the job.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16119">Diagnosing organizational behaviors</a>
Business process integration
LowCoordination
Shared customers, products, or suppliers
Impact on other business unit transactions
Operationally unique business units or functions
Autonomous business management
Business unit control over business process design
Shared customer/supplier/product data
Consensus processes for designing infrastructure services; specific applications made in business units
Unification
Customers and Suppliers may be local or global
Globally integrated business processes often with support of enterprise systems
Business units with similar or overlapping operations
Centralized management often applying functional/processes/business s unit matrices
High-level process owners design standardized processes
Centrally mandated databases
Decisions made centrally
HighDiversification
Few, if any, shared customers or suppliers
Independent transactions
Operationally unique business units
Autonomous business management
Business unit control over business process design
Few data standards across business units
Most decisions made within business units
Replication
Few, if any, shared customers
Independent transactions aggregated at a high level
Operationally similar business units
Autonomous business unit leaders with limited discretion over processes
Centralized (or federal) control over business process design
Standardized data definitions but data locally owned with some aggregation at corporate
Centrally mandated services
LowHighBusiness process standardization
Source: MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research
Ross, Weill, and Robertson
<a href="/node/155893'>Enterprise Architecture as Strategy</a>
There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people's brains off rather than turn them on.
Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything - a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps - the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss.
Good checklists are, above all, practical. The power of checklists is limited, Boorman emphasized. They can help experts remember how to manage a complex process or configure a complex machine. They can make priorities clearer and prompt people to function better as a team. By themselves, however, checklists cannot make anyone follow them.
Pilots nonetheless turn to their checklists for two reasons. First, they are trained to do so. They learn from the beginning of flight school that their memory and judgment are unreliable and that lives depend on their recognizing that fact. Second, the checklists have proved their worth - they work. However much pilots are taught to trust their procedures more than their instincts, that doesn't mean they will do so blindly.
Aviation checklists are by no means perfect. Some have been found confusing or unclear or flawed. Nonetheless, they have earned pilots' faith. Face-to-face with catastrophe, they are astonishingly willing to turn to their checklists.
A central tenet of classical systems engineering is that all systems can be viewed in hierarchies. A system is composed of subsystems that are composed of small units. A system is also embedded in higher-level systems in which it acts as a component. One person’s system is another person's component. A basic strategy is to decompose any system into subsystems decompose the requirements until they can be allocated to subsystems, carefully specify and control the interfaces among the subsystems, and repeat the process on every subsystem until you reach components you can buy or are the products of disciplinary engineering. Decomposition in design is followed by integration in reverse. First the lowest level components are integrated into the next level subsystems, these subsystems are integrated into larger subsystems, and so on until the entire system is assembled.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
If God spoke to me by saying, 'Mark, you're down to your last three words: What would you want to say to your fellow humans that would make the most positive impact?' It would be a close call between Love Thy Neighbor and Wash Your Hands; A close third would be Move, Move, Move.
Mark Pettus
When thinking about improving outcomes, one must recognize that the speed at which humans can make good decisions is limited in both time and space. To optimize our decision making abilities that enable the product to transition and progress towards the final end state, we need to create flow in decisions. If we plug up our pipeline with erroneous or voluminous knowledge (in the form of documents or other high-ceremony artifacts) we run the risk of backing up the system and creating an inventory backlog of decisions.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about
[w:John Von Neumann]
Most great works of the human mind have been made by one mind, or two working closely. This is true of most of the great engineering feats of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But now, team design has become the modern standard, for good reasons. The danger is the loss of conceptual integrity in the product, a very grave loss indeed. So the challenge is how to achieve conceptual integrity while doing team design, and at the same time to achieve the very real benefits of collaboration...
“Many hands make light work”. Often. But many hands make more work, Always! We all know the first adage. And it is true for tasks that are partitionable. The burden on each worker is lighter, hence the time to completion is shorter. But no design tasks are perfectly partitionable, and few are highly partitionable. So collaboration brings extra costs...
Many (mostly academic) writers conclude from the high degree of today’s specialization that the nature of design has changed: design today must be done as an “interdisciplinary negotiation” (among the team). The clear implication, though not explicit, is that the team members are peers, and each must be satisfied. NO! If conceptual integrity is the final goal, negotiation among peers is the classic recipe for bloated products! The result is design by committee, where none dare say “No” to another’s suggestion...
The fantasy model of collaborative design reflects a monumental unconcern about conceptual integrity. Jill pats the design here; Jim nudges it there; Jack patches it yonder. It is spontaneous; it is collaborative; and it produces poor designs. Indeed, we know the process so well that we have a scornful name for it—committee design. If collaboration tools are designed so they encourage committee design, they will do more harm than good.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Every move an Army soldier makes is preceeded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced to an original order from the president of the United States. The plans are quite thorough and... cascade downward.. until they accumulate enough specificity to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments in time. There's just one drawback: The plans often turn out to be useless.
"The trite expression we always use is: No plan survives contact with the enemy," says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavior sciences division at West Point. "You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that is useless ten minutes into battle."
In the 1980s, the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI). CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan's goal, the desired end-state of an operation. Commander Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels, without requiring play-by-play instructions from ther leaders. When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.
The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at CI by asking two questions:
If we do nothing else during tomorrow's mission, we must:
The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is:
If people don’t trust each other, they will cut down on sharing information and helping each other out. They will gird themselves in contractual overhead and bureaucracy, and build Pearl Harbor files to be able to blame others if the project gets into trouble—and such behavior is often precisely what gets the project into trouble. And as stated earlier, trust is built through effective commitments. Read more at location 1543
There are six critical elements of effective commitments: 1. The person making the commitment does so willingly. 2. The commitment is not made lightly; that is, the work involved, the resources, and the schedule are carefully considered. 3. There is agreement between the parties as to what is to be done, by whom, and when. 4. The commitment is openly and publicly stated. 5. The person responsible tries to meet the commitment, even if help is needed. 6. Prior to the committed date, if something changes that impacts either party relative to the commitment, advance notice is given and a new commitment is negotiated. Read more at location 1547
To be accountable for a commitment, it is important to neither promise nor expect more than can be delivered. In a world of rapidly changing mission priorities, new technologies, competitive challenges, and organizational relationships, total commitment to the full details of a product to be delivered five years later is a very risky bet. Read more at location 1561
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
Transferring (communicating) information up and down organizational levels can severely distort and attenuate it, unheard of in hardware. The attenuation process is a perfectly understandable one. A top-level meeting is held to discuss a new policy. All participants are told to inform their subordinates of what happened. Each does, taking perhaps 12 minutes each and certainly not the original 2 hours. The listeners are asked to inform their subordinates, which they do quickly, the policy appearing to be just one more order from above. And so on. Each "summary" cuts the volume by a factor of 10. Each "pass the word” transfer distorts the original meaning depending on who is talking and who is listening (or not).
Or, going in the opposite direction, a meeting of managers reaches conclusions that need to be interpreted and summarized for the next level supervisor, who interprets the gist of them to those above. This distortion and attenuation effect is not unique to companies. lt also afflicts military chains of command. Needless to say, it breeds a certain mistrust, if not outright cynicism up and down a chain in which a four star general is eight levels away from a second lieutenant and still more from a private on the combat line.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14377">Systems architecting of organizations</a>
People do not realize that their decision agendas are usually unconscious. Thus, the first step of the scenario processs is making it conscious. I view my decisions through very different lenses. We think of '"optimist" and "pessimist" as descriptions of people, but they are actually popular labels for well-known, radically different attitudes about the future...
We remember times in which we based our won decisions, correctly or not, on our convictions that the market would respond favorably, the harvest would be rich, or the mother lode would be found. We also recognize the "Cassandra", for whom the world is always on the brink of disaster, who sees the future as the source of inevitable payments due. There is, finally, the "status quo" mentality - a belief that tomorrow will be more or less the same as today.
It is useful to view the decision I am making from all points of view. What I am really after is compensation - a way for the optimist within myself temporarily to set aside the rose-colored glasses and look carefully at the traps on the path to success. The pessimist within me needs a way to look for unexpected breakthroughs and triumphs that might occur. And the status quo mentality needs to prepare itself to recognize changes when it does occur, and not just assume its insignificance.
The object is to make your stance to the future - which may change from moment to moment, situation to situation - visible to you. Having determined your outlook, deliberately examine the possibilities of other outlooks. The key is to examine the pitfalls and opportunities made visible by each viewpoint.
[w:Peter Schwartz]
<a href="node/12757">The Art of the Long View</a>
Competencies are defined in the kernel and can be thought of as generic containers for specific skills. Specific skills — for example, Java programming — are not part of the kernel because such skills are not essential on all software engineering endeavors. But competency is always required, and it will be up to the individual teams to identify the specific skills needed for their particular software endeavors. A common problem of software endeavors is not being aware of the gap between the competency that is needed and the competency that is available. The kernel approach will raise the visibility of this gap... Example competencies... are as follows.
Stakeholder Representation: This competency encapsulates the ability to gather, communicate, and balance the needs of other stakeholders, and accurately represent their views.
Analysis: This competency encapsulates the ability to understand opportunities and their related stakeholder needs, and to transform them into an agreed upon and consistent set of requirements.
Development: This competency encapsulates the ability to design and program effective software systems following the standards and norms agreed upon by the team.
Testing: This competency encapsulates the ability to test a system, verifying that it is usable and that it meets the requirements.
Leadership: This competency enables a person to inspire and motivate a group of people to achieve a successful conclusion to their work and to meet their objectives.
Management: This competency encapsulates the ability to coordinate, plan, and track the work done by a team.
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman
<a href="/node/14941">The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel</a>
While the boatman may fail in his obligations by refusing you passage or charging you more than the next passenger, the keeper of an information network may also speed up or slow down your transmission, or give right of way to one over another stream of traffic, among other manipulations. The Internet’s nature affords many options, but whatever may be the justification, a vibrant information economy cannot countenance discrimination at a level so basic as transmission on a public network. If the carrier is determined to capture greater profits, the carrier ought to be obliged to do so by expanding his capacity, not by charging similar parties different prices, bestowing on the favored a competitive advantage.
[w:Tim Wu]
<a href="/node/12575">The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empries</a>
Complexity theory rests on straightforward foundations. The first is that complex systems design themselves through evolution or the interaction of myriad autonomous parts. The second principle is that complex systems have emergent properties, which is a technical way of saying the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - the system will behave in ways that cannot be inferred from looking at the pieces. The third principle is that complex systems run on exponentially greater amounts of energy. This energy can take many forms, but the point is that when you increase the system scale by a factor of ten, you increase the energy requirements by a factor of a thousand, and so on. The fourth principle is that complex systems are prone to catastrophic collapse. The third and fourth principles are related. When the system reaches a certain scale, the energy inputs dry up because the exponential relationship between sale and inputs exhausts the available resources. In a nutshell, complex systems arise spontaneously, behave unpredictably, exhaust resources, and collapse catastrophically.
[w:James G. Rickards]
<a href="/node/12744" target="_blank">Currency Wars</a>
Environmental complexity is the almost inevitable end result of many years of IT investment. It is the accumulation of complexity caused by many years of creating, adding, deleting, and updating interconnected and overlapping systems. This is an almost universal phenomenon, but the IT industry's current best practices, tools, and techniques largely do not recognize it. Almost nothing in the industry toolbox deals with the risks and problems it generates..
They have accumulated mountains of systems that serve isolated business needs, known as "stove-pipe" systems. After they were installed, they were maintained, extended, used, and abused until their code base became similar to years of solidified lava flow building up on the sides of a volcano. Just as in a real, active volcano, such a system is pretty impossible to shift, no one really likes standing next to one, and only mad people want to poke their heads inside...
The most disturbing effect of this environmental complexity is a phenomenon known as the ripple effect. This is experienced when a business updates its software or hardware. The business might want a new business function that is offered by the latest software version, or the product the business is using might be going out of support. Although the change might seem simple at first, there rarely is such a thing as a nondisruptive change to any nontrivial environment. As the application middleware, database, or operating system version changes, a small but significant ripple is sent out around the environment. Changing one element might require another part of the IT environment to change, to ensure compatibility. Ultimately, these ripples can hit business applications and result in retesting, application changes, or even the need to reintegrate them with their surroundings.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
It is against this background that management confronts the electronic computer. This instrument offers management its own "technology B”, something which makes the managerial world utterly different. But management has addressed itself to the possibilities in a way which virtually precludes the emergence of a new managerial order. It has tried instead tried to assimilate the computer into managerial technology A - improving, or let us say simply souping-up, the ways of regulating matters with which managers are already familiar.
What could they really be expected to do? This question was answered according to temperament, but many managers suspected two things. Computers might turn out to be incomprehensible to the manager himself, and therefore a substantial personal threat; in any case, the cost might be ruinous. But the good manager is made of sterner stuff than this. In the second stage he very properly came to grips with the nature of the machine, and made a serious effort to understand its basic method of operation. He soon found out that the machine is a moron. Not only did this discovery remove unjustifiable fears, but it took away all sense of wonder, and that was a pity.
Although present-day computers fall very far short of the human brain in many capabilities, they are in just as many ways very much superior to the computers in our skulls. But in this second phase people lost sight of the fact they fell to discussing rather trivial problems about the relation between and consulting office machines and scientific machines in terms, for example, of the input/output requirement. Thus the managerial issues rapidly became political, because people used these trivial arguments to justify different computers in the office and the research laboratory, and a different computer again in the production context. Anything which inflames the appetite for empire building not only becomes a vice, but detracts from the issues which ought to be discussed.
For the manager, this was to be the age of electronic data processing referred to by the slick acronym EDP. Regardless of the purposes to which processed data would be put, all effort was now focused on the argument whether more and better data could be provided faster and more cheaply by installing a computer or by streamlining orthodox clerical procedures. This done (and of course this is a process that still goes on) some managers decided to go ahead and install computers. And that brought us to the third phase, in which most businesses remain. There is a rather widespread use of computers in the role of new lamps for old. Routine office work is done by machines; sometimes staff have been saved, sometimes not. More and better output has been obtained; sometimes people have known how to make use of it, and sometimes not. A variety of benefits has been sought; sometimes money has been saved, but all too often the pay-off has been negligible. Many who introduced computers during phase two became disappointed in phase three while many who did not came to feel that they were well out of it.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
The primitive act in all conceptual schemes for choosing sets is the simple, finite act of enumeration - we "set" them down as it were. We may do this by actually producing all the members of the set for inspection, as a chess set or a set of teeth. Usually, however, we specify a set of names, which is taken to represent some set of "things". We rarely enumerate the collections for any which forms the conceptual basis for our thinking. Enumeration, which forms the conceptual basis for the other operations, has perils of its own, but these are as naught compared with the possibilities for mischief in derived methods.
Perhaps the nastiest of these methods is the representation of a set by a typical member. This method rests on the assumption that the set can be typified, an idea that goes back at least to Plato. Platonists argued that the ideal type is a better representation of the set than any enumeration could be, since the actual members of a set could at best be faulty realizations of the ideal type. The ideal type, however, is strictly an observer's mental construction, which may be a useful way to summarize a mass of data.. but as taxonomists have discovered, it may simply be the path to a decomposition fallacy.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Trying to build configurability into either the software tool or an application to compensate for individual variation can complicate the software beyond the acceptable range for large numbers of people. Although an unacceptable degree of complexity isn't necessarily an artifact of configurability, the two often go hand in hand because configurability is hard to provide and attempts to provide it often fail. There is a natural tension between easy of use on the one hand and ease of changing use on the other.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
[w:John Muir]
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
[w:John Muir]
Nature... doth not that by many things, which may be done by few.
[w:Galileo Galilei]
Mulally understood that Ford’s global operations were too complex to be run centrally out of Dearborn, but he also appreciated the tremendous cost savings and efficiencies that could be gained by eliminating duplicate efforts around the world and creating real economies of scale.* During one of his first press conferences, Mulally was asked if Ford was considering a merger. “Yes,” he said. “We’re going to merge with ourselves.”
As an aeronautical engineer, streamlining was as dear to Mulally as pork to a politician. He had spent his entire professional life figuring out how to reduce drag and improve aerodynamics. Now he began applying these same principles to Ford’s product portfolio. He asked for a chart showing every car and truck the company made around the world. To his dismay, none existed. So Mulally went to the websites of each of Ford’s divisions and printed out pictures of all of their offerings. Then he asked his secretary for scissors and glue. When she brought them, she found Mulally sitting at his conference table with printouts spread all over it. He took the scissors and started cutting out pictures of each vehicle made by Ford and its subsidiaries. Then he divided them by region and started pasting them together on pages like a kid working on a school project. When he was finished, Mulally counted them all. Ford and its subsidiaries were making and selling ninety-seven different nameplates around the world.
Way too many, Mulally thought as he studied his handmade charts. He picked up the scissors and started cutting again.Mulally would later share his charts with Ford’s board of directors. Before their December meeting, he commandeered a conference room and mounted blowups of them on the wall. When the directors had gathered at World Headquarters, he ushered them into the room. Mulally stood there silently as they studied his handiwork. As he expected, they were as overwhelmed as he was by the dizzying array of cars and trucks. Mulally had no trouble convincing them that Ford needed to radically simplify its global lineup.
Bryce G. Hoffman
<a href="/node/15126">American Icon</a>
The problem with the financial products division was not that its regulators were absent or impotent. Its head, one Joseph Cassano, was heard during the crisis to complain stridently about over-regulation of his domain. The problem was that the regulators, like most regulators, lacked relevant information. They were experts on the politics of the situation, but had no real command of the intricacies of the businesses within their purviews or any stake in their operations. They were not perhaps as ignorant about the implications of credit default swaps as regulator-in-chief Ben Bernanke was about the imperial reach of the federal regulatory state. But it was a formidable gap all the same.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Whereas in England all is permitted that is not expressly prohibited, it has been said that in Germany all is prohibited unless expressly permitted and in France all is permitted that is expressly prohibited. In the European Common Market no one knows what is permitted and it all costs more.
<p>[w:Robert Megarry]
The company that owns the control point sets the pace. Its business plan defines the future. The others react, always a step behind.
“One: There are no pre-existing control points. They’re conditional depending on the circumstances.” “Interesting. What kind of circumstances?” “Relative value added, or rather the trajectory of relative value added.” “Example?” “Microsoft and Intel versus the PC makers. Or Wal-Mart versus its suppliers.” “What other circumstances?” “Creation of scarcity. Or seeing the bottleneck and capturing it.” “Any others?” Steve thought for only a moment. “Connection to the customer.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning a better connection than the other value chain players have.” Steve was feeling almost cocky. “How then does the profit happen?” Again, Steve’s pause for thought was very brief. “Predictability,” he quickly answered. “Predictability?” Zhao queried. “Yes.
Mike Cowell
<a href="/node/14787">The Art of Profitability</a>
A process can be improved if it can be understood; it can be understood only if it has a consistent structure [Senge 1990]; and its structure can be consistent only after the first steps of process improvement have reduced process variability... Many processes exhibited such broad variation in behavior that it was difficult for process specifiers to agree on a process that represented the typical scenario. Many organizations informally built process specifications from anecdotal process experience instead of developing the baseline process model with empirical models and data. Many organizations... created an ideal specification instead of capturing empirical practices, and organizations used these specifications as a baseline for improvement despite the mismatch. Because many process specification models were divorced from empirical practice, they could not reliably drive real development practice.
[w:Jim Coplien]
<a href="/node/12577">Organizational Patterns for Development</a>
The way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another - on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another's concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction - who had to share (or 'submit') particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.
In the face of the unknown - the always nagging uncertainty about whether, under complex circumstances, things will really be okay - the builders trusted in the power of communication. They didn't believe in the wisdom of the single individual, of even an experienced engineer. They believed in the wisdom of the group, the wisdom of making sure that multiple pairs of eyes were on a problem and then letting the watchers decide what to do. Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
Practicing a discipline is different from emulating a model. All too often, new management innovations are described in terms of the "best practices" of so-called leading firms. I believe benchmarking best practices can open people's eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, "they always say 'Oh yes, you have a Kan-ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also'. They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together." I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate one another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another 'great person'.
[w:Peter Senge]
<a href="/node/14499">The Fifth Discipline</a>
The secret to Toyota's success is not a set of techniques but is philosophy - the mindset of TQM and continuous improvement it has embraced - and the company's relationship with workers that has enabled it to tap their deep knowledge. As a wise executive ... said about imitating others, "We have been benchmarking the wrong things. Instead of copying what others do, we ought to copy how they think."
[w:Jeffrey Pfeffer] and [w:Robert Sutton]
<a href="/node/2000" target="_blank">Hard Facts</a>
I seek descriptions that will be useful in general, whether we apply them to managers or neurons. And if the description is reasonable so far, we shall be able to invoke quite control systems theory by describing the threshold as a transfer function. There is a set of inputs which, to some criterion, is transformed into an output - 0 or 1. Because... organizations cannot hope to command events in detail from on high, it is best to consider the transfer function as providing a modest degree of algedonic applause when in the normal state. lf there twenty algedonic input channels, perhaps fifteen of them are at 1 while things are running normally. The five at 0 represent the extent to which the algedonic feedback system as a whole is poised to administer rebuke. If events begin to go out of control in the lower level system, all twenty algedonic channels may turn to 0, but, if things go especially well, some of the original 0's may change to 1's
Suppose, however, that the transfer function itself turns out to be wrong - wrong that is in terms of an environment within which the neuron or manager is ineffectual. This judgment would be made by the metasystem; of course. Then (we would say) the transfer functions bust change its sign, drastic advice because we cannot afford to have transfer functions flip-flopping their outputs from 0 to and back again in a trigger-happy fashion just because the environment is a little unstable. It would be better to change the threshold slowly, so that the decision element tends to change in response… there is feedback which adjusts the transfer function itself. Note that some environmental conditions may demand more sensitive neurons or managers, and other conditions less sensitive ones.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
All adjustment processes have their costs, in energy of nonliving or living systems, in material resources, in information (including in social systems a special form of information often conveyed on a marker of metal or paper money), or in time required for an action. Any of these may be scarce. (Time is a scarcity for mortal living systems.) Any of these is valued if it is essential for reducing strains. The costs of adjustment processes differ from one to another and from time to time. They may be immediate or delayed, short-term or long-term.
How successfully systems accomplish their purposes can be determined if those purposes are known. A system's efficiency, then, can be determined as the ratio of the success of its performance to the costs involved. A system constantly makes economic decisions directed toward increasing its efficiency by improving performance and decreasing costs. Economic analyses of cost effectiveness are equally important in biological and social science but much more common and more sophisticated in social than in biological sciences. In social systems such analyses are frequently aided by program budgeting. This involves keeping accounts separately for each subsystem or component that carries out a distinct program. The matter-energy, information, money, and time costs of the program in such analyses are compared with various measures of the efficiency of performance of the program. How efficiently a system adjusts to its environment is determined by what strategies it employs in selecting adjustment processes and whether they satisfactorily reduce strains without being too costly. This decision process can be analyzed by a mathematical approach to economic decisions, or game theory. This is a general theory concerning the best strategies for weighing "plays" against "payoffs," for selecting actions which will increase profits while decreasing losses, increase rewards while decreasing punishments, improve adjustments of variables to appropriate steady-state values, or attain goals while diminishing costs. Relevant information available to the decider can improve such decisions. Consequently such information is valuable. But there are costs to obtaining such information. A mathematical theory on how to calculate the value of relevant information in such decisions was developed by Hurley. This depends on such considerations as whether it is tactical (about a specific act) or strategic (about a policy for action), whether it is reliable or unreliable, overtly or secretly obtained, accurate, distorted, or erroneous.
James Grier Miller
Living systems
When people casually speak of "the" cost of producing something, they usually mean the average cost-that is, the total cost of running the enterprise divided by the number of units of output it produces. But for actual decision-making purposes at any given time, the incremental cost is more crucial. The total cost of running an airline obviously includes the cost of airplanes, but in deciding whether or not to make a particular flight, what matters at that point is whether the incremental cost of that flight will be covered by its incremental value to the passengers, as revealed by what they are willing to pay for it....
An airplane idle on the ground during a particular time has a very low cost in the economic sense of cost as a foregone alternative. If a plane that would otherwise remain in a hangar overnight is instead brought out at midnight to fly a party of vacationers to a nearby resort, the cost of this short flight that does not interfere with its other schedule of flights is much less than the "average" cost of an airplane flight. In this case, the incremental cost of the flight is little more than the cost of fuel and a flight crew, since the plane itself is there for another purpose anyway.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Most executives have an almost irresistible desire to reduce the time and money invested in programming. They see, incorrectly, the obsolete advantage in reducing costs. What they don't see is that reduction in investment in programming has strong negative effects on a product's long-term quality, desirability, and therefore profitability. Of course, simply spending more money doesn't guarantee improvement, and it can often make things worse when additional money is unaccompanied by wisdom, analysis, and guidance.
My first mentor, Dan Joaquin, used to say that the old maxim "You get what you pay for" should properly be inverted to "You don't get what you don't pay for." Proceeding without proper planning risks spending way too much. The trick is to spend the correct amount, and that demands significant expertise in software construction management. It also demands process tools that provide managers with the insight and information they need to make the correct decisions.
The only available economic upside comes from making your product or service more desirable by improving its quality, and you can't do that by reducing the money you spend designing or programming it. In fact, you need to invest more time and money on the research, thinking, planning, and designing phase to make your results better suited to your customers' needs.
Alan Cooper
<a href="/node/12698">The Inmates really are running the Asylum</a>
Social dynamics are fraught with counter-intuitive behavior. They stand on a level of complexity beyond the reach of the analytical approach. Counter-intuitiveness means that actions intended to produce a desired outcome may in fact, generate opposite results. It has been said that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Things can get worse before getting better, or vice versa. One can win or lose for the wrong reason. Making drugs illegal, while costing the nation a fortune, was meant to curb abuse and save the society from its ills. Counter-intuitively it has produced a multi-billion-dollar crime industry, higher consumption, and an overburdened criminal justice system.
To appreciate the nature of counter-intuitiveness, one needs to understand the practical consequences of the following assertions:
Cause and effect may be separated in time and space. An event happening at a given time and place may have a delayed effect, producing an impact at a different time and a different place.
Cause and effect can replace one another, displaying circular relations.
An event may have multiple effects. The order of importance may shift in time.
A set of variables that initially played a key role in producing an effect may be replaced by a different set of variables at a different time.
Removing the initial cause will not necessarily remove the effect.
Jamshid Gharajedaghi
<a href="/node/2038" target="_parent">Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity</a>
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things.
[w:Machiavelli]
The idea that businesses buy knowledge like any other factor of production until its cost exceeds its yield, that businesses can safely and systematically assemble facts until the ground ahead stretches firmly before them, misses the radical difference between knowledge and everything else. It is the leap, not the look, that generates the crucial information; the leap through time and space, beyond the swarm of observable fact that opens up the vista of discovery. Galileo broached the modern age of science not by observing thousands of factual trajectories and deriving from them the law of gravity; rather “I conceived as the work of my own mind a moving object launched above a horizontal plane and freed of all impediment.” Freed, that is, of the facts; freed, by a leap of imagination, of the conditions of all real moving bodies as they are buffeted through the resisting air. Imagination precedes knowledge. Creative thought is not an inductive process in which a scientist accumulates evidence in a neutral and “objective” way until a theory becomes visible in it. Rather the theory comes first and determines what evidence can be seen.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
A common mistake many development managers make is to hire only developers, or to hire developers in numbers disproportionate to the rest of the team. The view seems to be that with more developers you can get more development done. If the objective is to finish the software project, this view is mistaken. Developers have a difficult time performing the functions of other members of the team. Skills are particular and grow as people apply them. Feet clap poorly, and hair curls better than noses.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
In the end, management doesn't change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.
[w:Lou Gerstner]
Software is different; it has no core. It is onionlike, a thing of layers, each built painstakingly and precariously on the previous one, each counting on the one below not to move or change too much. Software builders like to talk about laying bricks; skeptics see a house of cards. Either way, there's a steady accumulation going on. New layers pile on old. Programmers call these accretions "layers of abstraction," because each time a new one is added, something complex and specific is being translated into something simpler and more general... "This is what programmers do," wrote Eric Sink, a programmer who led the creation of the Web browser that became Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "We build piles of abstractions. We design our own abstractions and then pile them up on top of layers we got from somebody else." And every year the piles grow higher...
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
A mess is a system of problems. It is the future implicit in the present behavior of the system, the consequence of the system's current state of affairs. The essence of the mess is the systematic nature of the situation, not an aggregate representation of the sum of the parts. The elements of a mess are highly interrelated. No part can be touched without touching the other parts. As such, it is an emergent phenomenon produced by the interactions among the parts. Formulation of the mess requires understanding the essential behavioral characteristic of social phenomena.
A mess is not defined in terms of (1) deviations from a norm, (2) lack of resources (time, money, and information), or (3) an improper application of a known solution. A mess is neither an aberration nor a prediction, but the following:
The natural consequence of the existing order, based on a false assumption that nothing will change.
The product of success rather than failure, the consequence of a belief based on the fallacy that if X is good, more X is even better.
An early warning system reminding the actors that if things can go wrong they probably will.
An exaggeration intended to highlight the critical issues that may become the seed of a system's destruction in the future.
Messes are very resilient; they have a way of regenerating themselves. It is powerlessness and impotency in dealing with the mess which leads to the inevitable denial on which messes thrive.
Jamshid Gharajedaghi
<a href="/node/2038" target="_parent">Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity</a>
As the economy we have created becomes ever more complex, both the engineering that underpins it and the finance that connects it all together will tend to become more complex, too. Deepwater Horizon was pushing the limits of deep sea engineering; Three Mile Island came at a time of constant innovation in nuclear technology; the burgeoning market in credit derivatives also tested the boundaries of what was possible in finance. The usual response to complexity, that of trial and error, is not enough when faced with systems which are not only complex, but also tightly coupled. The costs of error are simply too high. The instinctive answer is to eliminate the errors. This is an impossible dream. The alternative is to try to simplify and to decouple these high-risk systems as much as is feasible.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
To anticipate likely sources of misalignment in any company, it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts:
Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity?
Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis?
Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?
A typical startup allocates ownership among founders, employees, and investors. The managers and employees who operate the company enjoy possession. And a board of directors, usually comprising founders and investors, exercises control. The CEO of a huge company like General Motors, for example, will own some of the company’s stock, but only a trivial portion of the total. Therefore he’s incentivized to reward himself through the power of possession rather than the value of ownership. Posting good quarterly results will be enough for him to keep his high salary and corporate jet. Misalignment can creep in even if he receives stock compensation in the name of “shareholder value.” If that stock comes as a reward for short-term performance, he will find it more lucrative and much easier to cut costs instead of investing in a plan that might create more value for all shareholders far in the future.
If a CEO collects $300,000 per year, he risks becoming more like a politician than a founder. High pay incentivizes him to defend the status quo along with his salary, not to work with everyone else to surface problems and fix them aggressively.
[w:Peter Theil]
<a href="/node/15320">Zero to One</a>
The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
[w:Albert Einstein]
Today's IT systems are so complex that they simply defy everyday comprehension, spilling out of our minds as we try to get our heads around them. Responsibility for maintaining them is split among a variety of skilled groups and myriad products and programs that coexist to support the functions of the enterprise. To deal with this Hydra, we draw high-level architecture diagrams that comfort us by making things look simple. These diagrams are an illusion, a trick, a facade. They are, at best, approximations for easy consumption and high-level communication. At worst, they instill false optimism about our ability to make changes to that complexity. Such "fluffy cloud" diagrams cannot hide genuine complexity forever.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
It is hard to get a man to understand something if his living depends upon him not understanding it.
[w:Upton Sinclair]
Every business is successful until it's not. What's disconcerting, though is how often top management is surprised when "not" happens. This astonishment, this belated recognition of dramatically changed circumstances, virtually guarantees that the work of renewal will be significantly, if not dangerously, delayed.
Denial follows a familiar pattern. Disquieting developments are a first dismissed as implausible or inconsequential, then rationalized as aberrant or irremediable, then grudgingly mitigated through defensive action, and then finally, though not always honestly, confronted.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
Design competitions in organizations are... inherently political. The various competing forces usually do not even share the objective of getting the organization that works best. How well the organization will work is subordinated to those who will have which levers of power...
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
There are two distinct interpretations of engineering design. The problem-solving approach, popular in many tertiary institutions and with an emphasis on solving structured, well defined problems using standardized techniques, may be traced to “hard” systems thinking. The creative design approach, on the other hand, combines analytical and systems thinking with human factors in engineering design to create and take advantage of opportunities to serve society...
Professional practice is a process of problem solving. Problems ... are solved through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen. In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. ... a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense. ... It is this sort of situation that professionals are coming increasingly to see as central to their practice.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
First, great designs have conceptual integrity - unity, economy, clarity. They not only work, they delight, as Vitruvius first articulated. We use terms such as elegant, clean, beautiful to talk about bridges, sonatas, circuits, bicycles, computers, and iPhones. Recognizing the Design Concept as an entity helps us to seek its integrity in our own solo designs, to work together for it in team designs, and to teach it to our youth. Second, talking frequently about the Design Concept as such vastly aids communication within a design team. Unity of concept is the goal; it is achieved only by much conversation. The conversation is much more direct if the Design Concept per se, rather than derivative representations or partial details, is the focus.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Consider a simple example of a design problem, the choice of the materials to be used in the mass production of any simple household object like a vacuum cleaner. Time and motion studies show that the fewer different kinds of materials there are, the more efficient factory assembly is - and therefore demand a certain simplicity in the variety of materials used. This need for simplicity conflicts with the fact that the form will function better if we choose the best material for each separate purpose separately.
But then; on the other hand, functional diversity of materials makes for expensive and complicated joints between components, which is liable to make maintenance less easy. Further still, all three issues, simplicity, performance, and jointing, are at odds with our desire to minimize the cost of the materials. For if we choose the cheapest material for each separate task, we shall not necessarily have simplicity, nor optimum performance, nor materials which can be cleanly jointed.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
The design process is not well understood either psychologically or practically. This is not for lack of study. Many designers have reflected on their own processes. One motivation for study is the wide gaps, in every design discipline, between best practice and average practice, and between average practice and semi-competent practice. Much of design cost, often as much as a third, is rework, the correction of mistakes. Mediocre design provably wastes the world’s resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness...
The boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
The rationalist believes that man is inherently sound (and good), subject to mistakes, and perfectible by education. After right education, maturing experience, and sufficient careful-enough thought, a designer can make a flawless design. The design methodology task, therefore, is to learn how to reason a design into flawlessness.
The empiricist believes that man is inherently flawed, and subject repeatedly to temptation and error. Anything he makes will be flawed. The design methodology task, therefore, is to learn how to determine the flaws by experiment, so that one can iterate on the design. Empiricists believe that humans will inevitably make mistakes: in defining objectives, in software architecture, in implementation in objects (algorithms and data structures), and in realization in code itself. This firm faith in fallibility prescribes a design methodology that includes... early prototypes, early user testing, iterative incremental implementation, testing on a rich bank of test cases, and regression testing after changes.
Even that assurance is not 100 percent, of course. Over the history of mathematics, many proofs, once accepted, have later been found fallacious.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Margaret Thatcher: “One wants documents [as opposed to view-graph foils] so one can think through beforehand, and consult colleagues”. American business all too often does reviews via PowerPoint presentations. Those vague bullets enable each participant to interpret the information as he pleases; they also facilitate the suppression of embarrassing but crucial details.
Lou Gerstner, turnaround CEO of IBM, startled the whole culture early on ([2002], Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, “Nick was on his second foil when I stepped to the table and as politely as I could in front of his team, switched off the projector... it had a terribly powerful ripple effect... Talk about consternation. It was as if the President of the United States had banned the use of English at White House meetings.”
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
I have reconsidered some most cherished beliefs in the practice of design and found many of the principles wanting. We know surprisingly little about how to do design. There is no science of the practice in the same sense that there is a science to the structural analysis of buildings and bridges, or to the building of circuits. Design is still an art, taught by apprenticeship, with many myths and strong beliefs, but incredibly little evidence. We do not know the best way to design something. The real problem is that we believe we do. Beliefs are based more on faith than on data.
This is a problem that confronts all professional disciplines: law, art, music, business, medicine, and design. Each of these disciplines often has some scientific field behind it (e.g., art and music has perceptual psychology, interaction design has well-established psychological roots, many parts of business have a basis in decision theory, economics, and finance, and medicine has biology and chemistry. But even in the fields with a substantive scientific basis, the practical applications to the daily practice are very limited. Thus, although biology is important as a foundation for medicine, it gives no guidance to patient-doctor interaction, to the taking of patient histories, or to diagnosis, nothing to say about patient empathy or best hospital practices. In business, finance and economics provide a rationale for some kinds of investment decisions, but where do best management principles come from? In law, what science underlies jury selection or presentations? Music has lots of theory, but very little is directly relevant to music performance. In the end, practical disciplines are all taught by apprenticeship, internships, residencies, and long periods of training.
In science, there are clear links among hypotheses, conclusions, and evidence. But in the practices of most professions, the links are tenuous at best. Instead, there is much reliance upon "best practice," where "best" is often defined by short-term measurements, usually of variables that are easy to measure as opposed to those that are of most significance. Long-term measures are seldom taken. Methods are seldom compared... Scientists usually operate in what has been called "white room" conditions, carefully forming abstract characterizations of the phenomena under consideration and studying them in a controlled research environment or the clean precision of the laboratory. Similarly, the theories are of necessity simplified and abstracted to a pristine form of mathematical or simulation models. Science works best when all the variables are understood and controlled. The real world is complex and messy, with uncontrolled variables, sometimes behaving in ways that contradict the neat, tidy, logical assumptions of the scientist. No wonder there is a gap.
The lack of scientific studies of practice is due to two things: First, practitioners are not trained in scientific research. They do not understand the need for experimental controls nor do they understand statistical variability and experimental biases. Moreover, they don't wish to: they want to get on with their work. Second, even when researchers well versed in experimental methods attempt to study practices, they discover that the very nature of a practical discipline throws in so many idiosyncratic variables that rigor is simply not possible.
<p>[w:Don Norman]
The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Those with a passion for law or sausage should watch neither being made
<p>[w:Mark Twain]</p>
In the worst case, the business environment into which a system is intended to fit can change during the lifetime of the project or program. The nature of big projects and the time it takes to deliver them could mean that the original problem changes or even disappears if the business changes direction during the solving process.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is.
Gordon Glegg
The Design of Design
As we move more toward such a digital world, an entire sector of the population will be or feel disenfranchisement. When a fifty year old steelworker loses his job, unlike his twenty five year old son, he may have no digital resilience at all. When a modern day secretary loses his job, at least he may be conversant with the digital world and have transferable skills. Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.
[w:Nicholas Negroponte]
<a href="/node/15505">Being digital</a>
Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
E. O. Wilson
The Social Conquest of Earth
Who is in the best decision to make timely, quality decisions. While the fiduciary usually lies with the Project and Portfolio Management discipline, too often this swim-lane attempts to acquire all information rather than delegate to authorities that can more efficiently and effectively interpret results. Moreover, all investment gates and toll gates are not created equal, with themes shifting from the problem domain to the solution domain and then to operations over time. This implies that different stakeholder groups should be the primary facilitators for adjudication of investment health over time. Ultimately it is for the customer, sponsor or investor to decide if their investment is healthy, but different specialized skill-sets can distill the differing perspectives of project activity.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Thinking Machines, a great and imaginative supercomputer company started by electrical engineering genius Danny Hillis, disappeared after ten years. In that short space of time, it introduced the world to massively parallel computer architectures. Its demise did not occur because of mismanagement or sloppy engineering of their so-called Connection Machine. It vanished because parallelism could be decentralized; the very same kind of massively parallel architectures have suddenly become possible by threading together low-cost, mass-produced personal computers.
While this was good news for Thinking Machines, it is an important message to all of us, both literally and metaphorically. It means the enterprise of the future can meet its computer needs in a new and scalable way by populating its organization with personal computers that, when needed, can work in unison to crunch o computationally intensive problems. Computers will literally work both individuals and for groups. I see the same decentralized mind-set growing in our society, driven by the young citizenry in the digital world. The traditional centralist view of life will become a thing of the past.
[w:Nicholas Negroponte]
<a href="/node/15505">Being digital</a>
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
[w:P. J. O'Rourke]
The tendency to proceed directly to the "solution" of "problems" from some given viewpoint or given set of values overlooks the crucial point that the diversity of viewpoints and values means that costs of concurrence and the amount of concurrence made necessary by different policies can vary enormously. The net difference between policy x and policy y may be far less than the cost of choosing, or one policy may require far more consensus than the other.
To those who feel that their values are the values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of any specific set of values-other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
It took not eighteen months but five years, beginning in 1915, for automobile production to double, and another five years to double again. But the story line is the same: the invention of the automobile and its falling price expanded the market for cars despite the absence of paved roads, gasoline stations, or maintenance garages. In studying this process, economists usually stress the elasticity of demand (how much more of the product is purchased when the price drops). But incomparably more important is the elasticity of supply. This is determined by the entrepreneur’s ingenuity, the availability of key resources, and the physical possibilities of the materials and systems
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
An embedded system such as embedded software on satellites is a system which performs dedicated function integral with hardware. Embedded systems are price and size sensitive, have power limitations, are frequently real-time, involve custom hardware, have limitations in tools, robustness and safety requirements, and are long lived and in service for decades.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
No system or organization can long survive without a viable purpose. The test of a good architecture is that it will last as an enduring pattern. The purpose of an organization and each of its organizational levels is to create capabilities and values in addition to those of their separate elements. Value is in the eyes of the beholder.
Three emergent capabilities will be presented in some detail: quality, knowledge, and core competency. They are of particular interest to excellent organizations because each interacting with the others, determines in large part what such organizations can or cannot do.
Value judgments and technical decisions in subordinate elements are made based on their effect on the properties and functions of the system as a whole. This is not to say that the elements are not important. Indeed, they "enable" the system to exist at all. But they cannot, of themselves, individually produce an emergent system behavior.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14377">Systems architecting of organizations</a>
The juxtaposition of vision (what we want) and a clear picture of the current reality (where we are relative to what we want) generates what we call 'creative tension': a force to bring them together, caused by by the natural tendency of tension to seek resolution. The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate and sustain creative tension in our lives.
[w:Peter Senge]
Engineering differs from other professions in that doctors, dentists, public accountants, and lawyers generally provide their services to specific individuals or, in some cases, to specific corporations. Engineers tend to design things rather than provide services to individuals. Their responsibility is more often to society than to specific people.
[w:Steve McConnell]
<a href="/node/2136" target="_blank">Professional Software Development</a>
If an engineer loses The Knack, the results can be devastating.
Baby Dilbert's doctor
<a href="
target="_blank">The Knack</a>
Reliance on Epics, which are notoriously ambiguous and high level, assumes that identification of as-is to to-be transformation strategy can emerge over time without up-front investment justification and any up-front reasoning about cost-benefit analysis. Such over-simplification assumes that stakeholder concurrence of investment themes as sunk costs has already occurred, that essential complexity can be addressed through emergent Product Backlog grooming activities, and real-time conversation can result in the knowledge required to refactor large scale legacy assets or reason out the BPR within COTS Acquisition constrained developments.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
...models help us reason about the world around us and explore why things work the way they do. It is astounding that for all the talk of learning that models somehow are left at the door. While they are only models and are "wrong" in terms of only being approximations of the actual entity, they are useful for such purposes as establishing context for a concept in which we seek understanding allowing us to group like concepts so as to perform apple-to-apple comparisons and enabling cross-disciplinary insights and knowledge transfer Researchers call these issues Epistemological Contextualism, in which knowing must require the context of the concept, Etymology and Taxonomy, which are the origins of terms and their classification, and Interdisciplinarity, which is combining two or more academic disciplines into one activity. It is my perspective each is necessary to forge new ground and enhance the state of pragmatic expertise, with the latter being the most overlooked as in achieving knowledge breakthroughs.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
For a range of products involving complex, interdependent components or materials that will be subject to varied or prolonged stress in
extreme environments, the outcome of the interaction of these parts cannot be precisely predicted
Nathan Rosenberg
<a href="http://dimetic.dime-eu.org/dimetic_files/cowan1990.pdf">Nuclear Power Reactors: A Study in Technological Lock-in</a>
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
[w:Mark Twain]
Estimation and planning are related topics, but estimation is not planning, and planning is not estimation. Estimation should be treated as an unbiased, analytical process; planning should be treated as a biased, goal-seeking process. With estimation, it's hazardous to want the estimate to come out to any particular answer. The goal is accuracy; the goal is not to seek a particular result. But the goal of planning is to seek a particular result. We deliberately (and appropriately) bias our plans to achieve specific outdcomes. We plan specific means to reach a specific end.
[w:Steve McConnell] in Software Estimation
Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.
Henry Ford
Software development projects should not be a sunk cost if we are exercising our fiduciary duty and performing effective governance. Exercising our real options requires exercising them before all the cash is burned or it is too late. Attempting to have perfect knowledge for a decision or set of decisions runs into diminishing returns, and perfected decision is of no value if too late.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Whitty began with the statement that project management has, by and large, failed to live up to the expectations of stakeholders. This statement should be shocking but isn’t because it is well documented by studies such as the Standish Report (2009). To quote Whitty, this widespread failure suggests that academics and practising project managers “. . . still do not really understand the nature of projects, and that too much research effort has been directed towards clarifying the reasons for project success and failure, while downplaying research on why projects exist and behave as they do…” He believes that the current paradigm of project management cannot help us understand the true nature of projects. Instead, a more critical approach, which considers projects to be a “. . . human construct, about a collection of feelings, expectations and sensations, cleverly conjured up by the human brain…” might be a more fruitful way of looking at projects.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
In The Dance of Change, we discover that companies often fail at organized efforts of self-improvement. By one study, 70 percent of “reengineering” campaigns flounder. Another study estimated that two-thirds of “total quality management” programs do likewise. These failures implicate the capacity of middle managers. Are they guiding change or simply being swept along? “Our core premise,” write the authors, “is that the source of these problems cannot be remedied by more expert advice, better consultants or more committed managers.” What then follows is 573 pages of musings from experts, consultants, and managers.
[w:Robert J. Samuelson]
<a href="/node/12699">Untruth : Why the Conventional Wisdom is (Almost Always) Wrong</a>
The cost of producing any good or service declines by between 20 percent and 30 percent with every doubling of units sold. Growing apace with output and sales is entrepreneurial knowledge, which springs from improvements in every facet of the company; every manufacturing process; every detail of design, marketing, and management. Crucially, the curve extends to customers, who learn how to use the product and multiply applications for it as it drops in price.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Numerous technical challenges were associated with this project, but the most critical was the need to engineer a product and a life-cycle operational concept that would produce satisfactory outcomes for a variety of stakeholders whose value propositions were often in conflict. Read more at location 1227
In such situations, many organizations focus on making quick requirements decisions and rapidly proceeding into development or outsourcing. However, Hospira’s understanding of the uncertainties and risks prompted the company to pursue a risk-driven, incremental-commitment course of buying information to reduce risk.Read more at location 1234
In the Exploration phase, the project carried out numerous stakeholder needs, technical opportunities, and business competition analyses, and determined ranges of preferred Stakeholder needs analyses included contextual inquiry via shadowing of nurses using IV pumps and follow-up interviews, along with creating task flow diagrams, use environment analyses, and user profiles analyses. Technical opportunity analyses included initial conceptual designs of multichannel pump configurations, evaluation of commercially available single-color and multicolor display devices and touchscreen capabilities, and software approaches for specifying multichannel delivery options and synchronizing concurrent processes. Read more at location 1243
The Valuation phase focused on the major risks highlighted in the Valuation Commitment Review. These included the multichannel pump options, the types of programmable therapies, the need for tailorable medication libraries, the display screen and user interface options, and the safety considerations. The Valuation phase also elaborated the product concept plan for the most attractive general set of options, including a development plan and operations plan, along with an associated cost analysis, risk analysis, and business case for review at the Foundations Commitment Review. Read more at location 1258
During the Foundations phase, considerable effort was directed toward addressing the identified risks, such as the need for prototyping of the full range of GUI usage by the full range of targeted users, including doctors and home caregivers and patients; for interoperability of the Symbiq software with the wide variety of available hospital information systems; and for fully detailed FMEAs and other safety analyses. Comparable added effort went into detailed planning for development, production, operations, and support, providing more accurate inputs for business case analyses. Read more at location 1290
GUI prototyping was geared toward meeting a set of usability objectives, such as the following: Ninety percent of experienced nurses will be able to insert the cassette the first time while receiving minimal training. Ninety-nine percent will be able to correct any insertion errors. Ninety percent of first-time users with no training would be able to power the pump off when directed. Eighty percent of caregiver/patient users would rate the overall ease of use of the IV pump as 3 or higher on a 5-point scale of satisfaction, with 5 being the highest value. Read more at location 1295
Usability testing was also conducted on one of the sets of abbreviated instructions called TIPS cards. These cards serve as reminders for how to complete the most critical tasks. Numerous suggestions for improvement in the TIPS cards, as well as the user interface, came from this work, including how to reset the “air-in-line” alarm and how to address the alarm and check all on-screen help text for accuracy. Read more at location 1325
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
Mulally explained how, at Boeing, his entire leadership team was expected to participate in a lightning-fast analysis of the entire business every Thursday morning. Each of his direct reports delivered a brief update on the status of his or her division or function, highlighting anything that had changed since the previous week’s meeting. It was the centerpiece of his management philosophy, and he would use it in Dearborn if he came there, too. “This is going to be a culture shock,” Ford cautioned.1
Then he listed what he would later call his “Four P’s”: “performance,” “product,” “process,” and “people.” Beneath that, Mulally wrote, “Leadership counts.”2
As they talked, Mulally wrote two phrases on his notepad: “compelling vision” and “ruthless execution.”3
Mulally responded by outlining his system of weekly meetings for them, just as he had for Ford. He told them this approach enforced extreme accountability on a weekly basis and left no hiding place for anyone who was not entirely committed to executing his part of the business plan. “It’s likely that a lot of people at Ford aren’t used to that, and they will self-select out,” Mulally said. “I won’t have to do it.”4
Bryce G. Hoffman
<a href="/node/15126">American Icon</a>
Taylor’s Logarithms, the standard quarto printed in London in 1792, contained (it eventually transpired) nineteen errors of either one or two digits. These were itemized in the Nautical Almanac, for, as the Admiralty knew well, every error was a potential shipwreck. Unfortunately, one of the nineteen corrections proved erroneous, so the next year’s Nautical Almanac printed an “erratum of the errata.” This in turn introduced yet another error. “Confusion is worse confounded,” declared The Edinburgh Review. The next almanac would have to put forth an “Erratum of the Erratum of the Errata in Taylor’s Logarithms.”
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
[w:Henry Ford]
The features could be categorized into five types: strategic, competitive, customer satisfaction, investment, and what they termed paradigmatic features. Strategic features were centered around fundamental and constraining choices. Competitive features responded to or perhaps even trumped a feature that their competition had and they didn't. Customer satisfaction features were features they heard about all the time that their customers wanted. Investment features were those things they decided to do to their technology even though the benefits wouldn't show up in the next release. What they meant by "paradigmatic" was that the successive implementation of features in this category over a period of multiple releases would eventually change the way people work.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
Much of the art of system dynamics modeling is discovering and representing the feedback processes, which, along with stock and flow structures, time delays, and nonlinearities, determine the dynamics of a system. You might imagine that there is an immense range of different feedback processes and other structures to be mastered before one can understand the dynamics of complex systems. In fact, the most complex behaviors usually arise from the interactions (feedbacks) among the components of the system, not from the complexity of the components themselves. All dynamics arise from the interaction of just two types of feedback loops, positive (or self-reinforcing) and negative (or self-correcting) loops. Positive loops tend to reinforce or ampllify whatever is happening in the system. Negative loops counteract and oppose change.
In common parlance the term "feedback' has come to serve as a euphemism for criticizing others, as in "the boss gave me feedback on my presentation." This use of feedback is not what we mean in system dynamics. Further, "positive feedback" does not mean "praise" and "negative feedback" does not mean "criticism". Positive feedback denotes a self-reinforcing process, and negative feedback denotes a self-correcting one. Either type of loop can be good or bad, depending on which way it is operating and of course on your values. Reserve the terms positive and negative feedback for self-reinforcing and self-correcting processes, and avoid describing the criticism you give or receive to others as feedback. Telling someone your opinion does not constitute feedback unless they act on your suggestion and thuse lead you to revise your view.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Politicians resist pilot schemes with objective measures of success. This is partly because politicians are in a hurry: they expect to hold on to a role for two to four years, not long enough for most experiments to deliver meaningful results... formal experiments hold few joys for traditional leaders, [and] informal feedback will often fail to reach them, too... There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk. There is some evidence that the more ambitious a person is, the more he will choose to be a yes-man – and with good reason, because yes-men tend to be rewarded. Even when leaders and managers genuinely want honest feedback, they may not receive it. At every stage in a plan, junior managers or petty bureaucrats must tell their superiors what resources they need and what they propose to do with them. There are a number of plausible lies they might choose to tell, including over-promising in the hope of winning influence as go-getters, or stressing the impossibility of the task and the vast resources needed to deliver success, in the hope of providing a pleasant surprise. Actually telling the unvarnished truth is unlikely to be the best strategy in a bureaucratic hierarchy. Even if someone does tell the truth, how is the senior decision-maker supposed to distinguish the honest opinion ... from some cynical protestation calculated to win a budget increase?
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
Knowledge, particularly financial knowledge, is about the past. Entrepreneurship is about the future. CFOs deal with past numbers, with accounts. By the time they get them all parsed and pinned down, the numbers are often wrong. In effect, CFOs are trying to steer companies by peering into the rearview mirror. Past numbers have little to do with future numbers. Remember Ken Fisher’s principle: company returns and stock prices are not serially correlated.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
In 1991, President Bush appointed Diane Ravitch, a Democrat, to be assistant secretary of education in charge of educational research. She had plans and ideas. She got nowhere. She soon discovered that all but 5 to 10 percent of her department's research budget was preassigned, by law, to entrenched recipients...
She couldn't kill, therefore she couldn't create. There were only two ways to do the job. One way, the popular method, was to shovel money out the door to the entrenched lobbies. The other way, always contentious, was to examine priorities and fight trench warfare against the beneficiaries of existing programs. The former approach was painless but unsatisfying; the latter was politically painful and almost always unsuccessful.
"At first, I thought it was about people really solving problems. But what it's really all about is people protecting their districts and the organizations they're close to. If you don't get the interest groups' support, you can't change anything, but if you change anything, you don't get their support. I thought I could shape the agency. But I couldn't do that. That was already done. My priorities were irrelevant."
Imagine an economy in which every important business enterprise was kept alive by a politically connected coalition of enterprise managers and government officials. Over time, the world would change, but the universe of businesses wouldn't. Obsolescent companies would gobble up resources, crowding out new companies. The economy would cease to adapt."
Jonathan Rauch
<a href="/node/12751">Demosclerosis</a>
Like the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the railroad grid of New England, and the thousand-mile Erie Canal; like the commercial real estate of Detroit and the giant nuclear plants and great printing presses of yesteryear; like Kodak’s photography-patent portfolio of a decade ago, the HP computers of a year ago, or the sartorial rage of last week; the material base of the 1 percent of the 1 percent can be a trap, not an enduring fount of wealth. In all these cases the things stayed pretty much the same. But thoughts about them changed. Much of what was supremely valuable in 1980 was nearly worthless by 2013.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
The ultimate object of design is form… If the world were totally regular and homogeneous, there would be no forces, and no forms. Everything would be amorphous. But an irregular world tries to compensate for its own irregularities by fitting itself to them, and thereby takes on form. D'Arcy Thompson has even called form the 'diagram of forces' for the irregularities. More usually we speak of these irregularities as the functional origins of the form.
Physical clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is first some programmatic clarity in the designer's mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to... find some sort of pattern in them, Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. When we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. Good fit is a desired property of this ensemble which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into this form and context.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
Crisis is a powerful impetus for change
Change is motivated by fear
The facts will set us free
Small, gradual changes are always easier to make and sustain
We can't change because our brains become "hardwired" early in life
Alan Deutschman
<a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die-fasttake1.html">Fast Company</a>
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.
[w:Steve Jobs]
<a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/11/15/parable-of-the-stones">Daring Fireball</a>
Software practitioners trying to modernize a legacy system often complain that the available software engineering techniques, methods, and processes are disconnected from reality. The reality of these practitioners is like reality anywhere: It is messy and lacks identifiable features that can be abstracted into a repeatable process.
Instead of evaluating similar software development efforts and looking for common features, many software engineers simply create idealized processes that maximize one variable, such as quality, while ignoring numerous other variables, such as cost, schedule, and technology. Of these variables, only technology is fixed; cost, quality, and schedule can be traded off. As a result, it is important to understand both the technologies used in the legacy system development and those that can be used in the modernization effort. The reason for this is simple: It is necessary to understand the fixed constraints in the problem space before considering how to bind values to the variables.
Seacord, Plakosh & Lewis
<a href="/node/15939">Modernizing Legacy Systems</a>
Just which jobs we consider complicated and which ones we consider elementary, even crude, is a judgment too often made not on the true nature of the work but on the things that attend it — the pay, the title, whether it’s performed in a factory or an office suite, in blue jeans or a gray suit. And while those are often reasonable yardsticks — a constitutional scholar may indeed move in a world of greater complexity than a factory worker — just as often, they’re misdirections, flawed cues that lead us to draw flawed conclusions about occupations we don’t truly understand. We continually ignore the true work people and companies do and are misled, again and again, by the rewards of that work and the nature of the place it is done.
It may not be much of a surprise that bosses and economic theorists don’t fully appreciate the complexity in many jobs. Both groups, after all, are interested mostly in performance, never mind how it’s achieved. More surprising is the fact that coworkers are often just as poorly informed about what the person one desk over or two spots down on the assembly line actually does all day. When they do give the matter any thought at all, they almost always conclude that the other person’s job is far less complicated than it is.
Jeffrey Kluger
<a href="/node/4274">Simplexity: How Simple Things Became Complex</a>
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would," For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.
[w:Francis Bacon]
This then is the nature of the fundamental mechanism which enables us, whether as people living in the world or as managers dealing with an enterprise, to handle the immense variety with which we are faced. We can recognize, or select, or decide between a million million alternatives with only forty well-planned receptors, or classifiers, or decisions. Even if we are very inefficient in designing our system or planning our procedures, the result is very impressive. We have also discovered what kind of measurement to use in thinking about these problems of control and in designing controllers.
The full-scale handling of proliferating variety is completely impossible for the brain of the man or for the brain of the firm. Yet both men and firms actually work. They do so, they must do so, by chopping down variety on a mammoth scale. It takes more than an act of faith in electronic computers to achieve this. The question is: how does a system conveniently and effectively undertake this fearful task? The answer is: by organization.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
In addition to a single strong sponsor, those who run the project (from commercial, project, and technical perspectives) need to have clear governance arrangements and be empowered to do their jobs. Decision making must be quick and authoritative, but it also must consider all stakeholders who are affected by the decision. Planning must be robust and well engineered, with sensibly sized phases and projects.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
Many of us accept the challenge of a business deadline in precisely the half-hearted way we might accept an athletic challenge from a much more robust associate. We intend to go through the motions, like a good sport, fully expecting to fail and counting on the understanding of our peers, who cannot blame us for being unable to succeed against such overwhelming odds. We might even hope for a margin of victory in our failure, for having had the courage to take on such a task. So we roll up our sleeves and get to work, while scrupulously documenting all of our actions and all of the reasons why the deadline could not be met. The more intrepid may attack the deadline with full force, convinced that the way to win a race against time is simply to run as fast as possible - only to discover that the pace cannot be sustained for long, and that frenetic enthusiasm can create more problems than it can resolve.
Dan Carrison in <span><a href="/node/3948" target="_blank">Deadline!: How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time</a></span>
Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal involves a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs. When we think of a clock, for example, in terms of purpose we may use the child’s definition: “a clock is to tell time. ” When we focus our attention on the clock itself, we may describe it in terms of arrangements of gears and the application of the forces of springs or gravity operating on a weight or pendulum. we may also consider clocks in relation to the environment in which they are to be used. Sundials perform as clocks in sunny climates—they are more useful in Phoenix than in Boston and of no use at all during the Arctic winter. Devising a clock that would tell time on a rolling and pitching ship, with sufficient accuracy to determine longitude, was one of the great adventures of eighteenth-century science and technology.
Consider clocks in relation to the environment in which they are to be used. Sundials perform as clocks in sunny climates—they are more useful in Phoenix than in Boston and of no use at all during the Arctic winter. Devising a clock that would tell time on a rolling and pitching ship, with sufficient accuracy to determine longitude, was one of the great adventures of eighteenth-century science and technology. To perform in this difficult environment, the clock had to be endowed with many delicate properties, some of them largely or totally irrelevant to the performance of a landlubber’s clock.
Natural science impinges on an artifact through two of the three terms of the relation that characterizes it: the structure of the artifact itself and the environment in which it performs. Whether a clock will in fact tell time depends on its internal construction and where it is placed. Whether a knife will cut depends on the material of its blade and the hardness of the substance to which it is applied.
[w:Herbert Simon]
<a href="/node/16184">Sciences of the artificial</a>
Understanding performance requires documenting the inputs, processes, outputs, and customers that constitute a business. It is interesting to describe an organization as a culture, a set of power dynamics, or a personality. However, it is essential at some point to describe what it does and how it does it...
Organization systems adapt or die. The success of the survivors depends on the effectiveness and speed with which they adapt to changes in the external environment (customers' needs, competitors' actions, economic fluctuations) and in their internal operations (rising costs, inefficiencies, product development opportunities)...
When one component of an organization optimizes, the organization often suboptimizes. Pulling any lever in the system will have an effect on other parts of the system. you can't just reorganize, or just train, or just automate, as if you were merely adding some spice to the stew. Each of these actions changes the recipe. An organization behaves as a system, regardless of whether it is being managed as a system. If an organization is not being managed as a system, it is not being effectively managed... if you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time...
To [effectively] manage, one must ensure that processes are installed to meet customer needs, that those processes work effectively and efficiently, and that the process goals and measures are driven by the customers' and the organization's requirements.
Rummler, Geary and Brache, Alan
<a href="/node/12558">Improving Performance</a>
The Fundamental System Success Theorem states: A system will be successful if and only if it makes winners of its success-critical stakeholders. The proof of “if” was summarized as follows: 1. Everyone significant is a winner. 2. Nobody significant is left to complain. Some external critics may complain that the system did not use their favorite technology, but if they are not success-critical, they cannot affect the success of the project for the success-critical stakeholders. The proof of “only if” was summarized as follows: 1. Nobody wants to lose. 2. Prospective losers will refuse to participate, or will counterattack. 3. The usual result is lose-lose...
In Case 1, the customer and developer attempt to win at the expense of the user by skimping on effort and quality. When presented with the product, the user refuses to use it, leaving everyone a loser with respect to expectations. In Case 2, the developer and the user attempt to win at the expense of the customer (usually on a cost-plus contract) by adding numerous low-value “bells and whistles” to the product. When the customer’s budget is exhausted without a resulting value-added product, again everyone is a loser with respect to expectations. In Case 3, the user and the customer compile an ambitious set of features to be developed and pressure competing developers to bid low or lose the competition. Once a contract is signed, the surviving bidder will usually counterattack by colluding with the user or the customer to convert the project into Case 2 (adding user bells and whistles with funded engineering change proposals) or Case 1 (by minimally interpreting vague contract terms for user help, maintenance diagnostics, and so on). Again, everyone is a loser...
One implication of the Fundamental System Success Theorem is that it is risky to use terms such as “optimize,” “minimize,” and “maximize” in project guidance. As Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon showed in his book Models of Man [9], success in multiple-stakeholder situations is achieved not by optimizing, minimizing, or maximizing of individual criteria, but rather by satisficing with respect to the stakeholders’ multiple criteria.
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy ... in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow ... all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all the augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradictory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty.
Paul Valery
Historical Fact, 1932
The phenomenon of generalization has been widely discussed by philosophers for millennia. It has been called the problem of induction. I have found that as a scientist I have some advantages over philosophers: It is sufficient to aim to capture the fundamental part of a specific reproducible phenomenon. I need not explain all of the many senses in which the words induction or generalization have been used.
The learning process is carried out by a concrete computation that takes a limited number of steps. Organisms cannot spend so long computing that they have no time for anything else or die before they finish. Also, the computation requires only a similarly limited number of interactions with the world during learning. Learning should enable organisms to categorize new information with at most a small error rate. Also, the definition has to acknowledge that induction is not logically fail-safe: If the world suddenly changes, then one should not expect or require good generalization into the future.
[w:Leslie Valiant]
<a href="/node/14836" target="_blank">Probably Approximately Right</a>
After any significant historical event numerous explanations of the causes are offered. These explanations can be so beguilingly plausible that we easily mistake them for actual causes that might have been detected before the events in question. We are then communally led into the belief that world events have identifiable causes and are generally predictable.
...the domains in which we make these reliable predictions often relate only to everyday life—what other people will say or other drivers do. They are mundane, almost by definition. But even mundane predictions become mystifying once one tries to understand the process by which the predictions are being made, or tries to reproduce them in a computer.
[w:Leslie Valiant]
<a href="/node/14836" target="_blank">Probably Approximately Right</a>
We keep trying (longing?) to veer back to the professional "career path" of old - a model of employment in which the Big Companies Ruled and we Genuflected on Command. Dazzled by the still abiding myth of security, we shy away from recognizing that new modes of enterprise require nothing less than the Re-imaginging of the Individual. Now we must take Immediate Charge of our new-fangled careers and identities, careers and identities that will consist of a string of WOW projects that we perform at a series of companies, small and large, over time. That's scary. That's cool. Whichever, it's life in a Brand You World
If you're going to light out for the frontier, if you're going to reinvent yourself as a Brand You enterprise, then you'lll need to pack some key traits in your old kit bag. (I say "if," but it isn't really an option. Remember: Distinct - or Extinct.) Here are 10 such traits:
Think like an Entrepreneur
Always be a "Closer"
Embrace Marketing
Pursue Mastery
Thrive on Ambiguity
Laugh Off Vigorous Screw-ups
Nurture your Network
Relish Technology
Grovel before the Young
Cultivate a Passion for Renewal
[w: Tom Peters]
<a href="/node/1985" target="_blank">Re-Imagine</a>
We need written agreements for clarity of communication; we need enforceable contracts for protection from misdeeds by others and temptations for ourselves. We need detailed enforceable contracts even more when the players are multi-person organizations, not just individuals. Organizations often behave worse than any member would. Clearly, it is the necessity for contracts, whether within an organization or between organizations, that forces the too-early binding of goals, requirements, constraints. Everyone recognizes the fact that these must later be changed.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
What causes most businesses to fail is running out of cash. In putting together a financial plan for your startup, the primary goal is to determine when or even if the business will get to cash flow neutral. This is the point when there is the same amount of cash coming into the business as is going out...
Cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. The cash flow statement allows you to see what your cash balance will look like month to month through the duration of your plan. When looking at this statement, keep in mind you need to keep a substantial amount of cash on hand at all times as a safety buffer. It is not unusual to keep at least six months of operating expenses on hand in the form of cash. Most businesses fail because they run out of cash before they achieve positive cash flow.
Mike Cowell
<a href="/node/14761">It's not a plan until the numbers add up</a>
We define governance in the mature, investment-centric sense as follows: to govern means steer. Effective governance steers the investment towards favorable outcomes. The mechanism for governance and therefore steerage is decisions - all decisions related to steerage, but those that can have material effects on our investment outcome are the ones that are held to a higher standard-of-care. These decisions are governed by those that have what is termed a "fiduciary duty", those individuals entrusted with making the decisions but with commensurate accountability if those decisions do harm to the outcome. Note that governance does not mean deliverables, nor documents. These are merely persistent stores of information. Some decisions must be taken to improve the likelihood of a favorable outcome. Making these steerage decisions requires timely access to the information; otherwise the effects of the steerage or course corrections will be lost. Formally, the ability to exercise our real options will expire if not acted upon in a timely manner. Therefore, instruments of governance must be pragmatic to keep up with the stochastic, dynamic nature of the... endeavor.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress in 2009 to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States heard from more than seven hundred witnesses, examined millions of pages of documents and held extensive hearings in order to reach conclusions about responsibility for the financial crisis that began in 2007. The commission concluded that regulatory failure was a primary cause of the crisis and it laid that failure squarely at the feet of the Fed. The official report reads:
We conclude this crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction.... The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not.... We conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets. The sentries were not at their posts....
Yet we do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it.... The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not.... In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles.
The report goes on for more than five hundred pages to detail the Fed’s regulatory failures in minute detail. As noted in the excerpt above, all of the Fed’s failures were avoidable.
[w:James G. Rickards]
<a href="/node/12744" target="_blank">Currency Wars</a>
GQM consists of 3 steps
Generate a set of organizational Goals
Derive a set of Questions relating to the goals
Develop a set of Metrics needed to answer the questions
The goals are based upon the needs of the organization, and they help in determining whether or not you improved what you wanted to. Goals are defined in terms of purpose, perspective, and environment using the generic templates as follows:
Purpose: {To characterize, evaluate, predict, or motivate} {the process, product, model, or metric} in order to {understand, assess, manage, engineer, learn, or improve} it
Perspective: Examine the {cost, effectiveness, correctness, defects, changes, product metrics, or reliability} from the point of view of the {developer, manager, customer, or corporate} perspective
Environment: The environment consists of the following: process factors, people factors, problem factors, methods, tools, and constraints.
The questions quantify the goals as completely as possible within the development environment. Questions are classified as product-related or process-related.
Ray Madachy
<a href="/node/15755">Software Process Dynamics</a>
Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them. You see it in the frequent mistakes authorities make when hurricanes or tornadoes or other disasters hit. You see it in the 36 percent increase between 2004 and 2007 in lawsuits against attorneys for legal mistakes - the most common being simple administrative errors, like missed calendar dates and clerical screw ups, as well as errors in applying the law.
For those who do the work, however - for those who care for the patients, practice the law, respond when need calls - the judgment feels like it ignores how extremely difficult the job is. Every day there is more and more to manage and get right and learn. And defeat under conditions of complexity occurs far more often despite great effort rather than from a lack of it. That's why the traditional solution in most professions has not been to punish failure but instead to encourage more experience and training.
We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields - from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
<p>[w:Atul Gawande]
Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
...the system products produced by the bazaar process are in general technically superior to those produced by the cathedral process. First, the market mechanism selects, in evolutionary fashion, the best-designed modules. Second, subjecting a new module simultaneously to hundreds of testers smokes out the bugs sooner, yielding a more robust product. Third, bugs are fixed better, because of market selection among fixes...
The Bazaar is indeed an evolutionary model. The larger system is grown by adding components, each of which meets a need (a requirement, if you will) discovered by the user-designer.
The gift-prestige economy works for people who are being otherwise fed; that is, the software gifts to the community are by-products of other work products that produce the revenue to pay the builders-donors.
Since many of the products so made are indeed by-products, there have been more tools than applications. The results are not always quite polished or quite debugged—they only have to be good enough for the purpose of the builder. The “market” selection is in fact the quality control.
Despite much that has been written about the “openness” and the “freedom” of the Open Source process, the total Linux edifice is hardly a random pile of idiosyncratic pieces—Linus Torvalds has been an overarching intellectual force for conceptual integrity. Moreover, for Linux a functional specification already existed: UNIX. Of equal importance, an overall system design existed.
A key to all design processes is the discovery of the users’ needs, wants, and criteria. The conspicuous success of the bazaar process in the Linux community seems to me to derive directly from the fact that the builders are also the users. Their requirements flow from themselves and their work. Their desiderata, criteria, and taste come unbidden from their own experience. The whole requirements determination is implicit, hence finessed. I strongly doubt if Open Source works as well when the builders are not themselves users and have only secondhand knowledge of the users’ needs.
Hence there is still a need for cathedral processes, carefully architected, tightly controlled, and meticulously tested.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
David Dunning and Justin Kruger, psychologists at Cornell and the University of Illinois, wanted to dig further into the known fact that taken as a whole across large populations, the average person rates himself as above average in skills and knowledge. Plainly, the average person cannot be above average in his or her skills, so how is it that we do not know ourselves? Ignorance breeds overconfidence, they say; particularly in fields which people know just enough to be dangerous. When Dunning and Kruger surveyed and tested Cornell undergraduates on such skills as logical reasoning and humor, the same pattern was repeated every time. Those with the worst test scores grossly overrated their performance and skills compared to others. The two psychologists quote Charles Darwin on this phenomenon: "Ignorance more frequently begats confidence than does knowledge".
The two have a few theories about how this could be: maybe incompetent people have trouble observing the world around them, or maybe the world does not provide good feedback. "It's possible that as humans we desire to be ignorant of our abilities", Kruger says.
James R. Chiles in <a href="/node/1949">Inviting Disaster</a>.
The goal is to create a network of self-motivated individual commitments. Just as the goal of software design is to get all of the best ideas of the team into the box, the goal of managing deliverables (or, as we call them, handshakes) is to get each of the team's individual promises into the box.
What is being developed is not clear. To avoid going entirely dark, we need to see that the real development task is to create a community capable of making and keeping hundreds of small but vital promises. This has little to do with technology per se and much to do with integrity in the face of uncertainty.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
Anyone who expects a quick and easy solution to the multifaceted problem of resource estimation is going to be disappointed.
Alfred M. Pietrasanta
IBM System Research Institute
The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!
[w:Pennsylvania Dutch]
We have a scale of ascending values for heuristic devices, depending on how far you go before you must stop. Going from the narrow to the broad, we find ideas, concepts, rules, principles, laws, reality, and truth. The further along this scale, the less we notice that a heuristic device is a device.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Decision making through any kind of process involves costs created by the decision-making process itself, quite aside from those costs created by the particular decisions reached. Achieving agreement or resolution of opposing views is never free. Nor should these "transactions costs," as economists call them, be thought of as minor incidental expenses. The transactions costs of choosing a new emperor of the Roman Empire often included tens of thousands of lives and the destruction of whole cities and surrounding countrysides in battles among contenders. The devotion of many rational and public-spirited men of later times to the principle of royal succession, which might seem at first to be only an irrational special privilege, is more easily understood against an historical background of astronomical transactions costs in choosing national leaders.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
[w:Mark Twain]
<a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain>WikiQuotes</a>
Their hands and minds make situational decisions as the work proceeds, be it on the thickness of the pot, or the shape of the knife edge, or the doneness of the roast. These are decisions that only they can make while they are working. And they draw on their own experience, each time applying it to a unique situation.
Ursula Franklin
<a href="/node/16129">The Real World of Technology</a>
It is necessary that large areas of any such complex organization should in fact be autonomous. If every aspect of the business, every smallest decision, had to be thought about consciously at the senior management level, then the firm would grind to a halt rather quickly. It is the same in the body and the same reasons apply. Both systems operate autonomic control, which is to say a level of management which does not involve conscious direction by the organism as a whole.
From the point of view of the whole organism, whether body or firm, the autonomic function is essentially to maintain a stable internal environment. This idea, called "homeostasis', really is necessary in any viable system. Neither brain nor board could press on with prosecuting a deliberate policy if the internal organs were running amuck. The well-ordered production machinery must not overheat, whether in terms of men or machines; cost and quality must be kept within physiological limits, which is to say that they must vary within a range narrow enough for the health of the whole organism to tolerate; and stocks of inter-process materials must be kept small enough to avoid idle time. The company board expects that its internal management can cope with these matters, and the conscious part of the brain expects the same mutatis mutandis of its autonomic nervous system.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
A honeybee goes out and finds the nectar and he comes back, he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well some scientist who is clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar where they’re all straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate. And you’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn't. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee.
[w:Charlie Munger]
<a href="http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf">The Psychology of Human Mis-judgement</a>
It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of managers.
[w:Fred Brooks]
One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.
Ian Banks
Matter, book 7 of Culture series
The glass is falling, hour by hour
the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass
you won't hold up the weather.
Louis MacNeice
Ignorance is a most wonderful thing. It facilitates magic. It allows the masses to be led. It provides answers when there are none. It allows happiness in the presence of danger. All this while, the pursuit of knowledge can only destroy the illusion. Is it any wonder mankind chooses ignorance?
[w:George Bernard Shaw]
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
[w:John F. Kennedy]
Speech on Theodore Roosevelt on New York, December 6, 1961
Incremental innovators are usually the people tasked with making things happen, and they pride themselves on being pragmatic and focused. They reject ideas that don’t connect to today’s products, today’s processes, and today’s customers.
They want proof that a thing can be done before they will sign up to do it, they reject concepts that they can’t test with target customers, and they obsess about things like whether the OK button on the app should be light or dark blue. They figure that if you can’t see what end state you’re headed toward, you shouldn’t step off in that direction.
James McQuivey
<a href="/node/14841">Digital Disruption</a>
The breathtaking diversity of content in our age has actually engendered in us an anxiety perversely contrary to the one that plagued our ancestors: it is not that there’s too little produced to meet demand, but that there’s way too much to sustain all our would-be writers, reporters, and thinkers in a world of content so cheap and abundant.
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
Everyone thinks he knows what information is. Information is what we know. Information is change in what we know. Information is how we communicate. Information is on the Internet. It is growing exponentially. It is data or messages or media or music or money or recipes or websites or pixels or packets. It is memory. It is imagination.Read
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Enough has happened in the computer world to demonstrate that these machines are now permanently with us. History has painfully demonstrated that once mankind knows how to perform a function by machine, the machine is in and man is out. And yet there is disappointment, and the economics of the whole business look somewhat rocky. The answer to the dilemma is becoming clear. Too many managers have been dazzled in EDP terms by the "more and quicker” argument, with the result that little fresh thought has been given to the purposes which the information duly handled is supposed to serve. This... is management information. And so the magic letters EDP are being replaced by the equally magic letters MIS, management information systems. This certainly appears to be another advance. It looks as if it takes seriously the question about the purposes of EDP.
But in reality we become more and more embedded in managerial philosophies of the past. We continue to replace one thing by another which is indeed more effective, and now we have a great vision whereby all these bits and pieces will be integrated in a vast informational network. The whole firm will run on a basis of 'instant fact' because managers will draw any item of knowledge they require from a huge database into which all the facts about the business will be poured.. I shall show explicitly why this vision of the future is actually incapable of fulfillment. The argument for the present rests on the fact that. even if these prognoses were reasonable, we should still have missed the point.
Items of fact about a business are profuse. They proliferate with every second that passes. Most of them are worthless in the sense that they have no bearing on managerial decision. By recording them, sorting them in different ways and printing out huge quantities of tables, nothing useful is accomplished. On the contrary, managers become engulfed in a sea of useless facts. Doubtless some valuable facts may be included, but if so they will be lost without trace. The manager wants information, not facts, and facts become information only when something is changed. The manager is the instrument of change (otherwise what is he doing?) which is to say his job is that of control. This means that the job is not to design a data-processing system at all, but to design a control system. And if we use the computer simply to undertake a souped-up version of the old kind of control system, which was inadequate simply because we did not have computers, we are no better off than before. It is the same with our planning techniques, which are part of the manager's control armory, and which so desperately needs to be in the context of technological change. For again we are concentrating on ways of doing things rather than on what we do. What is the use of the ever-faster, ever-slicker, more nearly perfect implementation of rotten plans?
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
In December 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the central line infection rate in Michigan's ICUs decreased by 66 percent. Most ICUs - including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital - cut their quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan's infection rates fell so low that its average ICU outperformed 90 percent of ICUs nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative's first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175 million in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for several years now - all because of a stupid little checklist.
[w:Atul Gawande]
Industry is now starting to realize that Individual and Interactions can be hampered greatly by the system in which they participate. If you trace the thread far enough, you find that exacerbating the situation is always the endless introduction of next big things and silver bullets that are foisted upon teams and their existing culture. It is as if the organization is in a constant state of inflammation due to the endless cycle of regime change and related pet change initiatives. Each member in the organization constantly exhibits an allergic reaction to each new foreign body, which is basically anything that runs counter-cultural, or is "the way we do things around here". Eventually, the organization develops anti-bodies to combat these annoying periodic events.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Among the ways in which various decision-making processes differ is in the extent to which they are institutionally capable of making incremental trade-offs, rather than attempting categorical "solutions." Consumers continually make incremental trade-offs when deciding what to buy in supermarkets or in automobile dealerships, but appellate courts may have only a stark choice to make between declaring a statute constitutional.
[w:Thomas Sowell]
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
In the beginning was the plan And then came the assumptions And the assumptions were without form And the plan was completely without substance And darkness was upon the faces of the workers And they spake unto their marketing managers, saying “it is a pot of manure, and it stinketh” And the marketing managers went unto the strategists and saith, “It is a pile of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof” And the strategists went unto the business managers and saith “It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong and such that none may abide by it” And the business managers went unto the director and saith, “It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength” And the director went to the vice president and saith, “It contains that which aids plant growth and it is very strong” And the vice president went unto the senior vice president and saith, “It promoteth growth, and it is powerful” And the senior vice president went unto the president and saith, “This powerful new plan will actively promote growth and efficiency of the company and the business in general” And the president looked upon the plan and saw that it was good And the plan became policy.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
"Management," wrote Peter Drucker, the late business philosopher, "is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant." We're accustomed to thinking of management as the application of business school techniques that carry a scientific sheen: uniform measurements of productivity and metrics of return-on-investment. Drucker's definition sounds awfully squishy; he could be talking about an orchestra conductor or a stage director. But in emphasizing the art of management over the science, the human realm over the quantitative dimension, Drucker - who first invented the term knowledge worker and then offered invaluable insights into its implications - was trying to remind us that numbers are only a starting point for management, not its ultimate goal.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
If success is an emergent property then it has to be about managing interactions, rather than actions. An all-star team is not necessarily the best team in the league, and it might even lose to an average team in the same league. What characterizes a winning team is not only the quality of its players but also the quality of the interactions among them.
Jamshid Gharajedaghi
<a href="/node/2038" target="_parent">Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity</a>
It was argued that in the same way a complicated tractor is built by parts, each performing only a simple task of horizontal, vertical, and circular motions, an organization could be created in such a manner that each person performed only a simple task. The mechanistic mode of organization was born as a logical extension of this conception and became instrumental in converting the army of unskilled agricultural laborers to semiskilled industrial workers. The impact of this simple notion of organizations was so great that in one generation it created a capacity for the production of goods and services that surpassed the previous cumulative capacity of mankind. The essence of the machine mode of organization is simple and elegant: an organization is a mindless system- it has no purpose of its own.
A socio-cultural view considers the organization a voluntary association of purposeful members who themselves manifest a choice of both ends and means. The critical variable here is purpose. In contrast to machines, in which integrating of the parts into a cohesive whole is a one-time proposition, for social organizations the problem of integration is a constant struggle and a continuous process.
The elements of mechanical systems are energy-bonded, but those of socio-cultural systems are information-bonded. The members of a socio-cultural organization are held together by one or more common objectives and collectively acceptable ways of pursuing them. The members share values that are embedded in their culture. The performance of each variable can be improved independently until the slack among them is used up. Then the perceived set of independent variables changes to a formidable set of interdependent variables. Improvement in one variable would come only at the expense of the others.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
The kernel in this book represents a software development effort as a continuously operating abstract mechanism composed of components and relationships. The project does not move from position to position within this mechanism as in the assembly line metaphor. Rather, there is a continuous flow through the mechanism as opportunities are transformed into requirements, and then into code and tests, and then into deployments.
The state of that mechanism is exposed through a set of critical indicators, called alphas, which represent how well the underlying components are functioning. These alphas progress from state to state through a sequence of actions taken by the development team in response to the current states.... when it comes to identifying a coherent set of practices that can guide a project from start to finish, they are too often confronted with dogmatic compendiums that are too rigid for their needs. A method should be adaptable to every project’s special circumstances: it should be backed by strong, objective arguments; and it should make it possible to track the benefits.
It is the progress of the individual requirement items that will drive or inhibit the progress and health of the Requirements. The requirement items could be of many different types—for example, they could be features, user stories, or use-case slices, all of which can be represented as alphas and have their state tracked. The benefit of relating these smaller items to the coarser-grained kernel elements is that it allows the tracking of the health of the endeavor as a whole.Practices are presented as distinct, separate, modular units, which a team can choose to use or not to use. This contrasts with traditional approaches that treat software development as a soup of indistinguishable practices and lead teams to dump the good with the bad when they move from one method to another.
cards provide concise reminders and cues for team members as they go about their daily tasks. By providing practical checklists and prompts, as opposed to conceptual discussions, the kernel becomes something the team uses on a daily basis. This is a fundamental difference from traditional approaches, which tend to overemphasize method description as opposed to method use and tend to only be consulted by people new to the team.
The kernel doesn’t in any way compete with existing methods, be they agile or anything else. On the contrary, the kernel is agnostic to a team’s chosen method. Even if you have already chosen, or are using, a particular method the kernel can still help you. Regardless of the method used, as Robert Martin has pointed out in his Foreword to this book, projects—even agile ones—can get out of kilter, and when they do teams need to know more. This is where the real value of the kernel can be found. It can guide a team in the actions to take to get back on course, to extend their method, or to address a critical gap in their way of working. At all times it focuses on the needs of the software professional and values the “use of methods” over the “description of method definitions” (as has been normal in the past).
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman
<a href="/node/14941">The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel</a>
The value-stream governance view is [often] known as a "lifecycle model", whereby the phases are often synonymous with the type of deliverable to be produced rather than the investment centric implications of their existence. If the life cycle model advocated is truly value-stream oriented, the milestones that delineate the phases will have names that suggest what is being achieved in terms of investment health. The litmus test will be supported by the types of Toll-gate Questions that investors will ask of the fiduciary of the project or endeavor. If these questions are of the form "do you have a (pick favorite document here) then it is likely that a non-investment-centric approach is being leveraged. Needless to say, checklists of this form do nothing to improve outcomes, mitigate investment risk, or improve cycle time. They are indicative of large order waste, and likely result in "deer in the headlights" milestone review meetings whereby project sponsors are not given crisp answers to fundamental investment questions.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming from people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition, but then make a fetish of it which excludes the possibility of asking reasonable questions. The modern designer relies more and more on his position as an 'artist', on catchwords, personal idiom and intuition - for all these relieve him of some of the burden of decision, and make his cognitive problems manageable. Driven on his own resources, unable to cope with the complicated information he is supposed to organize, he hides his incompetence in a frenzy of artistic individuality. As his capacity to invent clearly conceived, well-fitting forms is exhausted further, the emphasis on intuition and individuality only grows wilder.
In this atmosphere the designer's greatest gift, his intuitive ability to organize physical form is being reduced to nothing by the size of the tasks in front of him, and mocked by the efforts of the "artists." What is worse, in an era that badly needs designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world, the real work has to be done by less gifted engineers, because the designers hide their gift in irresponsible pretension to genius. We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability; just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
He described red-tabbed officers in warm, safe châteaux confidently moving pins on maps, forgetting that each pin represented a multitude of human beings whose outlook was very different from their own. “The hopes of decisive victory” grew “with every step away from the front line,” reaching “absolute conviction in the Intelligence Department.” The result—doomed offensives—troubled him more than any other aspect of the government’s war policy.
[w:William Manchester]
<a href="/node/14627">The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill</a>
Notwithstanding the consistently negative trend of the cost and schedule performance data, the contractor development team continually made best case projections of cost at completion based upon overly optimistic recovery plans and schedule assumptions. The evidence indicated that the contractor team perceived significant pressure from upper management to maximize cash flow. Such pressure would create an incentive to be optimistic, inasmuch as progress payments would be subject to reduction in the event of a contractor or Government estimate of an overrun.
Robert D. Austin
Beach, 1990, p. 5
The more information that’s out there, the greater the returns from just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn’t what’s scarce; it’s the willingness to do something with it.
[w:Tyler Cowen]
Time and uncertainty are critical variables within our software delivery ecosystem and therefore if we break up the entire journey into linear segments, certain themes of effort will need to be performed so as to address the concerns in each period. Early on, in the "fuzzy front end" of the value stream, the themed period of time is that of either "discovery" or "alignment" depending whether Demand is speculative or defined by a justifiable business need.
In the case of Alignment, we must make decisions and govern the expenditure of resources to only those investment opportunities of merit. This often entails reasoning about complexity as in the case of large enterprises, and therefore governance decisions typically consume as-is and to-be visualizations as well as transition roadmaps of how such a journey will take place. What we are interested in with such a value-stream of activities is demarking the points where we will make steerage decisions and potentially accrue value in the form of either exit or learning options. If this condition does not exist, then the discreteness of the activity is in question and likely inserting a break in the flow that is non-value-added. If bona fide decisions that could materially affect the outcome will occur, then their end points naturally result in go no-go decisions tied to funding. Without such a gate, discontinuous activities or "phases" are meaningless.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Certainly, every field has its sagas of delay; the snail's pace of lawsuits is legendary, and any building contractor who actually finishes a job on time is met with stares of disbelief. But there's something stranger and more baffling about the way software time bends and twists back on itself like a Mabius strip. Progress seems to move in great spasms and then halt for no reason. You think you're almost done, and then you turn around and six months have passed with no measurable progress. This is what it feels like: A wire is loose somewhere deep inside the workings. When it's connected, work moves quickly. When it's not, work halts. Everyone on the inside tries painstakingly to figure out which wire is loose, where the outage is, while observers on the outside try to offer helpful suggestions and then, losing their patience, give the whole thing a sharp kick. Every software project in history has had its loose wires. Every effort to improve the making of software is an effort to keep them tight.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
Knowledge work is just not very like factory work. There is no assembly line and there never will be, there aren't many fixed rules, values are more subjective, measurements more dubious, judgement is all-important. This is a card game where all the cards are wild. Knowledge work is less like the jobs that Taylor was studying, and more like the job that he himself was doing when he studied them. It involves invention, abstraction, articulation, and skillful management of many human relationships.
[w:Tom DeMarco]
<a href="/node/12672">Slack; Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency</a>
Your laptop is a note in a symphony currently being played by an orchestra of incalculable size. It’s a very small part of a much greater whole. Most of its capacity resides beyond its hard shell. It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical, biological, economic and interpersonal systems. The factories that make its parts are still in operation. The operating system that enables its function is based on those parts, and not on others yet to be created. Its video hardware runs the technology expected by the creative people who post their content on the web. Your laptop is in communication with a certain, specified ecosystem of other devices and web servers. And, finally, all this is made possible by an even less visible element: the social contract of trust— the interconnected and fundamentally honest political and economic systems that make the reliable electrical grid a reality. This interdependency of part on whole, invisible in systems that work, becomes starkly evident in systems that don’t. The higher-order, surrounding systems that enable personal computing hardly exist at all in corrupt, third-world countries, so that the power lines, electrical switches, outlets, and all the other entities so hopefully and concretely indicative of such a grid are absent or compromised, and in fact make little contribution to the practical delivery of electricity to people’s homes and factories. This makes perceiving the electronic and other devices that electricity theoretically enables as separate, functional units frustrating, at minimum, and impossible, at worst.
[w:Jordan Petersen]
<a href="/node/16663">Twelve rules for life: An antidote to chaos</a>
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
[w:Mark Twain]
Given the faults of human nature, coupled with the complexity of the design of everything…it behooves us to beware of the lure of success and listen to the lessons of failure.
[w:Henry Petrowski]
These are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’: denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth; self-destructive behaviour, because like the game-show contestant Frank, or Twyla Tharp when marrying Bob Huot, we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them; and the rose-tinted processes outlined by Daniel Gilbert and Richard Thaler, whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
In single-loop learning, collective learning causes the rules to change ([Swieringa Wierdsma 1992], p. 37). Swieringa and Wierdsma note that "[m]any of the measures applied in industry to improve quality, service and customer relationships take place at the level of single loop learning." But they note that such changes have only a surface effect: "No significant changes take place in the strategy, the structure, the culture or the systems of the organization." It is a question of changing the how, but hardly ever changing the why. There is hope for improvement, largely as a result of doing more of the same, but doing it better.
In double-loop learning, the focus is on learning at the level of insight. Now the focus moves to why, to a desire to increase knowledge and understanding rather than to a simple desire to "improve." This learning is called renewal learning since it relates to a renewal of insights in the organization.
Finally, triple-loop learning is about the organization's identity, which is called organizational development. This strategy helps organizations answer the following questions: What kind of business do we want to be? What are our values and principles?
All of these types of learning can be beneficial. The deeper one delves into the learning process, the longer it takes (single-loop learning can take place over days: double-loop, over months; and triple-loop, over years). Whereas single-loop learning is about process and reaction, the other levels deal with the structure of the organization and with learning how to learn.
[w:Jim Coplien]
<a href="/node/12577">Organizational Patterns for Development</a>
Ackoff’s (1986) delightful little book called “Management in Small Doses,” he distilled the problem as follows: “The major deficiencies in management education are not in what is taught but how it is taught. A major part of management education is devoted to trying to solve problems given to students by teachers. As a result, students unconsciously come to believe that it is natural for problems to be given to them. In the real world however, problems are seldom given; they must be taken. Nevertheless, students are neither taught nor learn how to take problems. In management, problems usually have to be extracted from complex, unstructured and messy situations. This can only be learned through practice, preferably under the guidance of someone who knows how. In learning, to take problems like learning to drive an automobile, instruction has little value without demonstration and practice.”
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
The people I listen to need to talk, because that’s how people think. People need to think. Otherwise they wander blindly into pits. When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do. Then they can not do them. Then they don’t have to suffer the consequences. That’s the purpose of thinking. But we can’t do it alone. We simulate the world, and plan our actions in it. Only human beings do this. That’s how brilliant we are. We make little avatars of ourselves. We place those avatars in fictional worlds. Then we watch what happens. If our avatar thrives, then we act like he does, in the real world. Then we thrive (we hope). If our avatar fails, we don’t go there, if we have any sense. We let him die in the fictional world, so that we don’t have to really die in the present. Imagine two children talking. The younger one says, “Wouldn’t it be fun to climb up on the roof?” He has just placed a little avatar of himself in a fictional world. But his older sister objects. She chimes in. “That’s stupid,” she says. “What if you fall off the roof? What if Dad catches you?” The younger child can then modify the original simulation, draw the appropriate conclusion, and let the whole fictional world wither on the vine. Or not. Maybe the risk is worth it. But at least now it can be factored in. The fictional world is a bit more complete, and the avatar a bit wiser.
People think they think, but it’s not true. It’s mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare— just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world. Viewpoint One is an avatar in a simulated world. It has its own representations of past, present and future, and its own ideas about how to act. So do Viewpoints Two, and Three, and Four. Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another. You can’t set straw men against one another when you’re thinking, either, because then you’re not thinking. You’re rationalizing, post-hoc. You’re matching what you want against a weak opponent so that you don’t have to change your mind. You’re propagandizing. You’re using double-speak. You’re using your conclusions to justify your proofs. You’re hiding from the truth.
True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be an articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener, at the same time. It involves conflict. So, you have to tolerate conflict. Conflict involves negotiation and compromise. So, you have to learn to give and take and to modify your premises and adjust your thoughts— even your perceptions of the world. Sometimes it results in the defeat and elimination of one or more internal avatar. They don’t like to be defeated or eliminated, either. They’re hard to build. They’re valuable. They’re alive. They like to stay alive. They’ll fight to stay alive. You better listen to them. If you don’t they’ll go underground and turn into devils and torture you. In consequence, thinking is emotionally painful, as well as physiologically demanding; more so than anything else— except not thinking. But you have to be very articulate and sophisticated to have all of this occur inside your own head. What are you to do, then, if you aren’t very good at thinking, at being two people at one time? That’s easy. You talk. But you need someone to listen. A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent. A listening person tests your talking (and your thinking) without having to say anything. A listening person is a representative of common humanity. He stands for the crowd. Now the crowd is by no means always right, but it’s commonly right. It’s typically right. If you say something that takes everyone aback, therefore, you should reconsider what you said. I say that, knowing full well that controversial opinions are sometimes correct— sometimes so much so that the crowd will perish if it refuses to listen. It is for this reason, among others, that the individual is morally obliged to stand up and tell the truth of his or her own experience. But something new and radical is still almost always wrong.
[w:Jordan Petersen]
<a href="/node/16663">Twelve rules for life: An antidote to chaos</a>
If decision making is made by gut instinct by an individual leader, the decision is likely to be very fast, but unfortunately must rely on the single individual's knowledge and experience, which may or may not be sufficient. If decision making is made through consensus, which is usually heavily dependent on the culture of the organization, then decisions are likely to be much slower. In either case, it is the decisions that need to be made that are the limiting factor in the progress that is made in transforming the product using the raw material of knowledge.
We can track the quality of our knowledge by the performance of our decision making and therefore the performance of the transitions of the product state machine. Normally decisions are not captured effectively and therefore the sources of poor knowledge remain unknown and likely to be relied upon in the future. Whether it be knowledge of how to build the product efficiently, or knowledge about the technologies in use, or even knowledge about who possesses high quality knowledge, only through the capture of decisions do we have a lens into the knowledge input to the software delivery ecosystem.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends upon retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
[w:George Santayana]
The Life of Reason
The problem of the blind spot can show up in any system with misreading instruments, hidden equipment, and a sluggish response to the controls. The problem grows much worse when crews don't know how little they are seeing into the machine, and then in a crisis they eroneously cobble up a theory and stick to it against all evidence.
They were experiencing what sociologist Karl Weick calls vu jade (the opposite of deja vu), the profoundly frightening impression that the world no longer makes sense and that one has blundered into a place or circumstance so alien that one has never been there before. Weick quotes Freud on this: 'a gigantic and senseless fear is set free' when things get bad enough.
Jame R. Chiles
Inviting Disaster
All Men are liable to Error; and most Men are, in many Points, by Passion or Interest, under Temptation to it.
[w:John Locke]
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
From my own recent experience, the ratio of effort of new build to integration is 3:1. For every dollar spent on new functionality, the total cost is four dollars to cutover this function into production.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
We really have to learn to be more like the doctors. They are able to say, quite comfortably and confidently and with conviction, "These things are never certain." Doctors seldom, if ever, state with certainty what the outcome of any procedure might be. Yet software managers, operating in a far less disciplined and less data-driven environment, one with much less history and of a complexity perhaps equal to the complexity of the anatomical systems that are the doctor's purview, blithely promise features, dates, and outcomes not especially susceptible to prediction. Worse, doctors are usually dealing with a subsystem that is malfunctioning while the overall system remains largely functional. In software development, the goal is often a wholly new system that has never functioned before at all.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design
F. A. Hayek
People tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed... In group interactions, for instance, exchanges between scientists could be formally coded as “clarification” or “agreement and elaboration” or “questioning.”... Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength. And then one day they are transformed into something more substantial: sometimes jolted out by some newly discovered trove of information, or by another hunch lingering in another mind, or by an internal association that finally completes the thought.
Steven Johnson
<a href="/node/14683">Where Good Ideas Come From</a>
Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association.
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil"
[w:Ayn Rand]
<a href="http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/economics/money/1826-Franciscos-Money-Speech.html">Atlas Shrugged</a>
Those who manage organizations have to provide an environment in which people can explore without fear of the consequences of failure. Without psychological safety we will not venture our opinions, articulate our thoughts or explore new ideas, The old fashioned wooden labyrinth game... is a good metaphor for this. The challenge of the game is to navigate a marble through a maze while avoiding the hazards (holes) along the way, much in the way we work towards goals. In the game, we have to continually adjust the board by tilting it, thereby causing the marble to roll in our desired direction. Sometimes, the positions of the hazards require us to exercise a high degree of control and precision by using subtle movements of the board. Adjust too far one way, the marble will fall in a hole and the game will be over. Make no adjustment at all, the marble will avoid hazards but will not get anywhere.
We instinctively know that we do not live in a predictable world and as a result we are constantly making adjustments, similar to the way in which we would adjust the marble board. The duration and angle of the tilt we apply depends on where we are in the maze and the hazards that we see ahead of us. Sometimes we will not see a hazard and the marble of our wellbeing will fall into a hole. At the bottom of the hole, things are stressful and chaotic and we want to get the hell out of there. Other times, we might see a potential hazard in front of us and concentrate so hard on avoiding it that we fail to see hazards beyond it. Occasionally, we realize that the tilt we have made was not the right one. We then take a step back, realign our sights and start over.
The metaphor suggests that since we are the ones tilting the board, we have complete control over our own destiny. Yet, the reality is that there are forces beyond our control that affect us. There are many different hands on the board, all tilting it in different directions at different times, forcing us to compensate by adjusting our own moves. For example, things like the odd global economic crisis have a tendency to cause many people to face the sudden risk of losing their jobs. Such a jolt of the board may completely change how we steer our marbles towards our sense of wellbeing. More important, it may also force us to re-evaluate what that sense of wellbeing actually is.
Stakeholders want to tilt in a direction that results in their wellbeing, but if they cannot have that, they would rather the marble be in a known place. From a personal viewpoint, the “known” is attractive because it offers certainty. From an organizational viewpoint it is less attractive because it represents a loss of flexibility and lack of adaptability to change. Our marble board cannot be tilted if two people are turning it in opposite directions at the same time, and the “tug of war” between the hands tilting the board means that there is a stasis or “status quo” effect. The organization becomes slow moving or even paralyzed.
When the board is kept static for a long time, key parts will begin to rust. Once this happens, a greater force is required to make a tilt because resistance to movement has increased. The problem here is that the greater the force required, the less certain we are about where the marbles are going to end up. The board, when it finally moves, does so with a jerk. When that happens, individual marbles scatter helter-skelter and the outcome is anybody’s guess.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
Economies stagnate and seize up when most investments become low-entropy (changeless big-company commodities and projects guaranteed by government) and money becomes high-entropy, full of surprises of devaluation and illiquidity...
The low-entropy side of the economy is demand and predictability; the high-entropy side is supply and surprise. Government and law are on the low-entropy side; they favor and foster rules of order. On the high-entropy side are entrepreneurship and spontaneity, the domains of creativity and surprise. Spontaneous order is an oxymoron that violates the fundamentals of any information system.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
At the outset of any fabrication process, uncertainty is high. No one knows how hard the machinery can be pushed; managers must supervise closely, keep large reserves of supplies on hand for emergencies, and maintain high manufacturing tolerances or margins for error. All this material inefficiency comes from uncertainty of information about the process. Without a substantial body of production statistics over time setting a low-entropy standard, managers are unable to distinguish a crippling defect, recurring in perhaps one of ten cases, from a trivial glitch occurring once in millions.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
It is very difficult to make sense of the interconnected chaos of reality, just by looking at it. It’s a very complicated act, requiring, perhaps, half our brains. Everything shifts and changes in the real world. Each hypothetically separate thing is made up of smaller hypothetically separate things, and is simultaneously part of larger hypothetically separate things. The boundaries between the levels— and between different things themselves at a given level— are neither clear nor self-evident, objectively. They must be established practically, pragmatically, and they retain their validity only under very narrow and specified conditions. The conscious illusion of complete and sufficient perception only sustains itself, for example— only remains sufficient for our purposes— when everything goes according to plan.
Under such circumstances, what we see is accurate enough, so that there is no utility in looking farther. To drive successfully, we don’t have to understand, or even perceive, the complex machinery of our automobiles. The hidden complexities of our private cars only intrude on our consciousness when that machinery fails, or when we collide unexpectedly with something (or something with us). Even in the case of mere mechanical failure (to say nothing of a serious accident) such intrusion is always felt, at least initially, as anxiety-provoking. That’s a consequence of emergent uncertainty. A car, as we perceive it, is not a thing, or an object. It is instead something that takes us somewhere we want to go. It is only when it stops taking us and going, in fact, that we perceive it much at all. It is only when a car quits, suddenly— or is involved in an accident and must be pulled over to the side of the road— that we are forced to apprehend and analyze the myriad of parts that “car as thing that goes” depends on.
When our car fails, our incompetence with regards to its complexity is instantly revealed. That has practical consequences (we don’t get to go to where we were going), as well as psychological: our peace of mind disappears along with our functioning vehicle. We must generally turn to the experts who inhabit garages and workshops to restore both functionality to our vehicle and simplicity to our perceptions. That’s mechanic-as-psychologist. It is precisely then that we can understand, although we seldom deeply consider, the staggeringly low-resolution quality of our vision and the inadequacy of our corresponding understanding. In a crisis, when our thing no longer goes, we turn to those whose expertise far transcends ours to restore the match between our expectant desire and what actually happens. This all means that the failure of our car can also force us to confront the uncertainty of the broader social context, which is usually invisible to us, in which the machine (and mechanic) are mere parts. Betrayed by our car, we come up against all the things we don’t know. Is it time for a new vehicle? Did I err in my original purchase? Is the mechanic competent, honest and reliable? Is the garage he works for trustworthy? Sometimes, too, we must contemplate something worse, something broader and deeper: Have the roads now become too dangerous? Have I become (or always been) too incompetent? Too scattered and inattentive? Too old? The limitations of all our perceptions of things and selves manifest themselves when something we can usually depend on in our simplified world breaks down. Then the more complex world that was always there, invisible and conveniently ignored, makes its presence known.
[w:Jordan Petersen]
<a href="/node/16663">Twelve rules for life: An antidote to chaos</a>
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force
[w:Peter Drucker]
American Management has a tendency to manage by executive summary. A director gets a one-page summary of an issue, a vice president gets a paragraph, and the president gets a three item list. At a recent conference on improving American manufacturing's ability to compete in the global marketplace, one conferee criticized a session by saying, "If an idea can't be summarized in one page, it doesn't have any merit." We do not see how U.S. companies will ever beat their global competitors with that view of executive information and analysis.
Rummler, Geary and Brache, Alan
<a href="/node/12558">Improving Performance</a>
Under conditions of true complexity - where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns - efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either - that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation - expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress.
Checklists... made the reliable management of complexity a routine. That routine requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictability the best they know how.
If I want you to know in complete detail what I have been doing for the last hour, then I shall want exactly one further hour to explain. If I have ten colleagues, and cannot see on average more than two of them at once, then I shall need five hours to explain my one hour. It is just the law of requisite variety. If can afford no more than ten minutes in explaining myself for every hour worked, then I shall devote two minutes per colleague, and there will be a ratio of 30:1 in the reduction of variety between myself and them. Some lethargic managerial societies seem to work quite smoothly on this basis, for the very simple reason that for them this turns out to be also the ratio of clock time to useful working activity. But a man who really is doing an hour's work in every hour bound to lose in intelligibility.
Next, we must note that this applies in the best of all worlds - one in which people love each other, and are completely determined to share their understanding. But human nature is not like this. Even the most willing of us find himself antipathetic, in varying degrees, to some of his colleagues. Even the most innocent of us occasionally succumbs to political motives which make him a deliberately poor communicator.
The conservatively minded business men among us will have none of this somewhat ruthless analysis. There is no need, for goodness sake, for me to tell everyone else in detail what i am doing. I am paid my job properly and all that anyone to needs to know is what I think they ought to know about the results of my work. And yet this is just the trouble. A viable organism works as an integral whole. A typical business is integrated too late, and too little.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Over the past 50 years, the New York Stock Exchange has outperformed most of the companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Why? Because markets are better at allocating resources than hierarchies. Hierarchies are very good at applying resources, laying out plans, sequencing activities, and meeting deadlines but they're lousy at allocating resources or, more specifically, at reallocating resources from old strategies to new strategies.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
There is… an explicit recognition that designs are created to provide value to humans, and design decisions are made in some attempt to maximize that value. Decision-based design recognizes the need for human intervention in the design process in four areas: determination of human values, determination of the relationships to be included in analytical models, assessment of probabilities for random events, and creativity through the creation of design options coupled with judgment on which options should be given consideration for implementation.
Hazelrig
Andy Hertzfeld tells a relevant tale from the early days at Apple about his mentor Bill Atkinson, a legendary software innovator who created Quickdraw and Hypercard. Atkinson was responsible for the graphic interface of Apple's Lisa computer (a predecessor of the Macintosh). When the Lisa team's managers instituted a system under which engineers were expected to fill out a form at the end of each week reporting how many lines of code they had written, Atkinson bridled. "He thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity," wrote Hertzfeld in his account of Macintosh history, Revolution in the Valley. "He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code." The week that he was asked to fill out the new management form for the first time, Atkinson had just completed rewriting a portion of the Quickdraw code, making it more efficient and faster. The new version was 2000 lines of code shorter than the old one. What to report? He wrote in the number -2000.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
A pound of pins required the work of ten men and women for at least seven and a half hours, drawing wire, straightening wire, pointing the wire, twisting and cutting heads from the spiral coils, tinning or whitening, and finally papering. He computed the cost of each phase in millionths of a penny. And he noted that this process, when finally perfected, had reached its last days: an American had invented an automatic machine to accomplish the same task, faster.
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
As... complexity grows, the need for explicit use models increases. Even for a shovel, it is important to be explicit as to whether it is for coal, dirt, grain, snow, or some mix; whether for child, woman, or man; whether for the casual user or the manual laborer. How much greater is the need for explicit use models for a truck, a spreadsheet, an academic building! Moreover, the more complex the design, the less likely the designers are to be domain experts who could do the users’ jobs. Implicitly assumed models are then much more dangerous.
All designers in fact have user and use models consciously or subconsciously... as they work. Team design creates the all-new requirement that the entire team have the same user model, the same use model. This requires explicit models and assumptions. This exercise is rare because the members of the team usually believe, without anyone saying so, that they share a common set of assumptions. After all, each one heard the enterprise leader charge and challenge the team. Each one has read the goal-defining document. All are expert.
Matters are not so simple. Each of us has in fact had a different experience using similar systems; my experience informs my picture of the typical user. Each of us has been exposed to a different set of applications; my exposure helps me define this application. If the team does not draft a common set of explicit assumptions, each designer will work with a distinct set of implicit ones. Microdecisions too minor ever to be discussed will be made differently, and conceptual integrity will be lost.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Teachers - and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers - tend to rely upon their personal strong points to hold a child to his work, and thereby to substitute their personal influence for that that of subject matter as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that his own personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command attention is almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the pupil's relation to the teacher almost takes the place of his relation to the subject. In this way the teacher's personality may become a source of personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake.
The operation of the teacher's own mental habit tends, unless carefully watched and guided, to make the child a student of the teacher's peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His chief concern is to accomodate himself to what the teacher expects of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject matter. "Is this right?" comes to mean "Will this answer, or this process, satisfy the teacher?" - instead of meaning, "Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?"
Instead of attempting to optimize project outcomes a sub-optimal compromise has been struck between investors of software who are basically innocent of the issues at play, and the latest shiny object to arrive on the scene that may represent mediocrity, but at least it's something. Nonetheless, the issue of determining fitness-for-purpose of the various ingredients used to incubate software projects needs to be addressed if the industry is to address the root cause of wasted software development investments.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Ah, 'All things come to those who wait.' They come, but often come too late.
Lady Mary M. Currie
Tout Vient à Qui Sait Attendre (1890)
To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for their future
[w:Plutarch]
I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
<p>[w:Edgar Dyson]</p>
When we mean to build, we first survey the plot, then draw the model And when we see the figure of the house, then must we rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability, what do we then do but draw anew the model. In fewer offices, or at last, resist to build at all?
Much more, in this great work, which is almost to pluck a kingdom down, and another up? Should we survey the plot of the situation and the model? Consent upon a sure foundation? Question surveyors, know our own estate?
How able such a work to undergo, to weigh against his opposite; or else we fortify in paper and in figures, using the names of men instead of men:
Like one that draws the model of a house beyond his power to build it, who, half through, gives o'er and leaves his part-created cost, a naked subject to the weeping clouds, and waste for churlish winter's tyranny.
Shakespeare
Bardolph, Henry IV, Part II, Act 1, Scene 3
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
A monopoly is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do outsized profits come at the expense of the rest of society? Actually, yes: profits come out of customers’ wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes. In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There’s no way to win by inventing a better kind of real estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up. But the world we live in is dynamic: it’s possible to invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.
[w:Peter Theil]
<a href="/node/15320">Zero to One</a>
“In a primary oral culture,” as Ong noted, the expression “to look up something” is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back — “recall” them. But there is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace...
“The spoken symbol,” as Samuel Butler observed, “perishes instantly without material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those who heard it.” Butler was able to formulate this truth just as it was being falsified for the first time, at the end of the nineteenth century, by the arrival of the electric technologies for capturing speech. It was precisely because it was no longer completely true that it could be clearly seen. Butler completed the distinction: “The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”
The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged. Poems were seen to have topics—the word previously meaning “place.” They possessed structure, by analogy with buildings. They were made of plot and diction. Aristotle could now see the works of the bards as “representations of life,” born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood. But he had also to account for other writing with other purposes—the Socratic dialogues, for example, and medical or scientific treatises—and this general type of work, including, presumably, his own, “happens, up to the present day, to have no name.”
Under construction was a whole realm of abstraction, forcibly divorced from the concrete. Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought. Body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change, quality and quantity, combination and separation, are among the counters of common currency now available.”
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
For the last two decades, world industry has been moving “up the stack” of computer technology. The “stack” is a seven-layer model of computing and communications. In previous decades, most of the action occurred in the bottom layer, which is the physical layer. It comprises all the microchips and printed circuit boards, racks and wires, fiber optic lines and lasers, amplifiers and sensors, iron oxide discs and “gorilla glass” that make up the material infrastructure of computer and network systems. In other words, the physical layer represents everything you can see—all the physics and chemistry of the machine. But what you see is not what you get. Above the physical layer are six levels of invisible but vital abstraction—layers for everything from “data links” and transport to “presentation” and applications—that bring the physical layer to life and account for the bulk of the commerce and technological progress of the information age. Without the higher layers, the computer is just an expensive and fragile brick... A researcher could know the location of every molecule in a computer, but without knowledge of its software codes, he would know little or nothing about what the computer was doing. The directional rule of the central dogma stems from the structure of thought.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
[New ideas would come about] by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.
[w:Sir Francis Bacon]
The Two Books Of The Profiicience And Advancement Of Learning, Book 2
We claim we know how the whole thing works. The problem is to make it work more quickly. That must surely mean the introduction of discipline and order, of some sort, into the situation. It also means, however, that no measures may be adopted which would at the same time put the remarkable freedom of action and the wonderful flexibility of the multinode in jeopardy. If people could see how to do this, without putting themselves and their organization into a strait-jacket, there is some chance that they would adopt new techniques. One method, we ought now to agree, must be excluded although it is the one method most usually attempted in practice, because no one can think of anything else. This is the method of rigorous protocol. Explicitly: it denatures the system itself - with all its in-built capacity to generate the right answers.
The first difficulty is to know what kind of problem the multinode actually solves. It does not devote itself, its seniority and power, to the determination of trivial outcomes or it ought not to do so. It is likely to be settling a policy of great importance and therefore considerable complexity. Thus it is that people think of thinking as a process of synthesizing an integral but elaborate conclusion from a large number of component parts. The decision is seen as a rococo edifice built up clause by legal clause. This is perhaps why there are endless drafting problems facing anyone trying to promulgate an ‘agreed’ decision.
The cybernetician adopts the contrary position. The output of the thinking process, the decision, has the following form: do this (rather than anything else). When the process of thinking originally starts, the multinode is faced not indeed with a number of building bricks in an edifice but with a seemingly infinite number of possible outcomes between which it must choose. It is the existence of this plethora of possibilities that cries out for decision in the first place. Then, under this model, the process we seek to assist is one of chopping down ambiguities and uncertainties until we may say: do this. In short, we would like to measure the variety of the complex decision at the start, measure the reduction of variety brought about by each conclusion reached in the process of thinking things out, and in general monitor the entire operation of the multinode as the variety comes down to a value of the decision itself. To do this we shall need two tools: a paradigm of logical search, and an actual metric - a rule and a scale - for measuring uncertainty.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Myths are "the way things are" as people in a particular society believe believe them to be; and they are models people refer to when they try to understand their world and its behavior. Myths are the patterns - of behavior, of belief, and of perception - which people have in common. Myths are not deliberately, or necessarily consciously, fictitious.
James Robertson
American Myth, American Reality
It is against this background that management confronts the electronic computer. This instrument offers management its own "technology B”, something which makes the managerial world utterly different. But management has addressed itself to the possibilities in a way which virtually precludes the emergence of a new managerial order. It has tried instead tried to assimilate the computer into managerial technology A - improving, or let us say simply souping-up, the ways of regulating matters with which managers are already familiar.
What could they really be expected to do? This question was answered according to temperament, but many managers suspected two things. Computers might turn out to be incomprehensible to the manager himself, and therefore a substantial personal threat; in any case, the cost might be ruinous. But the good manager is made of sterner stuff than this. In the second stage he very properly came to grips with the nature of the machine, and made a serious effort to understand its basic method of operation. He soon found out that the machine is a moron. Not only did this discovery remove unjustifiable fears, but it took away all sense of wonder, and that was a pity.
Although present-day computers fall very far short of the human brain in many capabilities, they are in just as many ways very much superior to the computers in our skulls. But in this second phase people lost sight of the fact they fell to discussing rather trivial problems about the relation between and consulting office machines and scientific machines in terms, for example, of the input/output requirement. Thus the managerial issues rapidly became political, because people used these trivial arguments to justify different computers in the office and the research laboratory, and a different computer again in the production context. Anything which inflames the appetite for empire building not only becomes a vice, but detracts from the issues which ought to be discussed.
For the manager, this was to be the age of electronic data processing referred to by the slick acronym EDP. Regardless of the purposes to which processed data would be put, all effort was now focused on the argument whether more and better data could be provided faster and more cheaply by installing a computer or by streamlining orthodox clerical procedures. This done (and of course this is a process that still goes on) some managers decided to go ahead and install computers. And that brought us to the third phase, in which most businesses remain. There is a rather widespread use of computers in the role of new lamps for old. Routine office work is done by machines; sometimes staff have been saved, sometimes not. More and better output has been obtained; sometimes people have known how to make use of it, and sometimes not. A variety of benefits has been sought; sometimes money has been saved, but all too often the pay-off has been negligible. Many who introduced computers during phase two became disappointed in phase three while many who did not came to feel that they were well out of it.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
"Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground?" Alice went on, not with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature.
"That wall is so very narrow!"
"What tremendously easy riddles you ask!", Humpty Dumpty growled out. "Of course I don't think so! Why, if ever I did fall off - which there's no chance of - but if I did - ". here he pursed up his lips, and looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. "If I did fall", he went on, "the King has promised me - ah, you may turn pale, if you like! You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? The King has promised me - with his very own mouth, to.... to..."
"To send all his horses and all his men," Alice interrupted, rather unwisely.
[w:Lewis Carroll]
Rapid feedback causes us to subconsciously associate our delivery of a work product and the beginning of the next process step. This attribution of causality gives us a sense of control, instead of making us feel we are the victim of a massive bureaucratic system.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
Complex systems and organizations are particularly prone to how boundaries are specified because, as pointed out earlier, the interrelationships are what create the added value of system-level functions. In organizations, creating value equates to influence. No wonder that complex systems are inherently difficult to partition. Positioning an organization by definition means positioning responsibility and authority, a very sensitive subject to the many managers who would much prefer that their responsibility match their authority- even as they understand why that match is seldom practical. It is impractical because systems and organizations require elements that work together. That in turn means that no element can be absolutely autonomous in responsibility or authority, much less in both. In complex organizations, almost everything is connected to everything else, directly or indirectly.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14377">Systems architecting of organizations</a>
As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.
[w:Daniel Kahneman]
<a href="/node/12721">Thinking Fast and Slow</a>
There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence. To adjust each to every other, and indeed even to perceive and trace them out with perfect correctness and success, entails difficulties whose nature partakes to a certain extent of those involved in every question where conditions are very numerous and inter-complicated.
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
firmitas, utilitas, venustas
(firmness, utility, beauty)
[w: Vitruvius]
[w:De Architectura]
The term brainstorm has been abused and bastardized in the 50 years since its coinage. The concept originates with Alex F. Osborn, whose excellent book Applied Imagination launched the industry of business creativity books. Its rise to popularity led to the quick misuse of the technique as a panacea for every conceivable business problem. When it failed to do the impossible of tripling people’s IQs, reversing executive stupidity, or instantly transforming dysfunctional teams, the business world turned against it, despite its fundamental goodness. Those who still use the term apply it trivially to refer to any thinking activity they might need to do.
The core message is simple: You have three things: facts, ideas, and solutions. You need to spend quality time with each individually. The great mistake is leaping from facts to solutions, skipping over the play and exploration at the heart of finding new ideas.... Osborn researched which environments stimulated people’s creativity, and this study led to the following four idea-finding (aka brainstorming) rules: Produce as many ideas as possible. Produce ideas as wild as possible. Build upon each other’s ideas. Avoid passing judgment.
[w:Scott Berkun]
<a href="/node/14701">The Myths of Innovation</a>
To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.
[w:Margaret Thatcher]
A decision has not been made until people know:
The name of the person accountable for carrying it out
The deadline for carrying it out
The names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it, or at least not be strongly opposed to it
The names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker" target="_blank" title="reference on Peter Drucker"><font color="#6c420e">Peter Drucker</font></a>
When people dream of streamlining the work of making software, most often they dream of standardized plug-in parts. James Noble and Robert Biddle, two scholars in New Zealand who sometimes write together under the sobriquet The Postmodern Programmers, dub this vision the Lego Hypothesis: "In the future, programs will be built out of reusable parts. Software parts will be available worldwide. Software engineering will be set free from the mundane necessity of programming." Pull some pieces off the shelf, snap them together, and presto: working software, with no painful coding! Programmers who have tried to travel the road to this utopian vision of programming have almost always found it blocked...
If software components were like Lego bricks, they'd be small, indivisible, and substitutable; they'd be more similar to one another than different; they'd be "coupled to only a few, neighboring components." But Noble and Biddle found that the components in actual programs varied enormously in size, in function, and in their number of connections to other components. They were "scale-free, like fractals, and unlike Lego bricks." When they peered under the hood of real programs, Noble and Biddle observed what they called "pervasive heterogeneity": Everywhere you looked, the only constant was that nothing was constant...
The concept of reusable code dates back to software's antediluvian roots, when Maurice Wilkes (the British programming pioneer who had the glum realization about his lifetime of debugging) and his colleagues in postwar Britain defined the subroutine: a chunk of code that could be invoked from anywhere in a program to accomplish a certain task and that, having finished its assignment, would hand the reins back to whichever part of the program had called it. Wilkes almost immediately began collecting subroutines into libraries, "in order that every user should not have to start from the bottom." From that day on, most programmers have also worn the hat of code librarian. But these libraries of code routines typically remain islands. True standardization has eluded the field; in software there are dozens of competing standards everywhere you look. Each point of differentiation in a computer system - what central processor chip are you using? what version of which operating system? what programming language? what data format? and so on - offers another point of failure for the snap-it-in Lego dream. As Robert Glass, the author of a number of books on software engineering, puts it, programmers long ago solved the problem of "reuse-in-the-small," building libraries of subroutines to automate the drudgery out of their work. Still unsolved is the problem of "reuse-in-the-large," making big reusable software components that are actually useful.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
I need four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going astray.
[w:James Taylor]
Bartender Blues
There is an old saying that the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. As such, the plethora of project management methodologies, best practices and standards serve to reinforce the idea that projects have an objective existence. In much the same way, permanent organizations are perceived as being “real” objective entities which have an existence independent of the people and relationships that comprise them.
There’s nothing innate in standards that guarantees their validity. However, standards, due to their “market position,” tend to shut out the competition. Alternate views of the profession get little or no airtime barring perhaps in academic circles (more on this later). Standards are hard to change because of the cost involved and/or vested interests of the standards bodies and those “certified” as proficient in the use of the standards. By definition, standards aim to ensure that organizations do things in the same or similar ways. They aim to eliminate idiosyncrasies in the way organizations do things.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
No one of us is ever safe. There is no security this side of the grave. A shipwreck or a hurricane can put man back to the brink of savagery, both in the means he uses to get his food and the lengths he will go to get it. The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.
<p>[w:Louis L'Amour]
The root cause was a small programming error, missed during ground tests because the checks were done at a time when the sensor was wired wrong. Although technicians later repaired the sensor wiring, it didn't occur to anyone that the tests had to be redone afterward.
Jame R. Chiles
Inviting Disaster
Organizations are continually subjected to influences from the economic and political environment in which they exist. One of many responses to such influences is to create new organizational roles to deal with the changes. These roles, with the cool titles and position descriptions that accompany them, can be thought of starting the “transition to adulthood” of a memeplex. Like all new and fresh sounding position titles, there is a period of identity crisis where practitioners try to find their niche in an organizational machine that doesn’t quite know where to fit them in. Additionally, within the new discipline, there are various practitioners doing things in different ways depending on their interpretation of their roles. The effect the new roles have on the organization and the wider “skills marketplace” may be seen as radical or revolutionary by other well-established disciplines. The latter may at first reject the new discipline because it challenges the “rightness” of theirs.
An organization is, quite literally, an organism and organisms respond to changes in ways that tend to maintain the status quo. However, given enough time and a certain critical mass of practitioners, the system begins to accept the changes. Unfortunately, the new memeplex is still to be established; it needs to do more work for wider acceptance. The step towards wider acceptance is when professional bodies start to appear. These often begin as informal organizations but are the young memeplex’s first steps towards professional respectability. Invariably, after a period, professional bodies begin to develop “bodies of knowledge.” From there, it is a short step to certifications that demonstrate a “deep and meaningful” understanding of this codified knowledge.
This signals that the memeplex is now approaching adulthood. A few practitioners—the early adopters—now want to be inducted into the “club of the certified” and be considered one of the clique. More organizations start to notice the new “cool kids” club and decide that their employees should be cool kids too. Therefore, they begin to ask for certifications and professional association membership as a prerequisite for employment. Prospective employees then see this requirement and realize that they also need to be in the club if they want to get a job. At or around the same time as organizations start to legitimize the new memeplex, educational institutions get in on the act and endorse it further by integrating it into their curriculums. After all, they want to be seen as cool, too. The memeplex has now come of age; it is mature, self-perpetuating and has some cool new job titles to show for it. Disciples of the associated body of knowledge have now been given the “absolute truth” and proceed boldly into the world to preach the good word.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
Like any system, the organization is composed of parts that have relationships to each other, and these relationships or interfaces determine the value of the organization. Without them the efforts of a group of people could never exceed the sum of their individual abilities. We create relationships between elements of an organization because we believe we will create some value that is not present in the individual parts. If we create this value, then we created a useful organization. If we do not we have failed in designing the organization.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.
[w:Nate Silver]
<a href="/node/14516" target="_blank">The Signal and the Noise</a>
To produce new ideas, we must overcome our tendency to fall in step with those around us, and overcome those with a vested interest in the status quo.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
Both airship and spacecraft were prisoners of the many promises made to get them built: promises of safety, low cost, on-time performance, and solid technology. In hindsight, the manic drive and optimism that got the work under way would look tragically misguided. According to Gerald C. Meyers, former chairman of American Motors, business managers in general avoid making contingency plans for failure. That's the kind of tack taken by losers and negative thinkers; a manager sees his job as planning for product success and continual market growth instead.
Jame R. Chiles
Inviting Disaster
At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.
[w:Winston Churchill]
Eulogy for [w:Neville Chamberlain]
Of all the organizational x-factors that most defy understanding, it’s the consumers who actually attend the movie or buy the goods or services a company offers that are the hardest to parse. And of all the things that make that job so difficult, the first and biggest is figuring out what those customers want in the first place.
Jeffrey Kluger
<a href="/node/4274">Simplexity: How Simple Things Became Complex</a>
The abstract existence of knowledge means nothing unless it is applied at the point of decision and action. More complex operations obviously involve more complex knowledge-often far more complex than any given individual can master. The person who can successfully man a gas pump or even manage a filling station probably knows little or nothing about the molecular chemistry of petroleum, and a molecular chemist is probably equally uninformed or misinformed as to the problems of finance, product mix, location, and other factors which determine the success or failure of a filling station, and both the manager and the chemist probably know virtually nothing about the geological principles which determine the best way and best places to explore for oil-or about the financial complexities of the speculative investments which pay for this costly and uncertain process.
[w:Thomas Sowell]
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Our brains are extraordinarily good at taking in information via our senses and examining it for patterns, but we’re quite bad at describing or figuring out how we’re doing it, especially when a large volume of fast-changing information arrives at a rapid pace. As the philosopher Michael Polanyi famously observed, “We know more than we can tell.” When this is the case, according to Levy and Murnane, tasks can’t be computerized and will remain in the domain of human workers. The authors cite driving a vehicle in traffic as an example of such as task.
[w:Erik Brynjolfsson] and [w:Andrew McAfee]
<a href="/node/15513">Second machine age</a>
Although there are no ranks or titles at Gore, some associates have earned the simple appellation "leader." At Gore, senior leaders do not appoint junior leaders. Rather, associates become leaders when their peers judge them to be such. A leader garners influence by demonstrating a capacity to get things done and excelling as a team builder. At Gore, those who make a disproportionate contribution to team success, and do it more than once, attract followers. 'We vote with our feet," says Rich Buckingham, a manufacturing leader in Gore's technical fabrics group. "If you call a meeting, and people show up, you're a leader." Individuals who've been repeatedly asked to serve as tribal chiefs are free to put the word "leader" on their business card. About 10% percent of Gore's associates carry such a designation.
Despite the unprecedented freedom granted to associates, Gore isn`t a company for slackers. Once a year, every associate receives a comprehensive peer review. Typically, data is collected from at least 20 colleagues. This information is shared with a compensation committee comprising individuals from the employee's work area. Each associate is then ranked against every other member of the business unit in terms of overall contribution. This rank ordering determines relative compensation. While the list isn't published, people are told in which quartile they rank. Seniority yields no dividends in Gore's compensation system. For example, an experienced business leader might be paid less than a PhD scientist. The formula is unblinking: the more you contribute the more highly regarded and rewarded you will be. Consequently, most associates feel pressured to take on more rather than less. Critically, though, this pressure doesn't come from a whip-cracking boss, but from one's own teammates.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
We can illustrate the kind of questioning we have in mind by seriously asking "What is a word processor”. The first thing to recognize is that different answers grow from the concerns of different individuals. For the manager of a factory that builds word processors, they are assemblies of electronic and mechanical devices, to be constructed, tested, and shipped. For the person who programs the word processor, it is a particular collection of software, dealing with the input, storage, and output of bytes of information. It operates through some kind of interface to a user who generates and modifies that information.
These are both perfectly valid answers, arising in particular domains to which the theories of computation and electronics are relevant. If we want to understand a breakdown of the hardware or software, we operate in their terms and turn to them for predictions. But these answers do not deal with what a word processor does - with the fact that it is a medium for the creation and modification of linguistic structures that play a role in human communication. For the purchaser of a word processor, this is the relevant domain. The word processor exists as a collection of hardware or programs only when it breaks down. In its use, one is concerned with the actions of creating and modifying documents and producing physical presentations of them on a screen or printed page. The relevant domain is not a computational one, but one that emerged long ago with the first writing instruments. It brings with it concerns of visual presentation issues of layout, type fonts, and integration of text with illustrations. Many current computer products are designed with a primary concern for this domain. They deal at length with formats and typography, focussing on the document as the thing being produced.
But still with this, we have not reached a full understanding of the word processor. We cannot take the activity of writing as an independent phenomenon. Writing is an instrument - a tool we use in our interactions with other people. The computer, like any other medium, must be understood in the context of communication and the larger network of equipment and practices in which it is situated. A person who sits down at a word processor is not just creating a document, but is writing a letter or a book. There is a complex social network in which these activities make sense. It includes institutions (such as post offices and publishing companies), equipment (including word processors and computers, but also all older technologies with which they exist), practices (such as buying books and reading the daily mail), and conventions (such as the legal status of written documents).
The significance of a new invention lies in how it fits into and changes this network. Many innovations are minor they simply improve some aspect of the network without altering its structure. The automatic transmission made automobiles easier to use, but did not change their role. Other inventions, such as the computer, are radical innovations that can not be understood in terms of the previously existing network. The printing press, the automobile, and television are all examples of radical innovations that opened up whole new domains of possibilities for the network of human interactions. Just as the automobile had impacts on our society far beyond speeding up what had been done with horses, the use of computers will lead to changes far beyond those of fancy typewriter. The nature of publishing, the structure of communication within organizations, and the social organization of knowledge will all be altered, as they were with the emergence of other technologies for language, such as the printing press.
One might think that the questioning can stop at this point. It is clear (and has been widely recognized) that one cannot understand a technology without having a functional understanding of how it is used. Further.more, that understanding must incorporate a holistic view of the network of technologies and activities into which it fits, rather than treating the technological devices in isolation. But this is still not enough. We can say that the word processor must be understood by virtue of the role it plays in communication, the distribution of information, and the accumulation knowledge. But in doing we take for granted the use of words like 'communications’, 'information’, and ‘knowledge’, which themselves require further examination. In this examination, we find ourselves being drawn into inquiries about basic human phenomena that have been called things like ‘intelligence’, 'language," and "rationality’.
As the use of a new technology changes human practices, our ways of speaking about that technology changes our language and understanding.
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
<a href="/node/16120" target="_blank">Understanding cognition</a>
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
Poul Anderson
The greatest opportunities for performance improvement often lie in the functional interfaces - those points at which the baton... is being passed from one department to another... All too often, it's the organization chart, not the business, that's being managed... A primary contribution of a manager (at the second level or above) is to manage interfaces. The [functional] boxes already have managers; the senior manager adds value by managing the white space between the boxes.
Rummler, Geary and Brache, Alan
<a href="/node/12558">Improving Performance</a>
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
George Santayana
A life of reason
“The spoken symbol,” as Samuel Butler observed, “perishes instantly without material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those who heard it.” Butler was able to formulate this truth just as it was being falsified for the first time, at the end of the nineteenth century, by the arrival of the electric technologies for capturing speech. It was precisely because it was no longer completely true that it could be clearly seen. Butler completed the distinction: “The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong llearning. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization - the learning organization's spiritual foundation. An organization's commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.
[w:Peter Senge]
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
[w:George Will]
Instead of being interested in what is new, we ought to be interested in what is true.
[w:Jeffrey Pfeffer]
<a href="/node/2000" target="_blank">Hard Facts</a>
Act without doing;
work without effort.
Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.
[w:lao-tze]
[w:Tao Te Ching]
A platitude is a mental shortcut we take, a deceptively quick way to cut through uncertainty. We clump our unclear, unarticulated aspirations in a bunch of platitudes. It is easy to do, and it gives us a sense of achievement. But it is a mirage because the objective is not clear, and we cannot define sensible measurements of success if the goal is fuzzy. It never fails to amaze us that many organizational endeavors are given the go-ahead on the basis of platitudinous goals.
A common characteristic of a platitude is that it has no meaning until it is applied to a particular situation. Words in this category include quality, security, flexibility, innovation, effectiveness and... governance. These words have plenty written about them and, accordingly, have many definitions. The mistake is to try and lock down a definition in an attempt to provide context to a situation or problem. This creates a very sneaky and dangerous platitude; one that deludes people into thinking that there is more shared understanding between people than there actually is.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
A practice is a repeatable approach to doing something with a specific purpose in mind... How explicit a practice should be,,, depends on two factors:
Capability: Capabilities refers to a person’s ability to, based on the knowledge they already have, figure things out for themselves. Team members with high skill and capability need only a few reminders and examples to get going. Others may need training and coaching to learn how to apply a practice effectively.
Background: If the team has worked together using a practice in the past or has gone through the same training, they have a shared background. In this case, practices can be tacit. On the other hand, if team members have been using different practices—for example, some have been using traditional requirements specifications while others have been using user stories—they have different backgrounds. In this case, practices should be described to avoid miscommunication.
The set of practices that [a team selects] for their way of working is their method... The term method is also used to describe a predefined set of practices that provide a standard, reusable way of working for use within a specific context. If a suitable method is available, the team can use this as a starting point instead of building their method from scratch.
Examples of common practices are user stories, test-driven development, and backlog-driven development.
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman
<a href="/node/14941">The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel</a>
There once was a man who said "Damn!"
It is borne in upon me I am
An engine that moves
In predestinate grooves
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.
Maurice Evan Hare
Uncertainty is the state where a decision-maker cannot accurately or precisely) predict the outcome of an event. Uncertainty is categorized into aleatory (random) and epistemic (probabilistic) processes. The first type is due to variability, which is an intrinsic property of natural phenomena or processes. The variability cannot be reduced unless the phenomena or process is changed. This variability cannot be reduced by collecting more data. Only by changing the process can the variability be reduced. Epistemic uncertainty is due to lack of knowledge.
Epistemic uncertainty is reducible, through the collection of data or acquiring knowledge.
Efstratios Nikolaidis and Zissimos Mounrelatos
Design Decisions under Uncertainty with Limited Information
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and new Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding along under a single mayor and mutual board of alderman. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
[w:Mark Twain]
Ask a group of your colleagues to describe the distinguishing characteristics of your company, and few are likely to mention adaptability and inventiveness. Yet if you ask them to make a list of the crafts at differentiate human beings from other species, resilience and creativity will be near the top of the list. We see evidence of these qualities every day - in ourselves and in those around us.
All of us know folks who've switched careers in search of new challenges or a more balanced life. We know people who've changed their consumption habits for the sake of the planet. We have friends and relatives who've undergone a spiritual transformation, or risen to the demands of parenthood, or overcome tragedy. Every day we meet people who write blogs, experiment with new recipes, mix up dance tunes, or customize their cars. As human beings, we are amazingly adaptable and creative, yet most of us work for companies that are not. In other words, we work for organizations that aren't very human.
There seems to be something in modern organizations that deplete the natural resilience and creativity of human beings, something that literally leaches these qualities out of employees during daylight hours. The culprit? Management principles and processes that foster discipline, punctuality, economy, rationality, and order, yet place little value on artistry, nonconformity, originality, audacity, and elan. To put it simply, most companies are only fractionally human because they make room for only a fraction of the qualities and capabilities that make us human. Billions of people show up for work every day, but way too many of them are sleepwalking.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
Human understanding supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and irregular, will yet invest parallels and conjugates and relatives where no such thing is.
Francis Bacon
Novum Oragnum
Because [of the] logic of decomposition and integration.. so central to classical systems engineering, it is difficult for many systems engineers to understand why it does not match software development very well… The same logic of decomposition and integration matches applications built in procedural languages (like C or Pascal) and where the development effort writes all of the application's code. In these software systems the code begins with a top-level routine, which calls second-level routines, and so forth, to primitive routines that do not call others. In a strictly procedural language, the routines are contained within or encapsulated in the higher-level routines that use them. If the developer organization writes all the code, or uses relatively low-level programming libraries. the decomposition chain termínates in components much like the hardware decomposition chain. Like in the classical systems engineering paradigm we can integrate and test the software system in much the same way, testing and integrating from the bottom up until we reach the top-most module.
As long as the world looks like this, on both the hardware and software sides, we can think of system decompositions... and the position of software as classical systems engineers would pitch to portray it. The software units are contained within the processor units that execute them. Software is properly viewed as a subsystem of the processor unit. However, if we instead went to the software engineering laboratory of an organization building a modern distributed system and ask the software engineers to describe the system hierarchy, we might get a very different story. Much software today is written using object-oriented abstractions, is built in layers, and makes extensive use of very large software infrastructure objects (like operating systems or databases) that do not look very much like simple components or the calls to a programming library. Each of these issues (object orientation and layering) creates a software environment that does not look like a hierarchical decomposition of encapsulated parts. To the extent that a hierarchy exists, it is often quite different from the systems and hardware hierarchy.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
Our every inclination may be to accept the validity of standard process and set out to standardize everything we do. This can lead too a positive obsession with process. Process obsession is the problem. Process obsession is not just an anomaly that occurs now and again. It is an epidemic. Process obsession is as common in knowledge-worker organizations today as the common cold... and in my opinion, about as desirable.
[w:Tom DeMarco]
<a href="/node/12672">Slack; Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency</a>
We must introduce uncertainty to add value in product development. Risk-taking is central to value creation in product development... We must carefully distinguish between variability that increases economic value and variability that decreases it.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
Product development creates economic value by producing the recipes for products - information - not by creating physical products. If we create the same recipe twice, we've created no new information.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
In 1942, when Merck had shipped out its first batch of penicillin—a mere five and a half grams of the drug—that amount had represented half of the entire stock of the antibiotic in America. A decade later, penicillin was being mass-produced so effectively that its price had sunk to four cents for a dose, one-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
<a href="/node/12660">The Emperor of All Maladies</a>
We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists.
The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn't have to occupy itself with.
All learned occupations have a definition of professionalism, a code of conduct. It is where they spell out their ideals and duties. The codes are sometimes stated, sometimes just understood. But they all have at least three common elements. First is an expectation of selflessness: that we who accept responsibility for others - whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers, or pilots - will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own. Second is an expectation of skill: that we will aim for excellence in our knowledge and expertise. Third is an expectation of trust-worthiness: that we will be in our personal behavior toward our charges. Aviators, however, add a fourth expectation, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others. This is a concept almost entirely outside the lexicon of most professions, including my own.
In medicine, we hold up "autonomy" as a professional lodestar, a principle that stands in direct opposition to discipline. But in a world in which success now requires large enterprises, teams of clinicians, high-risk technologies, and knowledge that outstrips any one person's abilities, individual autonomy hardly seems the ideal we should aim for. It has the ring more of protectionism than of excellence. The closest our professional codes come to articulating the goal is an occasional plea for "collegiality." What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline.
Discipline is hard - harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
<p>[w:Atul Gawande]
"Unfortunately," Constantine wrote, "most programmers like to program. Some of them would rather program than eat or bathe. Most of them would much rather cut code than chase documentation or search catalogs or try to figure out some other stupid programmer's idiotic work. Other things being equal, programmers design and build from scratch rather than recycle."... "If it takes the typical programmer more than two minutes and twenty-seven seconds to find something," Constantine wrote, "they will conclude it does not exist and therefore will reinvent it." ... There is almost always something you can pull off the shelf that will satisfy many of your needs. But usually the parts of what you need done that your off-the-shelf code won't handle are the very parts that make your new project different, unique, innovative, and they're why you're building it in the first place... What they all share is a passion for specialized knowledge and a troubled relationship - at best clumsy, at worst hostile - with everyone who lacks that passion. You mean you don't know how to configure your home network? For every geek who will gladly do it for you and then show you six ways to tweak it should you so desire, there is another who will snap, "Just RTFM, dude!" at you and turn away without explaining himself, leaving you to discover via Google that you've just been told to read the fucking manual.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
Progress is not doing better what should not be done at all.
Anonymous
<a href="/node/5657">Profit Beyond Measure</a>
He who would do good... must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
[w:William Blake]
Jerusalem, plate 55, lines 60 & 61
The concept of risk and risk assessments has a long history. More than 2,400 years ago the Athenians offered their capacity of assessing risks before making decisions. From the Pericle's Funeral Oration in Thurcydidas' ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ (started in 431 BC), we can read: We Athenians in our persons, take our decisions on policy and submit them to proper discussion.
The worst thing is to rush into action before consequences have been properly debated. And this is another point where we differ from other people. We are capable at the same time of taking risks and assessing them beforehand.
Others are brave out of ignorance; and when they stop to think, they begin to fear.
But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life, and what is terrible, and he then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.
Terje Aven
Foundations of Risk Analysis, 2nd Edition
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
[w:Edward Bernays}
Propoganda
Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.
Ludwig von Mises
Human Action
In March 1951 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 29-51 was published. "Although it is impossible to determine which course of action the Kremlin is likely to adopt," the report concluded, "we believe that the extent of [Eastern European] military and propaganda preparations indicate that an attack on Yugoslavia in 1951 should be considered a serious possibility." ...But a few days later, [Sherman] Kent was chatting with a senior State Department official who casually asked, "By the way, what did you people mean by the expression 'serious possibility'? What kind of odds did you have in mind?" Kent said he was pessimistic. He felt the odds were about 65 to 35 in favor of an attack. The official was started. He and his colleagues had taken "serious possibility" to mean much lower odds. Disturbed, Kent went back to his team. They had all agreed to use "serious possibility" in the NIE so Kent asked each person, in turn, what he thought it meant. One analyst said it meant odds of about 80 to 20, or four times more likely than not that there would be an invasion. Another thought it meant odds of 20 to 80 - exactly the opposite. Other answers were scattered between these extremes. Kent was floored.
Phillip Tetlock
<a href="/node/15821">Superforecasting</a>
Almost every company would like to improve communications on their development teams. Too often they think this requires getting more information to flow faster inside the organization. More people are invited to meetings. More decisions are documented. More memos are sent to more people. Do communications improve? No Ironically, the difference between companies that claim to have good communications and companies that have bad communications is never the quantity of information that is exchanged. Companies that have bad communications can still be buried in information. The key driver of good communications is the amount of usable information communicated compared to what is needed to make good communications.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
One way to think about the quest for solutions is to imagine a vast, flat landscape, divided into a grid of billions of squares. On each square is a document: a recipe describing a particular strategy. Evolutionary theorists call this a ‘fitness landscape’. If the fitness landscape is biological, each strategy is a different genetic recipe: some squares describe fish; some describe birds; some describe human beings; while the majority describe a genetic mush that represents nothing that could ever survive in reality. But the fitness landscape might equally represent recipes for dinner: some produce curries; others produce salads; many produce dishes that are nauseating or even poisonous. Or the fitness landscape might contain business strategies: different ways to run an airline or a fast-food chain.
For any problem, it’s possible to imagine a huge range of potential solutions, each one carefully written down and scattered on this vast landscape. Imagine, too, that each recipe is very similar to its neighbours: two adjacent dinner recipes might be identical save for one demanding a little more salt and the other a slightly longer cooking time. Two neighbouring business strategies might advocate doing everything the same, except that one prescribes slightly higher prices and a bit more marketing.
Now let’s change the picture and say that on our fitness landscape: the better the solution, the higher the altitude of the square that contains it. Now the fitness landscape is a jumble of cliffs and chasms, plateaus and jagged summits. Valleys represent bad solutions; mountain tops are good. Problem-solving on a contoured fitness landscape means trying to find the high peaks. In dinner-party space, that’s not so hard. But in a biological ecosystem, or an economy, the peaks keep moving – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly... As one peak subsides, others may not be clearly visible. The biological process of evolution through natural selection is entirely blind; finding a corporate strategy may or may not be a more deliberate and far-sighted process
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
Humans are not only rational beings, coolly weighing the possibilities and judging the probabilities. Emotions, reflex, unconscious motivations, and other non-rational or irrational factors all play a large role in our judgments and behavior. But even when we find time to reflect and deliberate we cannot behave in a fully rational manner (that is, make the best decisions possible given the information available to us). As marvelous as the human mind is, the complexity of the real world dwarfs our cognitive capabilities… Faced with the overwhelming complexity of the real world, time pressure, and limited cognitive capabilities, we are forced to fall back on rote procedures, habits, rules of thumb, and simple mental models to make decisions. Though we sometimes strive to make the best decisions we can, bounded rationality means we often systematically fall short, limiting our ability to learn from experience… Experimental studies show that people do quite poorly in systems with even modest levels of complexity. These studies led me to suggest that the observed dysfunction in dynamically complex settings arises from misperceptions of feedback. The mental models people use to guide their decisions are dynamically deficient… and are insensitive to non-linearity that may alter the strengths of different feedback loops as a system evolves
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
[w:Michelangelo]
By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.
Roger Ascham
The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.
Fraser Spiers, in <a href="http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html">Future Shock</a>
Product developers create a large number of proxy objectives: increase innovation, improve quality, conform to plan, shorten development cycles, eliminate waste, etc. Unfortunately, they rarely understand how these proxy objectives quantitatively influence profits. Without this quantitative mapping, they cannot evaluate decisions that affect multiple interacting objectives...
Life would be quite simple if only one thing changed at a time. We could ask easy questions like, "Who wants to eliminate waste?" and everyone would answer, "Me!" However, real-world decisions almost never affect only a single proxy variable. In reality, we must assess how much time and effort we are willing to trade for eliminating a specific amount of waste.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.
[w:Robert Glass]
We must find a way to get at a minimum two very polarizing and potentially dogmatic and hostile constituencies to seek out commonality rather than dwell on their differences. I advocate a "third way" to be leveraged for realizing software delivery change, one which is centrist in nature and instills balance among the various "freedom" perspectives and the more 'controlling" perspectives. This political ideology has been termed "Libertarian Paternalism" and serves as basis for implementing a state-of-the-practice change management strategy. The Libertarian aspect embraces the notion that humans are fallible as they are in making sound decisions, need the freedom to choose... The Paternalism aspect addresses the fallible of humans by leveraging broader knowledge than that possessed by small teams or individuals to gently guide teams towards better choices, which in the case of successful change management is sensitive of culture.
Moving beyond common ground practices, where the potential cultural gap is gradually larger, if one understands the magnitude of the between a practice to be gap introduced and the cultural setting, one understand the risks that can and will be present if one is to introduce them into the system in which the people coexist.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
Reflection involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence - a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determine the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. The successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another and support one another; they do not come and go in a medley. Each phase is a step from something to something - technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is utilized in the next term. The stream or flow becomes a train, chain, or thread.
[w:John Dewey]
Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought... Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief.
Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more comanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.
Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steading and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection.
[w:John Dewey]
How well one thing substitutes for another cannot be determined by how similar they are in physical characteristics, or indeed, by any purely objective criteria. Economists define substitutability in terms of people's subjective preferences as revealed by their overt behavior. If a rise in the price of coffee causes people to buy more tea, then economically speaking, we can say that they are substitutes without having to investigate the chemical or physical characteristics of either...
Simple as all this is, it goes completely counter to rhetoric that is often heard, and sometimes heeded, about the urgent need to "establish priorities" either nationally or in a business or other organization. At the instant that such rhetoric is uttered, there may indeed be an urgent need for more of one thing at the expense of something else, but it is only a matter of time before the changing proportions of the two things change the relative urgency of adding more of each. Categorical priorities ignore this fact, unless they are very flexible and reversible-in which case they are not really "priorities." But because sober analysis seldom has the appeal of ringing rhetoric, priorities often do get established, and outlive the necessities that gave rise to them.
Value being ultimately subjective, it varies not only from person to person but from time to time with the same person, and varies also according to how much of the given good he already has. Obviously a man in the desert dying of thirst would sacrifice much more for a glass of water than he would in his home, with water available from his faucet. In short, even for the same individual, the value of water can vary from virtually everything he has down to zero-or even below zero, since he would pay to have water taken away if his basement were flooded...
While an individual or an economy may appear at first to be weighing the subjective value of a good against its objective cost, ultimately what is being weighed is the subjective value of one good against the subjective value of another good. Faced with identical technology and resources setting the limits of what is possible at a given time, different combinations of goods may be produced, according to the subjective preferences of the decision makers, whether those decision makers are consumers, central planners, or royalty...
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
An algorithm is a technique, or a mechanism, which prescribes how to reach a fully specified goal. A typical air pilot's flight plan is an algorithm. The instruction: ‘turn left at the crossroads, take the second turning on the right, turn left at the Red Lion and our house is 120 yards up on the right' is an algorithm. A method for finding the square root is an algorithm, and so is a computer program. This last is important, because we shall soon have to clear up some confusion about the capabilities of computers. A computer can do only what it is precisely told to do. The programmer has to write an algorithm, then, which will exactly determine the computer's next move in any set of circumstances whatever.
An heuristic specifies a method of behaving which will tend towards a goal which cannot be precisely specified because we know what it is but not where it is. Suppose you are trying to reach the peak of a conical mountain enveloped in a cloud. It must have a highest point, but you do not know the compass bearing.The instruction: "keep going up', will get you there, wherever ‘there' is. ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will look after themselves' is an attempted heuristic for "being wealthy". Heuristics prescribe general rules for reaching general goals, and do not typically prescribe an exact route to a located goal as does an algorithm. There are after all an infinite number of paths up the mountain, and it does not matter much which path is taken (although some routes may be quicker than others).
These two techniques for organizing control in a system of proliferating variety are really rather dissimilar. The strange thing is that we tend to live our lives by heuristics, and to try and control them by algorithms. Our general endeavor is to survive, yet we specify in detail... how to get to this unspecified and unspecifiable goal. We certainly need these algorithms, in order to live coherently; but we also need heuristics and we are rarely conscious of them. This is because our education is planned around detailed analysis: we do not really understand things unless we can specify their infrastructure. The point came up before in the discussion of transfer functions, and now it comes up again in connection with goals. "Know where you are going, and organize to get there' could be the motto foisted onto us and on to our firms. And yet we cannot know the future, we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want, and we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude.
Birds evolved from reptiles, it seems. Did a representative body of lizards pass a resolution to fly? lf so, by what means could the lizards have organized their genetic variety to grow wings? One has only to say such things to recognize them as ridiculous but the birds are flying this evening outside my window. This is because heuristics work while we are still sucking the which would like to prescribe an algorithm.
If the goal is not recognized in detail, an heuristic is required, so the computer must be supplied with an algorithm determining an heuristic. That is a basic trick. Suppose we say: "The computer must learn from its own experience, as do we ourselves.' Learn what? We do not know; what we meant was that the computer must find out over a period, by trial and error, the courses of action which lead to better results of control. We shall say what is a better and what a worse result, but the computer has to determine a better strategy, a better control system, than we ourselves know. And of course it can do it. Because its algorithm, what it is programmed to do, specifies an heuristic. Alter the solution you are now using a little bit, says the algorithm, and compare the outcome with the erstwhile outcome. If this is more profitable, or whatever else we say, adopt it. Go on like this until variation you make leads to a worse result than you already have. Then any you may hang on to this solution, until the situation changes; whereupon you may do better once again by producing a new variation.
This example could be continued indefinitely. The point is that heuristic techniques are determined within a framework specifying the mode, the limits, and the criteria of search. And if that framework is itself an heuristic, then it too requires a framework; and so on indefinitely. At some point the nth framework must be reached which, from this system's internal standpoint at least, will have to be declared an absolute framework. In good logic, this cannot be done; but in all practice it has to be done. Hence all finite systems are limited and incomplete. We ourselves, our firms, our economies all suffer from this limitation. And because we do… the best possibility for change directed towards ever more successful adaptation lies in a reorganization of these hierarchies of command.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
[w:Gaius Petronius]
This sophistication in software engineering does not forestall, or noticeably reduce, the numerous references in the literature to the “product requirements” as a normal given for a design process. But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm: A chief service of a designer is helping clients discover what they want designed...
...Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays...
...The result, of course, is a grossly obese set of requirements, the union of many wish lists, assembled without constraints.3 Usually, the list is neither prioritized nor weighted. The social forces in the committee forbid the painful conflicts occasioned by even weighting, much less prioritizing...
...another kind of harm... leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of this enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework.
Fred Brooks
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
Our shock at the extreme requirement was fully matched by our shock that its extremity didn’t bother our briefer. Perhaps our instincts were wrong. Perhaps the marginal cost of the... capability was indeed low. But our conversation involved... neither an aircraft engineer nor a helicopter pilot - but rather mostly bureaucrats skilled at representing their groups in inter-group negotiations...
...acquisition has lost that permeating sense of urgency, replaced with ever-increasing layers of “oversight” mechanisms to avoid mistakes. Such a progression is also not unknown within technical corporations.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results
Milton Friedman
Treating your rocket-scientist employees as if they were still in kindergarten is not an isolated phenomenon. Almost every company has some kind of incentive program that is insulting and demeaning. At two of the companies I've worked for, the most stressful time of year was the twice-yearly performance review period. For some reason, the Juno HR department and the Microsoft HR department must have copied their performance review system out of the same Dilbertesque management book, because both programs worked exactly the same way. First, you gave "anonymous" upward reviews for your direct manager (as if that could be done in an honest way). Then, you filled out optional "self-evaluation" forms, which your manager "took into account" in preparing your performance review. Finally, you got a numerical score, in lots of non-scalar categories like "works well with others," from 1 to 5, where the only possible scores were actually 3 or 4. Managers submitted bonus recommendations upwards, which were completely ignored and everybody received bonuses that were almost completely random. The system never took into account the fact that people have different and unique talents, all of which are needed for a team to work well.
[w:Joel Spolsky] in <a href="/node/3634">Joel on Software</a>
Beware of the tyranny of making small changes to small things. Rather, make big changes to big things.
The caption read, “Opening the highways to all mankind.” Beneath it, Henry Ford outlined his vision for the company’s future. “An organization, to render any service so widely useful, must be large in scope as well as great in purpose. To conquer the high cost of motoring and to stabilize the factors of production—this is a great purpose. Naturally it requires a large program to carry it out,” it stated. “In accomplishing its aims the Ford institution has never been daunted by the size or difficulty of any task. It has spared no toil in finding the way of doing each task best. It has dared to try out the untried with conspicuous success.” This was exactly what Mulally had been looking for—a polestar to guide his transformation of Ford, a touchstone that he could return to in times of doubt. Everything came together for him in that image.1
“We are going to rationalize the brands, rationalize the product lines,” he said, explaining how he had taken a similar approach at Boeing, reducing its aircraft offerings from more than a dozen models to just four. Ford could get a lot more for its money by building more cars and trucks off of common platforms and sharing more parts and components between them.2
It’s the most important thing in the business that you always deal with the reality in the marketplace and match the capacity to demand. Because if not, it just gets worse."3
Mulally understood that Ford’s global operations were too complex to be run centrally out of Dearborn, but he also appreciated the tremendous cost savings and efficiencies that could be gained by eliminating duplicate efforts around the world and creating real economies of scale.* During one of his first press conferences, Mulally was asked if Ford was considering a merger. “Yes,” he said. “We’re going to merge with ourselves.”
As an aeronautical engineer, streamlining was as dear to Mulally as pork to a politician. He had spent his entire professional life figuring out how to reduce drag and improve aerodynamics. Now he began applying these same principles to Ford’s product portfolio. He asked for a chart showing every car and truck the company made around the world. To his dismay, none existed. So Mulally went to the websites of each of Ford’s divisions and printed out pictures of all of their offerings. Then he asked his secretary for scissors and glue. When she brought them, she found Mulally sitting at his conference table with printouts spread all over it. He took the scissors and started cutting out pictures of each vehicle made by Ford and its subsidiaries. Then he divided them by region and started pasting them together on pages like a kid working on a school project. When he was finished, Mulally counted them all. Ford and its subsidiaries were making and selling ninety-seven different nameplates around the world. Way too many, Mulally thought as he studied his handmade charts. He picked up the scissors and started cutting again.4
Bryce G. Hoffman
<a href="/node/15126">American Icon</a>
Software development is a process of producing mathematically rigorous interpretations of imprecise ideas. All software projects begin with an idea, or system requirement. No one begins a project by randomly writing code and then figuring out what it does. The code originates from a requirement, which is transformed into a high-level concept for implementing a more detailed understanding of the implementation., and which is ultimately transformed into the final source code. Some may say that code is not mathematically rigorous. However, a microprocessor is essentially a very fast adding machine augmented with the ability to jump between equations. It understands only math. A development process bridges the gap between the product concept and the sequential instructions executable on the modern processor.
Ross Smith
<a href="/node/12551">Defect Prevention</a>
Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is something that you can put a price on. Say that you’ll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11. This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a “bad beat” in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you’ll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds.
Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000; there is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt.
[w:Nate Silver]
<a href="/node/14516" target="_blank">The Signal and the Noise</a>
We use elaborate “rituals” in the guise of management strategies, best practices, methodologies and frameworks to give us the illusion of predictability. This is a natural reaction to an inherently uncertain and unpredictable world. Moreover, we convince ourselves, or allow ourselves to be convinced, that these rituals are rational; that they are based on sound premises and logical thought. Nevertheless, the inconvenient truth is that organisational practices are human responses to highly contingent and unpredictable environments
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
In a complex environment, experts are up against two main difficulties. The first is the fallibility of human memory and attention, especially when it comes to mundane, routine matters that are easily overlooked under the strain of more pressing events. (When you've got a patient throwing up and an upset family member asking you what's going on, it can be easy to forget that you have not checked her pulse.) Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.
A further difficulty, just as insidious, is that people can lull themselves into skipping steps even when they remember them. In complex processes, after all, certain steps don't always matter. Perhaps the elevator controls on airplanes are usually unlocked and a check is pointless most of the time. Perhaps measuring all four vital signs uncovers a worrisome issue in only one out of fifty patients. "This has never been a problem before," people say. Until one day it is.
…so safety isn’t about the absence of something…that you need to count errors or monitor violations, and tabulate incidents and try to make those things go away…..it’s about the presence of something. But the presence of what? When we find that things go right under difficult circumstances, it’s mostly because of people’s adaptive capacity; their ability to recognize, adapt to, and absorb changes and disruptions, some of which might fall outside of what the system is designed or trained to handle.
Sidney Dekker
There are three different dimensions of scaling:
Zooming in: This is about providing additional guidance beyond what the kernel provides when your team members have different backgrounds or different levels of competencies. This additional guidance comes in the form of practices.
Reaching out: This is about dealing with different kinds of development (e.g., in-house, offshore, bespoke, products, etc.). Each has different kinds of challenges and hence needs different methods comprising different practices.
Scaling up: This is about dealing with situations involving a large number of requirements, more than one system, a large number of people, and so on.
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman
<a href="/node/14941">The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel</a>
When there suddenly isn’t enough water to support the lifestyle that has been created, water envy is more than just a matter of resentment or social friction. It stands in the way of making good choices during a pressing crisis, and it can prevent a state or a country from remaking its water rules, its water infrastructure, its water economy, in a way that fairly adjusts to a future of less water, or more expensive water, or both...
Water issues are often a combustible combination of two things that don’t typically mix—something immediate, like taxes, that touches your life every day; and something intimate, like abortion, that taps your deepest beliefs. Water may be mostly ignored, but when it becomes important, it often ends up being about emotion as much as science or rational policy-making. When water becomes a crisis, when it cascades into politics, our responses are hard to predict, and hard to manage... Subjecting such technical decisions to a referendum brings democracy into an arena where it is not at its most helpful. We did not vote on the stringing of power lines or the laying of water mains, we do not vote on even major zoning decisions or the routes of highways or the locations of their interchanges. We elect officials to make those decisions, and if we don’t like their choices, we elect new officials.
Charles Fishman
<a href="/node/14640">The Big Thirst</a>
It was in many ways a repeat of the dynamic behind the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. This from a speech that flight director Gene Kranz gave to Apollo workers at Houston afterwards: "We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we... Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'"
James R Chiles
Inviting Disaster
The scientific method can be described as involving the following operations: (a) observation of a phenomenon that, henceforth, is taken as a problem to be explained: (b) proposition of an explanatory hypothesis in the form of a deterministic system that can generate a phenomenon isomorphic with the one observed; (c) proposition computed state or process in the system specified by the hypothesis as a predicted phenomenon be observed; and (d) observation of the predicted phenomenon.
Maturana
Biology of language: The epistemology of reality
Scientists approach their fields of study with humility, seeing themselves as small spots of intelligence surrounded by a vast sea of ignorance. The scientist approaches nature as a little child does, to discover what it is like. The engineer approaches nature with a swagger, determined to change it into something it never has been and never would be if left to itself. The scientist has a well-developed methodology and follows it wherever it may lead; the engineer knows precisely where to go, and will use any available methodology to get there.
Thomas Gilbert
<a href="/node/12638">Human Competence</a>
The book SDLC 3.0, Beyond A Tacit Understanding of Agile... addressed common issues being tackled within the various communities, including issues of scale, technical debt and empiricism. From this, the grand unifier was presented for enterprises,the notion of integrating the entire end-to-end value stream leveraging practices. Typical "value networks" that result from the selection of competing practice choices across the various activities of the value stream were presented covering such key value-added enterprise functions as Alignment, Acquisition, Portfolio Management and Service Transition. Finally, the book took a stand against the rhetoric of "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools", specifically in the sense that technology is a key enabler to how those human interactions may be empowered. Instead of buying into the rhetoric of tools always thwarting the necessary human collaborations that are at the core of the software development ecosystem, the book chose to attack the complexity of modern enterprise software development infrastructure rather than assume overly simplistic solutions to be universally applied dependent of context.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
At the core, the uppermost reason for not testing is a mindset that everything leaders have ordered has been done exactly as prescribed. This is a remarkably naive presumption, as the history of technology, and construction in particular, is packed with examples of workers who upon finding a tool or design to be inefficient have, in effect, said, I spit on your stupid ideas, and switched parts around or kept modifying them until they fit. Sometimes they told the designer or engineer about it; sometimes they did not.
James R. Chiles
Inviting Disaster
To operate in an uncertain world, people need to be able to re-perceive - to question their assumptions about the way the world works, so that they could see the world much more clearly... The end result is not an accurate picture of tomorrow, but better decisions about the future.
[w:Peter Schwartz]
<a href="node/12757">The Art of the Long View</a>
...if we consider the firm as an adaptive system, re-investment is now a feedback loop operating on a time cycle, which may be studied in terms of the control engineering concepts. A decision to re-invest passes round the system as a "blip': it is a step function. The lagged return on this investment is a smooth function over time, generated by the total behavior of the business, which may now be considered as a high-gain integrator. This means we are making synergistic use of our assets, and amplifying them. It assumes that there already exists a basic plan that will generate this investment; what matters is that we should be able to monitor its performance, so that the plan may be adapted.
...because we are now considering a dynamic situation with appropriate feedback, the model is adequate for all stages of the new firm's growth. At the start, no feedback exists, because no operation exists. It follows that the entire input capability must come from outside the system,.. any rigid plan, however well conceived, will not produce the goods unless it is continuously modified because the operation … is subject to external perturbation as well as to the perturbation of its own basic input. And if we require a steady (or, better still, according-to-plan) output, then a highly ingenious mechanism will be required on the feedback loop itself to modify correctly the error signals. ...the complex process of re-investment in the business conditions its survival. Businessmen know about this very well, although it is often convenient for them to pretend they do not - and to take a short-term view. Secondly, the activity which represents the feedback transfer is corporate planning. This is the very adjustment activity which modifies, or continuously aborts, the plan enshrined in the operation. Moreover, this so-called planning process is not at all a matter of sequentially aborting every plan which the management supposed itself to have underwritten.
The image of the firm ‘in the City’, with the financial journalists, and hence with the shareholders, is settled in the main by the absolute value of the output. Comments may be passed on the extent to which this output, if unfavorable, is as a matter of fact geared to long-term intentions and this is an attempt to measure the effectiveness of the whole managerial control system. But it is easier for commentators to play down the importance of the company's long-term plans, and to make snide (and rather gastronomical) comments about "pie in the sky' and 'jam tomorrow It is also, in the second place, true that commentators will usually observe the process of reinvestment as a recognition of the need to "plow back profits'. But they know nothing of the intricate corporate planning processes going on...
It would be amiable to say that this is because such information is one of the firm's best kept secrets; it would be more truthful to say that this corporate planning work is simply not being done. Management has been seen as a regulatory activity necessary to control some minimum necessary for security. But it has a second regulatory function: to the match between product and market demand. The first kind of regulation is performed in the face of perturbations introduced by the environmental economy, both of the nation and of competition in the money market. The second is performed in the face of market perturbations, which may be due to the aggressive marketing policies of competitors but which are fundamentally caused by the rate of technological innovation.
Earnings generate future earnings, and.. this flow is ‘pumped' by the market and its demands. Revenue is… generated by the match between existing product attributes (including price) and the demands of the market, as conditioned by the economic climate and available technological alternatives for satisfying the same basic needs. Investment funds are seen to be divided between product improvement, product innovation, and the potential operating efficiency. These three factors, which it is open to management to control, represent capabilities of the firm between which investment choices must be made. According to this model, there are only two more control parameters in the entire system worth considering. One is the responsiveness (inertia) of the market, and the second is the power to borrow money both of which are conditioned by other kinds of managerial action.
There are no crucial dates in the development of the firm, except those specified by convention. It is sad to see the whole process of corporate adaptation geared to the purely conventional annual statement of accounts and the chairman's address. Consider, for example, the marked difference which is bound to exist between the time constants of the three investment channels (product improvement, innovation, and better performance). There may well be a sluggish (long time constant) output response to certain kinds of fast varying input because of the complexities of the total system which damp down the initial oscillations. There may also be amplifiers in the system which increase the amplitude of dangerous oscillations that ought to be damped. It is the task of [organizations] to study all these phenomena through its models, and it ought also to monitor managerial action as being itself a generator of oscillation. One thing is sure about a system of this sort it is that the control target of steady response, which entails steady profit making and steady growth can be achieved only relatively. The important outcome of regulation is, as we learned from our study of homeostasis, to hold critical response variables within physiological limits.
When we consider the firm as an organism operating in an environment, and contemplate the intrinsic nature of business itself, it does seem very clear that both the money market and the product market must be satisfied. There are other interests to satisfy too no doubt - job satisfaction and the monetary requirements of the labour force are critical. But such demands on the system might best be regarded as constraints rather than major homeostatic loops of the total ecosystem particularly because the firm's response to the first two greatly conditions the climate in which the rest of the managerial responsibility will be discharged.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be... in order to attain goals, and to function... With goals and 'oughts" we also introduce into the picture the dichotomy between normative and descriptive. Natural science has found a way to exclude the normative and to concern itself soley with how things are.
[w:Herbert Simon]
Complex Adaptive Systems
In a paper, Barabba, Pourdenhad and Ackoff (2002) stated that: “. . . consultants are of two types: self-promoting gurus and educators. Gurus that pontificate and promote their proprietary problem solving techniques do not educate their clients. They promote maxims that define rules of behaviour but do not increase the competence of managers. They promote their proprietary solution as a fix for all problems instead of trying to increase managerial understanding of a particular corporate puzzle. They provide maxims that are really platitudes and panaceas without proof of effectiveness…”
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
People not only assimilate incoming information to their existing beliefs; but do not know they are doing so. Instead, they incorrectly attribute their interpretations of events to the events themselves; they do not realize that their beliefs and expectations play a dominant role. They therefore become too confident because they see many events as providing independent confirmation of their beliefs when, in fact, the events would be seen differently by someone who started with different ideas. Thus people see evidence as less ambiguous than it is, think that their views are steadily being confirmed, and so feel justified in holding to them ever more firmly.
Jervis
The management of the system-in-focus, called the Senior Management, is IN PRINCIPLE unable to entertain the variety generated by anyone (never mind all) of its subsidiary viable systems that constitute System One. The beginnings of a theory of autonomy, of de-centralization, lie in this simple fact, rather than in political theory.
Legal and Corporate Requirements are those variety attenuators that signify the identity of subsidiaries as corporate entities. Legally, System One is bound into the parent bv its Articles of Association, and by all the provisions of the Companies’ Act that concern affiliation. But the parent may, and usually does, specify other constraints on the proliferation of System One's variety. These range from delimiting technologies to specifying the modus operandi.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16119">Diagnosing organizational behaviors</a>
The idealization of human rationality is enshrined in modern economic theories, particularly those called neoclassical. These theories are an idealization because they direct their attention primarily to the external environment of human thought, to decisions that are optimal for realizing the adaptive system’s goals (maximization of utility or profit). They seek to define the decisions that would be substantively rational in the circumstances defined by the outer environment.
Economics exhibits in purest form the artificial component in human behavior, in individual actors, business firms, markets, and the entire economy. The outer environment is defined by the behavior of other individuals, firms, markets, or economies. The inner environment is defined by an individual’s, firm’s, market’s, or economy’s goals and capabilities for rational, adaptive behavior. Economics illustrates well how outer and inner environment interact and, in particular, how an intelligent system’s adjustment to its outer environment (its substantive rationality) is limited by its ability, through knowledge and computation, to discover appropriate adaptive behavior (its procedural rationality).
The question of maximizing the difference between revenue and cost becomes interesting when, in more realistic circumstances, we ask how the firm actually goes about discovering that maximizing quantity. Cost accounting may estimate the approximate cost of producing any particular output, but how much can be sold at a specific price and how this amount varies with price (the elasticity of demand) usually can be guessed only roughly. When there is uncertainty (as there always is), prospects of profit must be balanced against risk, thereby changing profit maximization to the much more shadowy goal of maximizing a profit-vs.-risk “utility function” that is assumed to lurk somewhere in the recesses of the entrepreneur’s mind.
In real life the business firm must also choose product quality and the assortment of products it will manufacture. It often has to invent and design some of these products. It must schedule the factory to produce a profitable combination of them and devise marketing procedures and structures to sell them. So we proceed step by step from the simple caricature of the firm depicted in the textbooks to the complexities of real firms in the real world of business. At each step toward realism, the problem gradually changes from choosing the right course of action (substantive rationality) to finding a way of calculating, very approximately, where a good course of action lies (procedural rationality). With this shift, the theory of the firm becomes a theory of estimation under uncertainty and a theory of computation—decidedly non-trivial theories as the obscurities and complexities of information and computation shift.
[w:Herbert Simon]
<a href="/node/16184">Sciences of the artificial</a>
On the whiteboard at the front of the room is written: How can we make a new product that we can successfully sell? Most of us have participated in this type of exercise at least once, and by now the drill is familiar. Through the course of several hours’ discussion, you will be asked to define your opportunities in the face of your threats. You’ll then prioritize the opportunities, break them down into tasks, assign those tasks to specific teams or individuals, and adjourn. This is a neutral process: there is nothing inherently brilliant or flawed in it. But from the many sessions of this kind that I have led, I have observed two broad outcomes that tell me a lot about the mindset the company has cultivated. What I typically see is a barrier-based mindset. That barrier-based mindset causes people in the room to read the whiteboard question interpreting the words make, product, and sell in this way: Make: What is our capacity for making a product we already know how to make? Product: What is the market for a product we already know how to make? Sell: How would we position ourselves in that market to win customers we already know? Naturally, these three questions align with standard business silos in the typical organization: engineering, product management, and marketing... Asking and answering the question "How can we make a new product that we can successfully sell?" from within these silos is so straightforward that it’s hard to question its effectiveness.
Any company that starts by asking what it can do next will fail to understand what the customer needs to do next. Even companies with large customer research functions typically fail here... Any company that starts by asking what it can do next will fail to understand what the customer needs to do next. Even companies with large customer research functions typically fail here... Companies that only look inside to find the ideas, tools, and resources they need to generate the next successful product may eventually find some of what they need, but it will take too long and generate too few improvements to sustain the company.
James McQuivey
<a href="/node/14841">Digital Disruption</a>
Inherent in the agile development methods... is an assumption that the nature of the software itself is either unknowable or will be unstable over the life of the project. In these situations, the business case of the project changes. Instead of the business case being "it will cost you this much and take that long to achieve that set of known, relatively stable goals", the business case in an agile software project is "as long as you, the customer, are willing to commit resources in stages (i.e., in two- to four-week iterations), the development team will do its best to deliver the most business value it can at the end of each stage. You have the right to change your definition of business value at the end of any iteration. You also have the right to put your resources elsewhere (i.e., cancel this project) at the end of any stage if you decide the business value delivered was not worth your investment."
The WBS is a means to estimate the cost and schedule needed to achieve a relatively stable set of known goals. Agile development projects, on the other hand, are aligned to returning the most business value given a fixed level of investment over time. The WBS will not be of much use in making the business case for an agile project. The agile project's business case involves estimating how much business value can be returned (and when it is returned) given the level of investment the customer is willing to make.
[w:Steve Tockey]
<a href="/node/4992">Return on Software</a>
We frequently talk about side effects as if they were a feature of reality. Not so. In reality, there are no side effects, there are just effects. When we take action, there are are various effects. The effects we thought of in advance, or were beneficial, we call the main, or intended effects. The effects we didn't anticipate, the effects which fed back to undercut our policy, the effects which harmed the system - these are the ones we claim to be side effects. Side effects are not a feature of reality but a sign that our understanding of the system is narrow and flawed. Unanticipated side effects arise becasue we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
How can a simulation ever tell us anything that we do not already know? The usual implication of the question is that it can’t. As a matter of fact, there is an interesting parallelism, which I shall exploit presently, between two assertions about computers and simulation that one hears frequently: 1. A simulation is no better than the assumptions built into it. 2. A computer can do only what it is programmed to do. I shall not deny either assertion, for both seem to me to be true. But despite both assertions simulation can tell us things we do not already know.
There are two related ways in which simulation can provide new knowledge—one of them obvious, the other perhaps a bit subtle. The obvious point is that, even when we have correct premises, it may be very difficult to discover what they imply. All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact. The rest of us must painstakingly and fallibly tease out the consequences of our assumptions. Thus we might expect simulation to be a powerful technique for deriving, from our knowledge of the mechanisms governing the behavior of gases, a theory of the weather and a means of weather prediction. Indeed, as many people are aware, attempts have been under way for some years to apply this technique. Greatly oversimplified, the idea is that we already know the correct basic assumptions, the local atmospheric equations, but we need the computer to work out the implications of the interactions of vast numbers of variables starting from complicated initial conditions. This is simply an extrapolation to the scale of modern computers of the idea we use when we solve two simultaneous equations by algebra. This approach to simulation has numerous applications to engineering design. For it is typical of many kinds of design problems that the inner system consists of components whose fundamental laws of behavior— mechanical, electrical, or chemical—are well known. The difficulty of the design problem of ten resides in predicting how an assemblage of such components will behave.
I shall make a preliminary comment that simplifies matters: we are seldom interested in explaining or predicting phenomena in all their particularity; we are usually interested only in a few properties abstracted from the complex reality. Thus, a NASA-launched satellite is surely an artificial object, but we usually do not think of it as “simulating” the moon or a planet. It simply obeys the same laws of physics, which relate only to its inertial and gravitational mass, abstracted from most of its other properties. It is a moon.
The more we are willing to abstract from the detail of a set of phenomena, the easier it becomes to simulate the phenomena. Moreover we do not have to know, or guess at, all the internal structure of the system but only that part of it that is crucial to the abstraction
[w:Herbert Simon]
<a href="/node/16184">Sciences of the artificial</a>
It is essential to realize that true and false, like 'free and unfree’, do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes, and with these intentions.
Austin
How to Do Things with Words
Judging by the experience of the last fifty years, it seems that major changes come roughly once in a decade. In this situation it makes an enormous difference whether we are able to react to change in three years or in twelve. An industry which is able to react in three years will find the game stimulating and enjoyable, and the people who do the work will experience the pleasant sensation of being able to cope. An industry which takes twelve years to react will be perpetually too late, and the people running the industry will experience sensations of paralysis and demoralization.
[w:Freeman Dyson]
As quoted in <a href="/node/12751">Demosclerosis</a>
In the pursuit of efficiency companies have wrung a lot of slack out of their operations. That's a good thing. No one can argue with the goal of reducing inventory levels, reducing working capital, and slashing overhead. The problem, though, is that if you wring all the slack out of a company, you'll wring out all of the innovation as well. Innovation takes time to dream, time to reflect, time to learn, time to invent, time to experiment. And it takes uninterrupted time - time when you can put your feet up and stare off into space. As Pekka Himanen put it in his affectionate tribute to hackers, "the information economy's most important source of productivity is creativity, and it is not possible to create interesting things in a constant hurry or in a regulated way from nine to five."
While the folks in R&D and new product development are given time to innovate, most employees don't enjoy this luxury. Every day brings a barrage of emails, voice mails, and back-to-back meetings. In this world, where the need to be "responsive" fragments human attention into a thousand tiny shards, there is no "thinking time." And therein lies the problem. However creative your colleagues may be, if they don't have the right to occasionally abandon their posts and work on something that's not mission critical, most of their creativity will remain dormant.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
Slips happen a little bit at a time. Slips don't happen at the end of the milestone or project. Slips just show up at the end. But they happen every day. They happen every hour. every time someone has to make a fresh pot of coffee, answer unexpected email, reconfigure a machine, or track down a maddeningly intermittent but catastrophic bug, slips happen.
You have to manage the granularity of development tasks in such a way that you emerge with visible deliverables over short intervals.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
Sometimes there is an invisible battleground in which combatants, under cover of specialized knowledge and social alliances, seek to take new territory or defend what they have. The dimensions of the battlefield may be unclear to the participants, but there is no mistaking that we are not all on the same team, and there will be winners and losers...
Social complexity means that a project team works in a social network, a network of controllers and influencers including individual stakeholders, other project teams, and other organizations. These relationships, whether they are with direct stakeholders or those more peripherally involved, must be included in the project. For it is not whether the project team comes up with the right answer, but whose buy-in they have that really matters. To put it more starkly, without being included in the thinking and decision-making process, members of the social network may seek to undermine or even sabotage the project if their needs are not considered.
Fragmentation suggests a condition in which the people involved see themselves as more separate than united, and in which information and knowledge are chaotic and scattered. The fragmented pieces are, in essence, the perspectives, understandings, and intentions of the collaborators… as when stakeholders are all convinced that their version of the problem is correct.
Jim Conklin
<a href="/node/14863" target="_blank">Dialog mapping</a>
Social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by authority, by conscious instruction, and by the even more insidious half-conscious influences of language, imitation, sympathy, and suggestion. Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind - its rashness, presumption, and preferences of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence - but also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages.
[w:John Dewey]
In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftsmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. Only in software are these two tasks performed concurrently instead of sequentially. But companies that build software seem totally unaware of the anomaly. Engineering and construction are so crossbred as to be inseparable and apparently indistinguishable by practitioners or executives. Planning of all sorts is either omitted or delayed until far too late. Profoundly complex technical engineering problems are habitually left unsolved until construction of code intended for public release is well underway, when it is too economically embarrassing to back up.
Alan Cooper
<a href="/node/12698">The Inmates really are running the Asylum</a>
To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future
[:Plutarch]
In analog days, the spectrum allocation part of the FCC’s (Federal Communications Commission) job was much easier. It could point to different parts of the spectrum and say: this is TV, that is radio, this is cellular telephony etc. But in a digital world, these differences blur or, in some case, vanish: they are all bits. In the near future, broadcasters will assign bits to a particular medium (TV or radio) at the point of transmission. This is usually what people mean when they talk about digital convergence or bit radiation. The transmitter tells the receiver, here come TV bits, here comes radio, or here come bits that represent the Wall Street Journal. In the more distant future the bits will not confined to any specific medium when they leave the transmitter.
[w:Nicholas Negroponte]
<a href="/node/15505">Being digital</a>
Stakeholders are the people for whom we build systems. A key part of your role as an architect is knowing how to work with stakeholders in order to create an architecture that meets their complex, overlapping, and often conflicting needs.
Rozanski, Nick and Woods, Eoin
<a href="/node/16461">Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders, Using Viewpoints, and Perspectives</a>
Standard processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center. So a new process may tell you, for example, the twenty-nine steps you must go through in the interviewing and hiring of a new engineer, but never give you a bit of guidance on the only thing that really matters: Will this guy cut the mustard? I see design standards that don't tell you how to come up with a good design (only how to write it down), employee evaluation standards that don't help you build meaningful long-term relationships with staff, testing standards that don't tell you how to invent a test that is worth running. Each of these standards says, in effect, "I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work... except the hard part.
[w:Tom DeMarco]
<a href="/node/12672">Slack; Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency</a>
For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build, and was not able to finish."
Luke 5:28 RSV
Evolution explores this landscape with a serendipitous mixture of wild leaps and small steps. The wild leaps usually end up at the bottom of some chasm, but sometimes they land in the foothills of some totally new range of mountains. The small steps lead uphill rather than down, but perhaps only to the top of a molehill.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
Stepwise refinement is the progressive removal of abstraction in models, evaluation criteria, and goals. It is accompanied by an increase in the specificity and volume of information recorded about the system, and a flow of work from generalized to specialized design disciplines. Within the design disciplines the pattern repeats as disciplinary objectives and requirements are converted into the models of form of that discipline. In practice, the process is neither so smooth or continuous. It is better characterized as episodic, with episodes of abstraction reduction alternating with episodes of reflection and purpose expansion.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14337">The Art of Systems Architecting</a>
A ship owner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not over well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts..
William K Clifford
<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html" target="_blank">The Ethics of Belief </a>
Because the future is unpredictable, a strategy can only be built from intentions: Given where you are now and where you think you want to go, now, what can you do, now, to help you get there? A strategy is not a fact, or a forecast, or a schedule, or a roadmap to the future. Is a strategy, then, a type of plan? The two concepts are often confused, since plans deal with the future and so does strategy. We could regard strategy as simply an offshoot of planning... However, as Scottish poet Robert Burns observed about the best laid ones of mice and men, plans are poor tools for dealing with uncertainty, ambiguity, and confusion—what distinguishes real business from business on paper
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
Strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. —George Santayana (1863–1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1,
Every passing day confirms Parkinson’s relevance. Successful bureaucrats, he said, are driven by two guiding forces: 1) “to multiply subordinates, not rivals”; and 2) “to make work for each other.” Every official who feels overworked appoints subordinates, who (feeling overworked) do likewise. Bureaucracies left to themselves—that is, left to create make-work—ultimately self-destruct. They become immobilized and can’t adapt to change. Witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and (a lesser example) the turmoil at General Motors.
[w:Robert J. Samuelson]
<a href="/node/12699">Untruth : Why the Conventional Wisdom is (Almost Always) Wrong</a>
Knowledge is about the past. Entrepreneurship is about the future. We are connected to the past by our memories and to the future by our choices. Information theory moves from the future to the past, while physical theory moves from the past to the future. Events are determined by physical causes from the past and by subjective choices from the future. The entrepreneur surfs the crests of creation in between.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything
<p>- [w:Wyatt Earp]</p>
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive
to change.
[w:Charles Darwin]
Why is it, these analysts ask, that some armies and navies have enjoyed prolonged periods of military supremacy? When confronted with this question, a layperson is likely to credit superior weaponry. Yet a careful reading of military history, like that offered by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray in The Dynamics of Military Revolutions, suggests that most technology advantages have been short-lived. In battle, one side captures the other's weapons or, better yet, those who manufactured the armaments. Bribes get paid and craftsmen defect. Foreign armies lay their hands on blueprints, or weapons get sold to allies who later become adversaries. Tactical and strategic advantages - the produce of inspired wartime leadership - are only slightly less fleeting. Successful battlefield maneuvers and new force formations are usually quickly copied and neutralized. While superior technology, tactical genius, or any of a dozen other factors may explain the outcome of a single battle, they can't account for repeated military success - the ability to emerge triumphant from the chaos of war again and again.
What, then, accounts for long-term military advantage - if not advanced armaments and brilliant commanders? Knox and Murray contend that long-lasting leadership is most often the product of fundamental advances in military doctrine and organization. History's most consistently victorious armies and navies have been those that were able to break with the past and imagine new ways of motivating, staffing, training, and deploying warriors. They have been management innovators.
Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met:
the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy
the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or
the innovation is part of an ongoing program of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time
[w:Gary Hamel]
<a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
It is not up to the artist to define the symbols.
Pablo Picasso
Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/Interactive Corp., was at Harvard Business School explaining the rationale behind the mosaic of interactive commerce companies he had assembled at IAC, such as Ticketmaster, Hotels.com, Match.com, and LendingTree.com. One of the students pointed out that these various businesses seemed to be operating independently, not in a coordinated synergistic fashion.
Diller erupted in mock anger. "Don't ever use that word synergy. It's a hideous word," he said. "The only thing that works is natural law. Given enough time, natural relationships will develop between our businesses."
I agree. What applies to disparate parts of a giant company also applies to disparate people in an organization. You can't force people to work together You can't mandate synergy. You can't manufacture harmony, whether it's between two people or two divisions. You also can't order people to change their thinking or behavior. The only law that applies is natural law.
The only natural law I've witnessed in three decades of observing successful people's efforts to become more successful is this: People will do something - including changing their behavior - only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.
[w:Marshall Goldsmith]
<a href="/node/3012">What Got You Here Won't Get You There</a>
The real world gives the subset of what is, the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The "constraint" is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsic to the thing but are relational between observer and thing.
W. Ross Ashby
Analytical thinking and systems thinking are quite distinct. Analysis is a three-step thought process. First, it takes apart that which it seeks to understand. Then it attempts to explain the behavior of the parts taken separately. Finally it tries to aggregate understanding of the parts into an explanation of the whole. A system thinking process uses a different approach. It puts the system in the context of the larger environment of which it is a part and studies the role it plays in the larger whole.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Take personal responsibility. Things change, so be flexible. Work smart and work hard. Serve others well. Be nice to others. Be optimistic. Have goals; want something big for yourself. Stay focused. Keep learning. Become excellent at what you do. Trust your gut. When in doubt, take action. Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can. Enjoy all you've got. Above all: keep it simple! ... Don't ever let anyone tell you that success in any area of life or business is complicated. Use your head. When it starts feeling complicated, just stop. Stop and evaluate what you are doing. Ask yourself why it seems to be so hard. Ask yourself if there is any way that you can drop some steps out of the process. Ask yourself if what you are doing is just busywork or whether you are really moving closer to your goals. ... Life and business are profoundly simple. Not easy, but simple. There is a big difference. Success is never easy. If it were, there would be many more successful people in the world. Success is hard. It comes from hard work, staying focused, becoming excellent, and consistently delivering excellence, discipline, study, and much more. Those concepts are not complicated; they are simple ideas that require only hard work.
Larry Winget in <a href="/term/847" target="_blank">It's Called Work for a Reason</a>
We doctors remain a long way from actually embracing the idea. The checklist has arrived in our operating rooms mostly from the outside in and from the top down. It has come from finger-wagging health officials, who are regarded by surgeons as more or less the enemy, or from jug-eared hospital safety officers, who are about as beloved as the playground safety patrol. Sometimes it is the chief of surgery who brings it in, which means we complain under our breath rather than raise a holy tirade. But it is regarded as an irritation, as interference on our terrain. This is my patient. This is my operating room. And the way I carry out an operation is my business and my responsibility. So who do these people think they are, telling me what to do?
[w:Atul Gawande]
Too often testing is viewed as a necessary evil in the development process. It only exists because we make mistakes. If we made fewer mistakes, we would not need to do all this testing. We should spend our money on `designing in quality' instead of finding defects by testing. The result of such an attitude may be a test department that is under-resourced and under-managed. Unfortunately, by viewing testing as a problem, rather than an asset, we miss the opportunity to capitalize on the extraordinary improvements that can take place in product testing.
Let us start by putting testing in perspective. The elapsed schedule time for product testing is typically 30 to 60 percent of overall development cycle length. This is not another minor activity, it is a major design activity. ... Test results have inherently high information content. In fact, testing is usually the stage of design process that generates the greatest amount of information.... Most companies misunderstand the role of testing ... because they fail to distinguish between design testing and manufacturing testing. ... Manufacturing testing is done to identify defects in the manufacturing process. ... Design testing is done to generate information about the design. A good outcome is high information generation early in the design process. ... We want a failure rate close to 50 percent....
A participant in a conflict, any conflict, may be thought of as engaging in four distinctive although not distinct activities:
He must observe the environment, which includes himself, his opponent, the physical, mental, and moral situation, and potential allies and opponents.
He must orient himself to decide what it all means, a “many-sided, implicit cross-referencing” process involving the information observed, one’s genetic heritage, social environment, and prior experiences, and the results of analyses one conducts and synthesis that one forms
He must reach some type of decision.
He must attempt to carry out that decision. That is, he must act.
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
Control in a business is something much more than the interactions of its senior managers. It has to do with information of an extent and complexity beyond the capacities of those senior people to interpret it Therefore it has to do with the structure of information flows, the method of information handling, with techniques for information reduction, and so forth. These features of information's role used to be determined by the cerebral capacities of the senior staff. The brains of these men constituted the only media for information handling, and therefore the way the men interacted was equivalent to the way information interacted...
There exists today a capacity to cope with information vastly in excess of the human capacity, the result that the manager is no longer the arbiter of sophistication in control. He must delegate this role the electronic computer, just as he delegated other managerial prerogatives in the past thereby losing them, be it noted, to people who were more expert than he but junior. And just as he retained his seniority over these juniors, just as he remained in command, just as he used the efforts of his more expert underlings to build a bigger and more profitable firm, so now he must use the computer. The manager no more abdicates in favour of computers because they are more sophisticated in control than he, than in favour of maintenance men because they can keep the plant working and he cannot. But he has to know how to organize the maintenance men to keep the plant working, and he has to know how to organize computers to affect the firm's control. Moreover, he has to organize the plant so that it can be maintained; he has also to organize the firm so that it can be computed with.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
When we say, "Men used to think the world was flat," or, "I thought you went by the house," we express belief: something is accepted, held to, acquiesced in, or affirmed. But such thoughts may mean a supposition accepted without reference to its real grounds. These may be adequate, they may not; but their value with reference to the support they afford the belief has not been considered.
Such thoughts grow up unconsiously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief. They are picked up - we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into acceptance and become unconsiously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation - all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion - are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgements proper that rest upon a survey of evidence...
But to think of the world as flat is to ascribe a quality to a real thing as its real property. This conclusion denotes a connection among things and hence is not, like imaginative thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness commits him who holds it to thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibliity of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in accordance with his conception of these objects.
[w:John Dewey]
<a href="/node/4180">How We Think</a>
These six ideas are ... the bricks in the foundation of the materialist superstition:
The first is iterativity. Whether we’re talking about the evolution of learning from infancy or evolution of species from a primal soup, it’s a random walk all the way, starting and continuing under the same rules from any point and always remaining open to further evolution or conditioning.
The next is environmentalism... nothing matters in the iteration but actual interactions with the immediate physical surroundings.
The third is gradualism: advancing only by “numerous successive slight modifications,” as Darwin put it. Monkeys don’t jump over the moon, or land on it—even in their minds if they are deemed to have them.
Fourth is the important concept of monotonicity. This means one unchanging scheme of cause and effect. The iterations are always and everywhere chiefly governed by the same single factor, which always follows the same rules, whether reward in learning or selection of the fittest in biology. With an adequately detailed theory of learning, as one eminent Skinnerian opined, “we could teach English to worms.” With a sufficiently extensive model of recursive natural selection, repeating itself on itself, we could evolve a lump of clay into Arnold Schwarzenegger. These are very strong claims. In real life … practically nothing is a monotonic function of practically anything else,” even Arnold.
The world is full of agents who change their responses or reverse them. A related concept is locality, which means insensitivity to remote influences, past events, future events, or probabilities. To the agent in Dubuque, China doesn’t matter. Nor does the Holocaust. Nor does Omaha. Nor does next week.
Locality leads to the last characteristic: mindlessness—no mental causes, intelligence, imagination, design, will, or knowledge allowed... these principles deny such vivid and vital human experiences as consciousness, memory, imagination, and free will, no one actually believes in the model in all its implications.
In the face of constant empirical disproofs, psychologists have abandoned Skinner’s behaviorism, which has proved entirely unable to explain human acquisition of language, vision, motor skills, and other cognitive or even reflex functions
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, who has spent his career studying greatness and genius, concludes: "No matter where you look, the same story can be told, with only minor adjustments. Identify the 10 percent who have contributed the most to some endeavor, whether it be songs, poems, paintings, patents, articles, legislation, battles, films, designs, or anything else. Count all the accomplishments that they have to their credit. Now tally the achievements of the remaining 90 percent who struggled in the same area of achievement. The first tally will equal or surpas the second tally. Period."
One study showed that a mere 16 composers produced about 50 percent of classical music that is performed and recorded today, while 235 others produced the remaining half. Another study found that 10 percent of the authors had written about 50 percent of the books in the Library of Congress. Research on computer programmers showed that the most productive programmers were 10 times more productive than the least productive, and five times more productive than average programs. Such staggering variations suggests a strong argument for bringing aboard and keeping the best people, especially those in the top 10 percent.
[w:Jeffrey Pfeffer] and [w:Robert I. Sutton]
<a href="/node/2000" target="_blank">Hard Facts</a>
If programmers are optimists by nature, they also have a keen eye for the downside. A hyper-active imagination for disaster scenarios is a professional asset; they have to think through everything that can go wrong in order to practice their craft. If you want to change the world, the Italian radical Antonio Gramsci famously declared, you need "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Today’s software creators are improbable heirs to that binary mind-set.
<p>Scott Rosenberg in <a target="_blank" href="/node/3853">Dreaming in Code</a></p>
When work is organized as a sequence of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves to the organizer, the boss or manager. The process itself has to be prescribed with sufficient precision to make each step fit into the preceding and the following steps. Only in that manner can the final product be satisfactory. The work is orchestrated like a piece of music — it needs the competence of the instrumentalists, but it also needs strict adherence to the score in order to let the final piece sound like music.
Ursula Franklin
<a href="/node/16129">The Real World of Technology</a>
An economic system is a system for the production and distribution of goods and services. But what is crucial for understanding the way it functions is that it is a system for rationing goods and services that are inadequate to supply all that people want. The classic definition of economics is that it is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. If resources - the ingredients of production - were not scarce, there would be no economics. We would be in an Eden or a utopia...
Given the enormous cost of consensus, it is unlikely to be achieved, except on something of overwhelming urgency to an overwhelming majority of people. We easily provide ourselves with food and clothing precisely because there is no consensus needed as to what is the best food or the best clothing. If we had to reach a consensus first, we might destroy ourselves in the process of trying to meet simple basic needs...
Because economic systems are essentially systems of rationing, any successfully functioning economic system would have "unmet needs" everywhere. The alternative would be to completely satisfy all of some category of needs-the most urgent, the moderately important, and the trivially marginal-thereby leaving still more unsatisfied (and more urgent) needs unmet elsewhere in the economy.
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
If you provide software to a captive audience, your ongoing customer transactions are more, not less, psychologically and emotionally complicated than business conducted in a normal competitive setting. Your customers are doing something not unlike doing business with family members. This kind of business is especially problematic - and supercharged with meaning. You must compensate for your customer's lack of choices among several products and the frustration and resentment that can create over time. You must get your customers to 'choose' you in spite of their captivity, not because of it. And since their relationship with you is one institutional commitment rather than a history of successive personal commitments, you begin in a negative posture.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>
In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.
[w:Immanuel Kant]
People study hard and become experts in particular areas. They earn credentials - degrees, publications, the occasional Nobel Prize - that make it easier for us to trust them. They write books, teach classes, and go on TV, so that we all can benefit from their hard work.The results of that work go through vetting processes appropriate to the type and importance of its claims, providing us with even more assurance of its accuracy. As new discoveries are made and sanctioned, the body of knowledge grows. We build on it, engaging in a multi-generational project that, albeit with occasional missteps, leads us further along in our understanding of the world. Knowledge is a treasure, knowing the distinctively human activity, and our system of knowledge is the basis for the hope that we might all one day come to agreement and live in peace.
[w:David Weinberger]
<a href="/node/14656" target="_blank">Too Big to Know</a>
Early in a system’s life cycle, there are many possible system capabilities and solutions to consider, leading to a wide range of system costs. Particularly in competitive procurements, it is tempting to make bids and proposals at the lower edge of the Cone of Uncertainty. This is often rationalized through optimistic assumptions such as “The A team will perform on the project,” “The COTS products will do everything right,” or “It shouldn’t take that much effort to turn the prototypes into products.” Often, such temptations are mirrored with similar behavior by acquirers who are trying to sell their programs, resulting in a “conspiracy of optimism.” This usually results in a project’s actual costs far outrunning the optimistic estimates and creating a large overrun.
It is preferable to do some prototyping, architecting, or COTS evaluations before committing to a fixed price (or, as discussed in the Introduction, to use a poker or blackjack approach rather than a roulette approach)...
The main causes of project failure tended to be projects adopting a total-commitment development approach without considering issues of development feasibility with respect to the full range of success-critical stakeholders. The studies found that the key stakeholder classes common to virtually all projects (users, acquirers, developers, maintainers) consistently had serious incompatibilities among their top value propositions or success models [and] uncertainties in the nature of the system to be developed and in the applicability of various candidate solution approaches.
The second Cone of Uncertainty reflects uncertainties in whether the best solution determined at the end of Stage I will still be the best solution after a lengthy single-pass, total-commitment development period... Total commitment to the requirements for a three-year single-pass development of a new system is likely to find that the three-year-old delivered solution is obsolete or noncompetitive.
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
The attractive oversimplification of a mechanical model of systems... implied the notion of a whole which was completely equal to the sum of the parts, which could be run in reverse; and which would behave in exactly identical fashion no matter how often these parts were disassembled and put together again, and irrespective of the sequence in which the disassembling or reassembling would take place. It implied consequently that the parts were never significantly modified by each other, nor by their own past, and that each part once placed in its appropriate position with its appropriate momentum, would stay exactly there and continue to fulfill its completely and uniquely determined position.
[w:Gerald Weinberg]
I should be at peace. I have understood. Don’t some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys...
Umberto Eco
Foucault’s Pendulum
Although risks may be calculated mathematically, as in the actuarial tables of life insurance companies, the cost of a given risk is no more objective than any other cost. Some people can sleep soundly with their rent unpaid, and creditors threatening to repossess their car or attach their salary. Other people worry about their money in a government-insured bank account. In between are numerous gradations of individual concern for a given risk, and therefore a different psychic cost paid in carrying that risk, or different financial costs paid to reduce the risk.
Anyone who buys an automobile knows (or discovers) that he is not really buying transportation, but is in fact buying a given probability of transportation on given occasions. If he keeps the car long enough, there will be occasions when he has to walk or take the bus or get a ride with a friend. He may do this voluntarily, as an investment, by leaving his car in the shop for regular maintenance, or he may forego that investment for the present benefits of constant use of the automobile, and involuntarily walk, take a bus, etc., at a later time when the car breaks down as a result of lack of maintenance.
Cars which are very similar in the quality of ride, convenience of operation, or aesthetic considerations, may sell for very different prices if they differ substantially in their respective probabilities of continuous service-that is, if they differ in the frequency of breakdowns or the amount of maintenance required. These may be differences in brands of cars or differences in the same car purchased new and used. In either case, cars' price differences need not reflect transportation differences, but may reflect simply risk differences. As in the case of other kinds of risks, however objective the probabilities may be, the costs of risk are highly diverse with respect to individual situations and subjective preferences. An auto mechanic or someone else who is handy with tools may find the cheapness of a particular car more than compensates its special troubles, while a heart surgeon with no understanding of engines may find a car that won't start an intolerable problem when he has to rush to treat someone in the intensive care ward
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Much of the information we receive is ambiguous. Ambiguity arises because changes in the state of the system resulting from our own decisions are confounded with simultaneous changes in a host of other variables. The number of variables that might affect the system vastly overwhelms the data available to rule out alternative theories and competing interpretations. This identification problem plagues both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the qualitative realm, ambiguity arises form the ability of language to support multiple meanings… Rich, ambiguous texts, with multiple layers of meaning, often make for beautiful and profound art, along with employment for literary critics, but also make it hard to know the minds of others, rule out competing hypotheses, and evaluate the impact of our past actions so we can decide how to act in the future.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Internal communication systems in large organizations are often open to many individuals who may wish to send memoranda, announcements, official documents, paychecks, survey questions, or plain gossip. The number and frequency of such internal communications influences how much attention the average recipient pays to each item. Infrequent arrivals of internal mail are likely to receive more attention per unit than a flood of material arriving every few hours. In other words, the law of diminishing returns operates, so that beyond some point there are diminishing increments of attention as the quantity of mail increases. With a sufficient inundation, there will be less total attention paid-less information effectively received-than if fewer communications had been sent. The situation can reach this level of absolutely diminishing returns only because there are virtually no costs to the numerous individual decision makers who decide whether to add more material to the internal communications system. They may all know that the recipients' attention and patience are already strained, but each individual sender also knows that his action alone will have very little effect on that.The
<p>[w:Thomas Sowell]</p>
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about ... Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.
[:Plato]
Phaedrus
We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.
<p class="rteleft"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/opinion/02brooks.html">Elmer Johnson</a>
While the organization as a whole is becoming more and more interdependent, the parts increasingly display choice and behave independently. The resolution of this dilemma requires a dual shift of paradigm. The first shift will result in the ability to see the organization as a multi-minded, socio-cultural system, a voluntary association of purposeful members who have come together to serve themselves by serving a need in the environment...
...dominant cultures, by default, keep reproducing the same non-solutions all over again. This is why the experience with corporate transformation is fraught with frustration. The implicitness of the organizing assumptions, residing at the core of the organization's collective memory, is overpowering. Accepted on faith, these assumptions are transformed into unquestioned practices that may obstruct the future.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
After many years of working in product development, I have concluded that the idea of best practices is a seductive but dangerous trap. Best practices are only 'best' in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives. A change in either the context or the objective can quickly transform the 'best practice' into a stupid approach. For example, a dedicated prototype facility may be a superb practice in one business but an economic disaster in another... The great danger in 'best practices' is that the practice can get disconnected from its intent and its context and may acquire a ritual significance that is unrelated to its original purpose. This distortion appears to arise because of our tendency to start believing the label 'best' as an absolute judgment. Why would you choose not to do something the 'best' way? It requires great mental clarity to recognize that the label 'best' might be misleading.
Donald G. Reinertsen
<a href="/node/2005" target="_blank">Managing the Design Factory</a>
McNamara's insistence on using quantitative abstractions and operations research modeling to run the Vietnam was chillingly captured by journalist George leonard in an essay in which he referred to "highly trained young abstractionists sitting at the controls of giant bombers, many miles removed in height and psychic distance from the consequences of their acts. They address themselves to grid coordinates which first were expressed abstractly on pieces of paper, then encoded in electronic inertial devices. At a certain point in the sky, the abstractionists actuate the devices, which then release hundreds of tons of high explosives. Neither the abstractionists sitting in their orderly, antiseptic surroundings in the sky nor those on the ground who conceived the operation are motivated by personal malice. They are concerned only with clearing out specific rectangular areas of jungles. The planes wheel in the sky and fly away, and that's all their is to it"
H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms
<a href="/node/5657">Profit Beyond Measure</a>
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
[w:Albert Einstein]
To define success for engineered systems, we rely on Webster’s definition of engineering as “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.” Read more at location 599
The definition of systems engineering developed by INCOSE and adopted by the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) is “An interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. Read more at location 604
A system will succeed if and only if it makes winners of its success-critical stakeholders. Read more at location 613
Making winners of your success-critical stakeholders requires: 1. Identifying all of the success-critical stakeholders. 2. Understanding how each stakeholder wants to win. 3. Having the success-critical stakeholders negotiate among themselves a win-win set of product and process plans. 4. Controlling progress toward the negotiated win-win realization, including adapting it to change. Read more at location 624
The most appropriate user interfaces and collaboration modes for a complex human-intensive system are not specifiable in advance, but rather emerge with usage. Forcing users to specify them precisely in advance of development generally leads to poor business or mission performance and expensive late rework and delays.Read more at location 684
The term “satisficing” means not everybody gets everything they want, but everybody gets an outcome that they are satisfied with.Read more at location 706
Stakeholder value-based guidance. If a project fails to include and address the value propositions of its success-critical stakeholders such as end-users, maintainers, interoperators, or suppliers, these stakeholders will frequently feel little commitment to (or even active hostility toward) the project and either underperform, decline to use the results, or block the use of the results. Read more at location 745
Incremental commitment and accountability. Many success-critical stakeholders will object to making total commitments of their scarce resources to weakly defined ventures, but will incrementally commit to buying better information on them. Once a commitment is made, all stakeholders need to understand that they are accountable for keeping their promises.
Concurrent multidisciplinary engineering. If definition and development of (a) requirements and solutions; (b) hardware, software, and human factors; or (c) product and processes are done sequentially, the project is likely both to go more slowly and to make early, hard-to-undo commitments that cut off the best options for project success.
Evidence- and risk-based decisions. If key decisions are made based on assertions, vendor literature, or meeting an arbitrary schedule without access to evidence of feasibility, the project is building up risks. And in the words of Tom Gilb, “If you do not actively attack the risks, the risks will actively attack you.” Many of the hazardous spiral look-alikes described over the years conveniently dropped any consideration of risk, and paid the price of an overrun or cancellation later. Read more at location 748
Requirements (objectives and constraints) Solutions (alternatives) Products and processes Hardware Software Human factors aspects Business case analysis of alternative product configurations Product line investments Intentional reflection at all levels.
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
Designers seek to choose rather than predict the future. They try to understand rational, emotional, and cultural dimensions of choice and to produce a design that satisfies a multitude of functions. The design methodology requires that designers learn how to use what they already know, learn how to realize what they do not know, and learn how to learn what they need to know.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Probably the ultimate root of the modern habit of using quantitative abstractions to represent, or stand in place of, concrete things is language, "the mode of behavioral coordination through which humans bring forth the world they create with each other thing from its context". By using words, human beings give abstract shape to the world we occupy. Language lets human being separate a particular thing from its context. Formulated in a phrase, a tangible thing can then be analyzed intellectually, as if it existed apart from its physical context in the real world. Because of language, “there is no limit to what we can describe, imagine, and relate [as mental abstractions]".
Since language allows humans to objectify and depersonalize particular things, its power is formidable. When we use language to create abstractions and to generalize, we remove and separate particular things from their context and treat them as if they were not part of a pattern in a living system. Thus, the first use of a simple word as "tree" begins to separate us from the natural habitat we share with other living beings. Once we objectify "tree” with a word we stop living among the lungs of the earth in the wild, and begin to see trees as the source of results such as fruit, shelter, tools, transportation, shade, decoration, wind barrier, writing surfaces and toilet paper. By the twentieth century, trees, almost extinct as species, became a harvestable crop in tree farms, where the primary result is to maximize the projection of "fiber" for industrial and management purposes. Thus, managing by result - managing to secure a "sustainable" supply of fiber- subject to the the web of relationships in the natural forest system to the stresses and strains of clear cutting, thereby threatening the long term viability of the natural system.
In the same way that language lets us think abstractly about fiber and trees, language also allows us to treat the abstract concept of the business result as if it were an actual object that existed separately from the messy, organizational context which gives rise to it. Viewed as an independent entity, this abstraction, this quantifiable business result that we entertain only in our minds, seems to be more real and concrete than does the real situation from which it emanated in the first place.
It is not a great leap, then, from seeing abstract results as concrete realities, to trying to manage them by arbitrarily manipulating the relationships from which they emanate. Such manipulation involves separating ends from means, or goals from the acts that achieve them. In Western culture the separation of means (the way our goal was achieved) from ends (the goal or what is to be achieved) has often been accompanied by a belief that the end or goal is immutable and prominent, and the means are ephemeral and changing. Therefore ends seem more "real" and more "valuable" than the means.
H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms
<a href="/node/5657">Profit Beyond Measure</a>
The classic rules of business management are rooted in the manufacturing traditions of the industrial age. Unfortunately, they have yet to address the new realities of the information age, in which products are no longer made from atoms but are mostly software, made only from the arrangements of bits. And bits don't follow the same economic rules that atoms do. Some fundamental truths hold for both the old and the new economies. The goal of all business is to make a sustainable profit, and there is only one legal way to do so: Sell some goods or services for more money than it costs you to make or acquire them. It follows that there are two ways to increase your profitability: Either reduce your costs or increase your revenues. In the old economy, reducing your costs worked best. In the new economy, increasing your revenue works much, much better...
Programmers create software, and business executives create revenue streams and profit centers. Programmers measure their success by the quality of the product, and business executives measure their success by the profitability of their investments. They measure this profitability by applying the language of business mathematics, which recognizes fixed costs, variable costs, corporate overhead, and research and development, but, unfortunately, it has no model appropriate for software or programming.
Alan Cooper
<a href="/node/12698">The Inmates really are running the Asylum</a>
Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. ONe might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned. And in the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner even more than in commerce it lies with the buyer... The most vital and significant factor in supplying the primary material whence suggestion may issue is, without doubt, curiosity. The wisest of the Greeks used to say that wonder is the mother of all science. An inert mind waits, as it were, for experiences to be imperiously forced upon it.
[w:John Dewey]
Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. That turns out to be remarkably close to what modern research has begun to show us, and it works both ways. The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse...
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation. It involves numerous bodily changes that are preparations for action. The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes its chemistry so that it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done. All of that happens outside of conscious control. Reason is tentative, slow, and fallible, while emotion is sure, quick, and unhesitating...
The human organism, then, is like ajockey on a thoroughbred in the gate. He's a small man and it's a big horse, and if it decides to get excited in that small metal cage, the jockey is going to get mangled, possibly killed. So he takes great care to be gentle. The jockey is reason and the horse is emotion, a complex of systems bred over eons of evaluation and shaped by experience, which exist for your survival. They are so powerfuul, they can make you do things you'd never think to do, and they can allow you to do things you'd never believe yourself capable of doing. The jockey can't win without the horse, and the horse can't race alone. In the gate, they are two, and it's dangerous. But when they run, they are one, and it's positively godly...
The horse can either work for us or against us. It can win the race or explode in the gate. So it is learning when to soothe and gentle it and when to let it run that marks the winning jockey, the true survivor. And that is what the dark humor of various subcultures is all about. It's about gentling the beast, keeping it cool, and when it's time to run, it's about letting it flow, about having emotion and reason in perfect balance.
Employees have developed a sense of entitlement regarding their jobs, their work space, and their company. Many people have become so dependent on their company, on society, and on others that they think they are owed a living. They think the company is there to serve them instead of the truth, which is that they are there to serve the company. They think that the employer is supposed to take care of every little aspect of their lives. Get a paper cut? File a medical claim. Someone flirt with you? Just file a harassment suit. And if the employer doesn't respond to this false sense of employee entitlement, they will likely find themselves defending a lawsuit. All of this bothers me. Your company owes you a safe working environment. That's about it. As long as stuff doesn't fall on your head, the company has done its part. They don't owe you an environment in which you are safe from stupid people. Stupid people are everywhere, and while I hate that it's true, they just can't be legislated against. If that were the case, we would have to lock up the bulk of the workforce. Therefore, your bosses, your coworkers, and your customers will all say stupid things to you. You will be harassed. Your feelings will get hurt. You will stub your toe. It happens on the street and at home and you can't do a thing about it. It will also happen at work. It's called life.
Product processes grow, and as with all bodies of rules, each mistake-experience begets new rules or new approvals to prevent repeats. There are few barriers to the birth of such extra rules, and, once they are born, there are no forces for their elimination until a crisis comes. By the very nature of things, bureaucracies become more Byzantine, processes heavier, and organizations less nimble.
[w:Fred Brooks]
<a href="/node/12526">The Design of Design</a>
The essence of engineering lies in the nature of this approach. Take for example a problem that arises in civil engineering, the oldest of the engineering disciplines: how to join opposite banks of a river. What does the civil engineer do? First, he (or she) observes that there are several potential solutions. A bridge might be appropriate, or perhaps a tunnel, or perhaps a ferry service would be better still. Next, the engineer must gather numerous facts. How steep are the banks of the river? Are the banks stable? Does the river flood often, and how severely? What kind of geology underlies the riverbed? How much traffic must be accommodated, now and in the future? What kinds of resources are available to the project (time and money)? When enough of these kinds of facts are established, the engineer can select the best general solution. The details of the general solution, for example "suspension bridge”, are then made specific to the problem at hand and a particular suspension bridge is designed drawings are made, specification are set, and the bridge is built.
Kurt Wallnau, Scott Hissam, and Robert Seacord
<a href="/node/15818">Building Systems from Commercial Components</a>
Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. When we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. Good fit is a desired property of this ensemble which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into form and context.
No one division of the ensemble into form and context is unique. Fitness across any one such division is just one instance of the ensemble's internal coherence. Many other divisions of the ensemble will be equally significant. Indeed, in the great majority of actual cases, it is necessary for the designer to consider several different divisions of an ensemble, superimposed, at the same time.
The form is a part of the world over which we have control and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design we want to satisfy; the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact and frictionless coexistence.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
Russell Ackoff recently announced to his colleagues that "the future of operations research is past" because "managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts... managers do not solve problems: they manage messes". Problems are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate just in so far as managers can shape it by their actions. What is called for, under these conditions, is... the active, synthetic skill of "designing a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about". Engineers encounter unique problems of design and are called upon to analyze failures of structures or materials under conditions which make it impossible to apply standard tests and measurements. Practitioners are frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests. Each view of professional practice represents a way of functioning in situations of indeterminacy and value conflict, but the multiplicity of conflicting views poses a predicament for the practitioner who must choose among multiple approaches to practice or devise his own way of combining them.
[w:Donald Schon]
The Reflective Practitioner, London: Temple Smith, 1983, pp. 3-20
It is not given to human beings - happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable - foresee or to predict ton any large extent the unfolding course of events.
Winston Churchill
Eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, 1940
A plan is an intention about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be in the future. It is an intention because although we may plan to accomplish certain things, whether we actually do, and whether they have the effects we want, depends on factors beyond our control: customers, competitors, governments, and acts of God, to name a few.
You will spend a lot of time trying to map out the future: “If this happens, I’ll do that. On the other hand, if that happens, I’ll do this. On the third hand . . .” You might want to add a fortuneteller or a prophet to your staff. At the same time you’ll discover that these models, which are a type of “decision tree,” quickly become complex. Instead of helping you deal with the confusion of the world, this approach can easily add to it.
Do you believe that you can create a plan for every eventuality? Each scenario will suggest ten more, and you will soon wrap yourself in a web of nodes and arrows from which you will never escape, and you will have to pay in money and time for the effort...
Problems can arise if you have a formal planning process with an attendant, enforcing bureaucracy. With all this investment, there is a tendency to take the output of the process (the plans) too seriously, locking you into the plan as the real world goes on its way.
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates">Hippocrates</a>
<a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aphorisms">Amorphisms</a>
No plan of operation can extend with any prospect of certainty, beyond the first clash with the hostile main force. Only a layman can pretend to trace throughout the course of a campaign the prosecution of a rigid plan, arranged beforehand in all its details and adhered to the last. All successive acts of war are therefore not pre-mediated executions butg spontaneous acts guided by military tactics.
Field Marshal [w:Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder]
How, first of all, is the "requisition' placed? In most firms, an actual internal order for the raw material is originated by B and sent to A. Yet in most instances (although one can think of exceptions) this is a silly procedure, a ritual which people think must be undertaken for the sake of sound accounting in the office. It is contrary to the notion of continuous planning and control developed throughout this book. In fact, Division A knows very well that a volume of this particular raw material flows to Division B, and it currently produces what B currently consumes unless, that is, an interdivisional stock of the stuff is held. In that case, more complicated rules may be used to govern A's output to suit B's input. But in general, and over a period, actuality is the same for A as for B in relation to this material. If it were not so, the stock (or queue, as we call a stock we do not like) would become infinitely large, or else B would have idle capacity for lack of supplies
In an orthodox system, it is a moot point whether or when B be officially informed. The supplying management may be too proud, too optimistic or too forgetful to alert the consuming management. If not, what is actually to be said? ‘We are having a bit of trouble in the annealing, old man’ will alert Division B, whose managers will then try to discover what this remark means. Will the material be late, and if so, how late? How much stock is there? Should they go outside for supplies? And so on.
Now complicate this example one little bit. Suppose that not only Division B, but Divisions E, F, and G also use A's product. Perhaps B could borrow from the E, F, or G stocks. But these divisions are threatened too. suddenly we are in a competitive situation instead of a collaborative one and experience shows that this is where communications break down. For an element of gamesmanship is introduced into an already complicated situation. The fact that all of this can happen (has happened, often happens) leads to a new result. The consuming divisions adopt a cautious policy about their stocks, and try to build them up; the financial authorities become alarmed (the performance of investment is being adversely affected), and they intervene; meanwhile all concerned devise rules and procedures for handling the situation which are supposed to be fair, supposed to be collaborative, supposed to be optimal. But by now people are playing poker with the situation; trust is lost, informal rules are adopted at the divisional level which are intended to secure satisfaction… and oscillation has set in.
...The matter is not referred to the corporate level, if it ever is referred, until the oscillation has set in. This generates a difficult problem in terms of control theory, quite apart from human attitudes. But by the time these too have degenerated into suspicion and defensiveness, there is an appalling management problem of a social and psychological sort as well. Small wonder that these fundamental oscillatory mechanisms in the firm (and in government and society at large) prove so very damaging. They are a curse of our age, because our age has produced so many large-scale organizations without autonomous control. Most of the successful ones I have observed have been entirely unofficial and largely unrecognized.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Still, the army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do. What they decided not to do was almost as interesting as what they actually did. They did not require Model 299 pilots to undergo longer training. It was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the air corps' chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot's checklist. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced.
In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But flying this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any one person, however expert. The test pilots made their list simple, brief, and to the point - short enough to fit on an index card, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. It had the kind of stuff that all pilots know to do. They check controls are unlocked - dumb stuff. You wouldn't think it would make that much difference. But with the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War, enabling its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.
The market creates neither the product nor the process of production. The entrepreneur and his product create the market. The priority of entrepreneurs to markets is suggested in the development of Western law, as Harold J. Berman observed in Law and Revolution: “The initial development of mercantile law was left largely … to the merchants themselves, who organized international fairs and markets, formed mercantile courts, and established mercantile offices in the new urban communities that were springing up throughout Western Europe.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
The manager mediates between the hard demands of the stock market and the soft demands of workers. On paper, there is no tension. Workers will be committed and creative if they are respected and consulted. Good ideas will bubble up from below. Managers will be rewarded for their openness and understanding. But in real life, conflicts abound. Galvanizing consensus is often time-consuming. Sometimes it’s undesirable because some ideas are better than others. And getting people to obey without alienating them is hard if they 1) disagree with you; 2) hate you; 3) are incompetent; or 4) spend the day surfing the Net...
Perhaps managers could once succeed - or at least survive - on status and technical competence. There was a chain of command. Authority was respected or feared. Machines regulated production jobs. This era has ended. The almost universal task of managers today, in our culture, is to serve twin masters, each of whom has grown more demanding. There’s the Organization with its imperatives; and there’s the Individual - each with “needs.” This is a tough job, and somebody’s got to do it.
[w:Robert J. Samuelson]
<a href="/node/12699">Untruth : Why the Conventional Wisdom is (Almost Always) Wrong</a>
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life.” It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal.
[w:Richard Dawkins]
The human capabilities that contribute to competitive success can be arrayed in a hierarchy. At the bottom is obedience - an ability to take direction and follow rules. This is the baseline. Next up the ladder is diligence. Diligent employees are accountable. They don't take shortcuts. They are conscientious and well organized. Knowledge and intelligence are on the next step. Most companies work hard to hire intellectually gifted employees. They value smart people who are eager to improve their skills and willing to borrow best practices from others. Beyond intellect lies initiative. People with initiative don't wait to be asked and don't need to be told. They seek out new challenges and are always searching for new ways to add value. Higher still lies the gift of creativity. Creative people are inquisitive and irrepressible. They're not afraid of saying stupid things. They start a lot of conversations with, "Wouldn't it be cool if". And finally. at the top, lies passion. Passion can make people do stupid things, but it's the secret sauce that turns intent into accomplishment. People with passion climb over obstacles and refuse to give up. Passion is contagious and turns one person crusades into mass movements. As the English novelist E. M. Forster put it, "One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested."
[w:Gary Hamel]
<a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
[:Winston Churchill]
When human operators were needed to physically connect one phone line to another, a larger network meant a slower switching system, prone to bottlenecks and breakdowns.
[w:Tim Wu]
<a href="/node/12575">The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empries</a>
We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
[w:Gaius Petronius Arbiter]
[w: Satyricon]
It is in the nature of human endeavors to try to divide things into neat packages with well-defined boundaries around each. Nations are drawn in a map with sharp boundary lines encompassing them. Universities are divided into departments of chemistry, physics, business administration, and so on. Companies draw organization charts that partition and subdivide tasks, disciplines, and projects.
Providing that the problems, conditions, and tasks are not too complex, all of these boundaries have served remarkably well. Indeed, the applied science of systems engineering depends on just such well-defined, albeit artificial, divisions and interfaces.
Artificial boundaries, as might be expected, cause problems of their own. Geographical boundaries have caused conflicts from neighborhood squabbles to world wars. Discipline boundaries in universities, as in interdisciplinary programs like electrical engineering and chemistry, make interdisciplinary programs like electrochemistry very difficult to manage. Organization charts more often create competition than cooperation. "Turf wars", as they are called, are at the core of university, company, military service, and agency politics.
Complex systems and organizations are particularly prone to how boundaries are specified because... the interrelationships are what create the added value at the system level.
[w:Eberhardt Rechtin]
<a href="/node/14377">Systems architecting of organizations</a>
Adventurous ideas soon become constrained by the observed fact that their proponents cannot think them through to a proper conclusion, it would seem, and the old ideas prevail. It is not because they are successful: they are not, and the world is in a worse mess to prove it.
The first reason as to why adventurous ideas often fail, and old ideas prevail is benign. It reflects merely on human weakness and inadequacy. It is not a theory of conspiracy, which declares that sinister forces are mustered against any kind of innovation. And yet there is a malign explanation as well... The word malign means simply inimical to viability. We do not have to be paranoid to recognize that we are actually ill.
The second explanation says that the new idea is not only beyond the comprehension of the existing system, but that the existing system finds it threatening to its own status quo. Of course it does. That is not necessarily because of its determination to hang on to power, although that is often a factor. It is mainly because the existing system does not know what will happen if the new idea is embraced.
The first explanation said that the innovator fails to work through the systemic consequences of the new idea. The second explanation says that the Establishment cannot either, and with better reason and, what is more, that it has no incentive whatsoever to do so. It was not its own idea for heaven’s sake. The onus is on the innovator. That seems perfectly reasonable, until we remember the power equation: it turns out that the Establishment controls the resources that the adventurous idea needs.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Why, exactly, is the Internet so adaptable, innovative, and engaging? Because:
Everyone has a voice.
The tools of creativity are widely distributed.
It's easy and cheap to experiment.
Capability counts for more than credentials and titles.
Commitment is voluntary.
Power is granted from below.
Authority is fluid and contingent upon value added.
The only hierarchies are "natural" hierarchies.
Communities are self-defining.
Individuals are richly empowered with information.
Just about everything is decentralized.
Ideas compete on an equal footing.
It's easy for buyers and sellers to find each other.
Resources are free to follow opportunities.
Decisions are peer-based.
This may not be a detailed spec for a 21st century management system, but I doubt that it is far off.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
Often... rhetoric... relates to the so-called anti-pattern 'command and control', a nod to the term coined by Henry Fayol. Several mental leaps are made when the word governance is attached to this phrase, and images of sweat shops or Theory X low trust management are immediately thrust into the mind of the recipient. However, governance has nothing to do with controlling or micro-managing individuals, except under circumstances of extreme negligence. More importantly, it is for the investor to decide how they wish to manage or "govern" their investments, not methodologists or the proxies executing their endeavors: in each case, this would represent a conflict-of-interest.
Mark Kennaley
<a href="/node/15585">Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development"</a>
"All programmers are optimists," Frederick Brooks wrote in 1975. "Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists." But programmers' innate optimism is often obscured by their forthrightness about difficulties and problems...
Each computer-based advance in human productivity or convenience or creativity seems to call forth a shadow; our dreams of progress are troubled by crashes and viruses and spam. The picture of digital progress that so many ardent boosters paint ignores the painful record of actual programmers' epic struggles to bend brittle code into functional shape. That record is of one disaster after another, marking the field's historical time line like craters. Anyone contemplating the start of a big software development project today has to contend with this unfathomably discouraging burden of experience. It mocks any newcomer with ambitious plans, as if to say, What makes you think you're any different?
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
A rival good is a thing that can be appropriated by only one person at a time—an egg, an apple, a book, a bond, a tennis racket, or an apartment. It tends to be used up as it is used. Non-rival goods, by contrast, are appropriable by any number of people at one time. As you use non-rival goods and services, they expand, according to network effects (Metcalfe’s Law), by the square of the number of compatibly linked users. Examples are books on Kindle, Google searches, Quicken spreadsheets, operating systems, dress designs, songs, television programs, or economic ideas.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, and any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planned, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Ursula Franklin
<a href="/node/16129">The Real World of Technology</a>
In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.
Immanuel Kant
For of all things that have several parts and where the totality of them is not like a heap, but the whole is something beyond the parts, there is some cause of it, since even among bodies, in some cases contact is the cause of their being one, in others stickiness, or some other attribute of this sort. A definition, however, is an account that is one not by being bound together, like the Iliad, but by being of one thing.
Aristotle
Metaphysics
But to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes... one cannot see that they owed anything to fortune beyond opportunity, which brought them the material to mould into the form which seemed best to them. Without that opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished, and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain...
Those who by valorous ways become princes, like these men, acquire a principality with difficulty, but they keep it with ease. The difficulties they have in acquiring it arise in part from the new rules and methods which they are forced to introduce to establish their government and its security. And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such ways that the prince is endangered along with them.
[w:Nicolo Machiavelli] in <a href="http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm" target="_blank">The Prince</a>
To match the growing complexity of problems, there is a growing body of information and specialist experience. This information is hard to handle; it is widespread, diffuse, unorganized. Moreover, not only is the quantity of information itself by now beyond the reach of single designers, but the various specialists who retail it are narrow and unfamiliar with the form-makers' peculiar problems, so that it is never quite clear how the designer should best consult them. As a result, although ideally a form should reflect all the known facts relevant to its design, in fact the average designer scans whatever information he happens on, consults a consultant now and then when faced by extra-special difficulties, and introduces this randomly selected information into forms otherwise dreamt up in the artist's studio of his mind. The technical difficulties of grasping all the information needed for the construction of such a form are out of hand - and well beyond the fingers of a single individual.
At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty, they also change faster than before. New materials are developed all the time, social patterns alter quickly, the culture itself is changing faster than it has ever changed before. In the past - even after the intellectual upheaval of the Renaissance - the individual designer would stand to some extent upon the shoulders of his predecessors. And although he was expected to make more and more of his own decisions as traditions gradually dissolved, there was always still some body of tradition which made his decisions easier.
Now the last shreds of tradition are being torn from him. Since cultural pressures change so fast, any slow development of form becomes impossible. Bewildered, the form-maker stands alone. He has to make clearly conceived forms without the possibility of trial and error over time. He has to be encouraged now to think his task through from the beginning, to 'create' the form he is concerned with, for what once took many generations of gradual development now attempted by a single individual. But the burden of a thousand years falls heavily on one man's shoulders, and this burden has not yet materially been lightened. The intuitive resolution of contemporary design problems simply lies beyond a single individual's integrative grasp.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
There is another, more general limitation to our shopworn management principles. While ostensibly they serve the goal of operational effectiveness, they minister to a need that is perhaps even dearer to top management's heart: predictability. One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularize the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Regularity (achieved through standards, controls, plans, and procedures) makes management's job easier. It helps executives recognize and correct deviations when they occur. It allows business leaders to make predictions and then stick to them. It reduces the chance that middle managers will be caught out by their superiors. In other words, it helps the bureaucratic class maintain its self-comforting illusion of control. In the bible of modern management, "no surprises" is the first commandment.
Increasingly, though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits. For example, while one can imagine a highly disciplined product development process yielding the "son-of-iPod," a line extension within Apple's family of iconic music players, it's unlikely that a rigid, mechanistic process would have ever hatched the iPod itself. In the 21st century, regularity doesn't produce superior performance... Of course, deviations from the norm can destroy value, as when, for example, they impair product quality. Nevertheless, an organization that worships regularity with a single-minded devotion is likely to have trouble distinguishing between value-destroying irregularities and value-creating irregularities. The risk is that management systems designed to promote alignment and consistency end up culling out variations of all sorts - the good and the bad. With exactitude and invariability fast losing their power to generate above-average returns, companies are going to have to learn to love the irregular.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
People do care about cash. When that annual review begins, your employee is hanging on every word, carefully listening to your tone, wondering, good review or bad review? If it's sounding good, that must mean cash; and cash rocks. If it's sounding bad, they stop listening and start preparing themselves for hating you for the next month, since you clearly have no idea where they added their value this year.
Michael Lopp in <a href="/node/3633">Managing Humans</a>
This is so simple it sounds stupid, but it is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil if you drill wells. You may think you're finding it when you're drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill.
John Masters
A legendary hero is usually the founder of something - the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go on a quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potential of bringing forth that new thing.
[w:Joseph Campbell]
Hero with a Thousand Faces
...the company found itself in serious trouble by 1998. Banking on the success of the new wide-body, the commercial aviation division had launched an ambitious growth program with the aim of doubling production. Instead, Boeing’s supply chain collapsed and work at its factories stopped completely. The company reported its first loss in fifty years. The group’s president, Ron Woodard, was fired, and Mulally was tapped to replace him. Mulally began a radical reformation of the Commercial Airplanes Group. Declaring that “you can’t manage a secret,” he ordered his senior managers to compile every possible piece of data about the company’s operations, organize it all into easy-to-read charts and tables, and present their findings in daylong problem-solving sessions held every Thursday. Based on this information, Mulally and his team quickly developed a restructuring plan. They streamlined every aspect of the group’s operations, cut thousands of jobs, and outsourced work that did not have to be done in-house. A year later, the division was profitable again and setting new production records.
Bryce G. Hoffman
<a href="/node/15126">American Icon</a>
For a large class of unambiguous sentences such as “the cart is on the mat”, the notion of the literal meaning of the sentence only has application relative to a set of background assumptions. The truth conditions of the sentence will vary with variations in these background assumptions; and given the absence or presence of some background assumptions the sentence does not have determinate truth conditions. These variations have nothing to do with indexicality, change of meaning, ambiguity conversational implication, vagueness or presupposition as these notions are standardly discussed in the philosophical and linguistic literature.
Searle
Literal meaning
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. "Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. "Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
<p> [w:Michael Crichton]
Up to a certain point, the ordinary conditions of life, natural and social, provide the conditions requisite for regulating the operations of inference. The necessities of life enforce a fundamental and persisitent discipline for which the most cunningly devised artifices would be ineffective substitutes. The burnt child dreads the fire; the the painful consequence emphasizes the need for correct inference mcuh more than would learned discourse on the properties of heat. Social conditions also put a premium on correct inferring in matters where action based upon valid thought is socially important. These sanctions of proper thinking may affect life itself, or at least a life reasonably free from perpetual discomfort. The signs of enemies, of shelter, of food, of the main social conditions have to be correctly apprehended.
But this disiplinary training, efficacious as it is within certain limits, does not carry us beyond a restricted boundary. Logical attainment in one direction is no bar to extravagant conclusions in another. A savage expert in judging signs of the movements and location of animals that he hunts, will accept and gravely narrate the most preposterous yarns concerning the origins of their habits or structures. When there is not directly appreciable reaction of the inference upon the security and prosperity of life, there is no natural checks to the acceptance of wrong beliefs. Conclusions may be generated by a modicum of fact merely because the suggestions are vivid and interesting; a large accumulation of data may fail to suggest a proper conclusion because existing customs are averse to enteraining it. Independent of training, there is a "primitive credulity" which tends to make no distinction between what a trained mind call fancy and that which it calls a reasonable conclusion.
Natural intelligence is no barrier to the propogation of error, nor large but untrained experience to the accumulation of fixed false beliefs. Errors may support one another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of misconception. In the mere function of suggestion, there is no difference between the power of a column of mercury to portend rain, and that of the entrails of an animaalo or the flight of birds to fortellthe fortune fo war.
Only systematic regulation of the conditions under which observations are made and severe discipline of the habits of entertaining suggestions can secure a decision that one type of belief is vicous and the other sound. It is the result of the regulation of the conditions under which observation and inference take place.
[w:John Dewey]
No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others. Picture the process of form-making as the action of a series of subsystems, all interlinked, yet sufficiently free of one another to adjust independently in a feasible amount of time. It works, because the cycles of correction and re-correction, which occur during adaptation, are restricted to one subsystem at a time.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
The Resource Bargain is the ‘deal' by which some degree of autonomy is agreed between the Senior Management and its junior counterparts. The bargain declares: out of all the activities that System One elements might undertake, THESE will be tackled (and not THOSE), and the resources negotiated to those ends will be provided.
However autocratic or democratic (or even anarchic) your Resource Bargaining proves to be, the governing mode of management is Accountability. Please think about this responsibility for resources provided in terms (not of financial probity, not of emotional dependency, but) of variety engineering. Can you possibly itemize every single thing that the subsidiary does, demand a report on it, and expect a justification? Obviously not. Therefore accountability is an attenuation of high-variety happenings [and] investment is a variety attenuator.
EXAMINE precisely how accountability is exercised and especially what attenuators (totals, averages, key indicators) are used. If in the end, you are appalled to discover that the machinery is inadequate, that Senior Management just does not have Requisite Variety, then you had better own up.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16119">Diagnosing organizational behaviors</a>
Performance reviews were stressful for a couple of reasons. Many of my friends, especially the ones whose talents were very significant but didn't show up on the traditional scales, tended to get lousy performance reviews...
The effect of reviews on morale is lopsided: While negative reviews hurt morale a lot, positive reviews have no effect on morale or productivity. The people who get them are already working productively. For them, a positive review makes them feel like they are doing good work in order to get the positive review— as if they were Pavlovian dogs working for a treat, instead of professionals who actually care about the quality of the work they do.
And herein lies the rub. Most people think that they do pretty good work (even if they don't). It's just a little trick our minds play on us to keep life bearable. So if everybody thinks they do good work, and the reviews are merely correct (which is not very easy to achieve), then most people will be disappointed by their reviews. The cost of this in morale is hard to understate.
<p>[w:Joel Spolsky]
<a href="/node/3634">Joel on Software</a>
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.
General [w:Eric Shinseki]
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.
T. S. Eliot
Burnt Norton
All cherish the illusion that leading Yale, Harvard, and Princeton economists possess vital wisdom about the economy. They generally don’t. Their preoccupation with static macroeconomic data blinds them to the actual life and dynamics of entrepreneurship. Their preoccupation with liabilities and debt blinds them to the impact of their policies on the value of economic assets. Their GDP model, where everything is measured as a kind of spending—power rather than knowledge—pushes them to manipulative policies and redistribution inimical to business value and growth. Believing that a weaker dollar is just the thing to spur a sluggish economy, by hyping the spending category of “net exports,” they miss the consequent devaluation of all the assets of the country.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Senior management cannot mandate improvement, and people cannot be told to implement a process. The result of attempting to force a solution is that people will treat process improvements as a game and the metrics will become almost meaningless. Software engineering is knowledge work that requires best practice as part of the daily routine. The individual doing the work must own the process. This seems to contradict the need for management to drive the initiative. However, senior leadership must reward quality and have the processes in place to recognize it when they get it.
Ross Smith
<a href="/node/12551">Defect Prevention</a>
With no variety of experience, people have no chance to see their own actions as alternatives to other possibilities, and instead of becoming self conscious, they simply repeat the patterns of tradition, because these are the only ones they can imagine. In a word, actions are governed by habit. There are essentially two ways in which such education can operate, and they may be distinguished without difficulty. At one extreme we have a kind of teaching that relies on the novice's very gradual exposure to the craft in question, on his ability to imitate by practice, on his response to sanctions, penalties, and reinforcing smiles and frowns. The most important feature of this kind of learning is that the rules are not made explicit, but are, as it were, revealed through the correction of mistakes. (The second method of teaching) the novice learns much more rapidly, on the basis of general "principles". The education becomes a formal one; it relies on instruction and on teachers who train their pupils, not just by pointing out mistakes, but by inculcating positive explicit rules.
These teachers, or instructors, have to condense the knowledge which was once laboriously acquired in experience, for without such condensation the teaching problem would be unwieldy and unmanageable. The teacher cannot refer explicitly to each single mistake which can be made for even if there were time to do so, such a list could not be learned. A list needs a structure for mnemonic purposes. So the teacher invents teachable rules within which he accommodates as much of his unconscious training as he can - a set of shorthand principles.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm
[w:Winston Churchill]
For decisions to take on meaning, it helps for them to become tangible. It is easier for a distant general to send his forces into battle than one who has to look them in the eye... People often persuade themselves that their decisions do not matter, because they feel powerless to make the best decision... [yet we] know at heart that decisions do matter. We ourselves are arguably the sum total of the decisions we have made.
[w:Peter Schwartz]
<a href="node/12757">The Art of the Long View</a>
Analysis takes time. Indeed, when building IT systems, analysis typically takes almost as long as building the system. Even then, IT architects seldom do as thorough a job of surveying a site as building architects do. Unfortunately, in IT, relatively little time is spent on the equivalent of a site survey. This is despite the fact that very few IT projects are delivered on "Greenfield" sites anymore...
A site survey enables you to understand this complexity, described in terms of the third kind of requirement we introduced earlier: constraints. These requirements do not specify what the solution must do or how fast it needs to go; they simply define the environment in which it must exist. Constraints massively affect the final solution, but the early requirements phase of any project rarely captures them...
Unfortunately, site surveys almost never happen. This is because using standard IT analysis techniques to perform such a survey across an environment that took nearly 4,000 person-years to build would likely be prohibitively expensive. And as soon as one was conducted, it would be outdated.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
Today’s real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies. Prescriptive technologies are not restricted to materials production. They are used in administrative and economic activities and in many aspects of governance, and on them rests the real world of technology in which we live. While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing it.
Ursula Franklin
<a href="/node/16129">The Real World of Technology</a>
Duplication of software is free. That means the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.
Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost.
Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you'll make crappy software, and you won't even save that much money.
[w:Joel Spolsky]
<a href="/node/3635">Smart and Gets Things Done</a>
It should be obvious that fast feedback improves the speed of learning. What may be less obvious is that fast feedback also increases the efficiency with which we generate information and learn new things. It does this by compressing the time between cause and effect. When this time is short, there are fewer extraneous signals that can introduce noise into our experiment... It is common that we must invest in creating a superior development environment in order to extract the smaller signals that come with fast feedback.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
A computer is an organization of elementary functional components in which, to a high approximation, only the function performed by those components is relevant to the behavior of the whole system... any computer can be assembled out of a small array of simple, basic elements. For instance, we may take as our primitives the so-called Pitts-McCulloch neurons. As their name implies, these components were devised in analogy to the supposed anatomical and functional characteristics of neurons in the brain, but they are highly abstracted. They are formally isomorphic with the simplest kinds of switching circuits— “and,” “or,” and “not” circuits. We postulate, now, that we are to build a system from such elements and that each elementary part has a specified probability of functioning correctly. The problem is to arrange the elements and their interconnections in such a way that the complete system will perform reliably.
Almost all of the computers that have been designed have certain common organizational features. They almost all can be decomposed into an active processor (Babbage’s “Mill”) and a memory (Babbage’s “Store”) in combination with input and output devices. (Some of the larger systems, somewhat in the manner of colonial algae, are assemblages of smaller systems having some or all of these components. But perhaps I may oversimplify for the moment. ) They are all capable of storing symbols (program) that can be interpreted by a program-control component and executed. Almost all have exceedingly limited capacity for simultaneous, parallel activity—they are basically one-thing-at-a-time systems. Symbols generally have to be moved from the larger memory components into the central processor before they can be acted upon. The systems are capable of only simple basic actions: recoding symbols, storing symbols, copying symbols, moving symbols, erasing symbols, and comparing symbols.
Only fragments of theory were available to guide the design of a time-sharing system or to predict how a system of a specified design would actually behave in an environment of users who placed their several demands upon it. Most actual designs turned out initially to exhibit serious deficiencies, and most predictions of performance were startlingly inaccurate. Under these circumstances the main route open to the development and improvement of time-sharing systems was to build them and see how they behaved. And this is what was done. They were built, modified, and improved in successive stages. Perhaps theory could have anticipated these experiments and made them unnecessary. In fact it didn’t, and I don’t know anyone intimately acquainted with these exceedingly complex systems who has very specific ideas as to how it might have done so. To understand them, the systems had to be constructed, and their behavior observed... in large part their behavior is governed by simple general laws, that what appeared as complexity in the computer program was to a considerable extent complexity of the environment to which the program was seeking to adapt its behavior.
[w:Herbert Simon]
<a href="/node/16184">Sciences of the artificial</a>
One of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity... when water is suddenly in short supply, we not only pay much closer attention to how we use it, and how much we use, we’re suddenly alert to how other people use water, and how much they use. Rather than broaden understanding - Oh, that’s how much water it takes to raise rice - the result is often resentment, even conflict.
Charles Fishman
<a href="/node/14640">The Big Thirst</a>
Although everything depends on everything else, this "everything" can be grouped into two categories: those elements that somehow can be controlled and those that cannot. This distinction gave us an operational definition of the system, environment, and system boundary. The system therefore consists of all the interactive sets of variables that could be controlled by participating actors. Meanwhile, the environment consists of all those variables that, although affecting the system's behavior, could not be controlled by it. The system boundary thus becomes an arbitrary subjective construct defined by the interest and the level of authority of the participating actors.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Thomas Keating (2009) said that we all have three instinctual needs: (1) safety and security; (2) approval and esteem; and (3) power and control. If you think about it, it is these desires that cause behaviour that others find irrational. They create a filter that censors the exchange of information between people.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
Got any ideas?
<p class="rteleft">[w:Chesley Sullenberger]
But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident- of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
Organizations consist of people, and the smooth functioning of organizations depends critically on the commitments that people make to each other... people will genuinely commit only to things they truly believe in. Consequently, they have to be convinced of what they are committing to.
Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati
<a href="/node/14846">Heretic's guide to best practices</a>
Clearly, the value of a system's capability, as opposed to the cost of producing it, is different depending on whether the stakeholder is a buyer, a member, a seller, or a competitor.
The transportation value of a particular automobile or truck clearly includes more than its negotiated price. To a wage earner, it may include a broadened choice of job opportunities. To a teenager, as parents well know, it is freedom. To a traveling salesman, it is the potential size of his territory.
The value of research, of publications, of resource management and many other functional results similarly depends on who is judging its value and by what criteria. Price negotiating, therefore, can be more than a zero-sum game in which one side gains the other loses. In effective negotiating, few parties gain everything desired, though everyone gains something. The nature of that "something" no doubt will be different for each party. The endgame - much as it is in architecture and design - is one of fit, balance, and compromise until a solution satisfactory to all concerned is reached.
Value can be produced in many ways. It can be in the form of a product created by processing inputs and materials into product outputs. Existing processes be made more efficient or cost-effective. The productivity of an organization can be increased by reducing duplication of common support functions such as finance, personnel management, and legal affairs. Profit can be increased by making systems smarter. And value can be generated as new and unique system functions are created by organizing otherwise separate elements into a system.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhardt_Rechtin">Eberhardt Rechtin</a>
<a href="/node/14377">Systems architecting of organizations</a>
Variation is difficult because of ... grandiosity: politicians and corporate bosses both like large projects – anything from the reorganisation of a country’s entire healthcare system to a gigantic merger – because they win attention and show that the leader is a person who gets things done. Such flagship projects [fail] because errors are common and big projects leave little room to adapt. The other tendency emerges because we rarely like the idea of standards that are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything, whether it’s education, the road network or the coffee at Starbucks.
If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable. When a problem is unsolved or continually changing, the best way to tackle it is to experiment with many different approaches. If nobody tries anything different, we will struggle to figure out new and better ways to do anything. But if we are to accept variation, we must also accept that some of these new approaches will not work well. That is not a tempting proposition for a politician or chief executive to try to sell.
Tim Harford
<a href="/node/12684">Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure</a>
In the quantitative realm, engineers and econometricians have long struggled with the problem of uniquely identifying the structure and parameters of a system from its observed behavior. Elegant and sophisticated theory exists to delimit the conditions in which one can identify a system from its behavior alone. In practice, the data are too scarce and the plausible alternative specifications are too numerous for statistical methods to discriminate among completing theories. The same data often support wildly divergent models equally well, and conclusions based upon such models are not robust.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
[w:Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
Most aspects of life are not so simple. If you want to succeed in a job interview, or in making an investment, or in choosing a life partner, you can be quite sure that there is no equation that will guarantee you success. In these endeavors it will not be possible to limit the pieces of knowledge that might be relevant to any one definable source. And even if you had all the relevant knowledge, there may be no surefire way of combining it to yield the best decision.
Those aspects of knowledge for which there is a good predictive theory, typically a mathematical or scientific one, will be called theoryful. The rest will be called theoryless. I use the term theory here in the same sense as it is used in science, to denote a “good, effective, and useful theory” rather than the negative sense of “only a theory.” Predicting the orbit of a planet based on Newton’s laws is theoryful, since the predictor uses an explicit model that can accurately predict everything about orbits. A card player is equally theoryful in predicting an opponent’s hand, if this is done using a principled calculation of probabilities, as is a chemist who uses the principles of chemistry to predict the outcome of mixing two chemicals. In contrast, the vast majority of human behaviors look theoryless.
While gravity and mechanics may be theoryful to a physicist, they will not be to a fish or a bird, which still have to cope with the physical world, but do so, we presume, without following a theory.
[w:Leslie Valiant]
<a href="/node/14836" target="_blank">Probably Approximately Right</a>
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Mellevile
Moby Dick
Thinking involves the suggestion of a conclusion for acceptance, and also search or inquiry to test the value of the suggestion before finally accepting it. This implies (a) a certain fund or store of experiences and facts from which suggestions proceed; (b) promptness, flexibility, and fertility of suggestions; and (c) orderliness, consecutivenss, appropriateness in what is suggested. Clearly, a person may be hampered in any of these three regards: His thinking may be irrelevant, narrow, or crude because he has not enough actual material upon which to base conclusions; or because concrete facts and raw materials, even if extensive and bulkly, fail to evoke suggestions easily and richly; or finally, because, even when these two conditions are fulfilled, the ideas suggested are incoherent and fantastic, rather than pertinent and consistent.
[w:John Dewey]
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, and adoption.
John Stuart Mill
The producers of these goods and related wealth have to develop skills and deploy capital over many years to make the items available. Time to market may be decades. That Apple iPhone is full of Qualcomm microchips manufactured in a wafer fabrication plant that takes at least five years to build and equip. The chips are the product of a multi-month, seven-hundred-step manufacturing process that has been designed, debugged, and tested by engineers over at least a four-year period. During all that time, little or nothing is “liquid.” The capital is tied up in cement and steel and silicon and chemical systems and photolithography equipment and fiber optic lines and real estate and air freight and expensively trained engineers and executives in companies around the globe.
Geoge Gilder
<a href="/node/15757">Knowledge and power</a>
Defining [the architect's] title is not simple. I once sat in a banquet room at a conference for military software contractors and watched as Raytheon's vice president of engineering asked the crowd how many considered themselves "systems architects." Half the audience raised their hands. Another third identified themselves as "systems engineers." The Raytheon exec then asked them to define "systems architect" and distinguish it from "systems engineer." A long silence followed and then a series of faltering, unsatisfying stabs at an answer. Some in the crowd seemed affronted, as if the very question were impertinent. Finally, one attendee stood up and started reciting the verbiage from an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) standards document, whose boilerplate bureaucratic language only underscored the speaker's point: that a room filled with professionals whose work depended on precise specification could neither compose nor agree upon a simple, unambiguous definition of their own job titles.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
The main causes of project failure tended to be projects adopting a total-commitment development approach without considering issues of development feasibility with respect to the full range of success-critical stakeholders. The studies found that the key stakeholder classes common to virtually all projects (users, acquirers, developers, maintainers) consistently had serious incompatibilities among their top value propositions or success models.
Barry Boehm and Jo Ann Lane
<a href="/ICM">Incremental Commitment Model</a>
In software management, coordination is not an afterthought or an ancillary matter; it is the heart of the work, and deciding what tools and methods to use can make or break a project. But getting sidetracked in managing those tools is a potent temptation. When the cry of "Let's build it ourselves!" arises, geeks are all too happy to rally and cheer. A celebrated (and perhaps apocryphal) bit of graffiti from MIT captures this: "I would rather write programs to help me write programs than write programs." Similarly, there is a saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." This principle, which found its way into the business advice manual The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, appeals to every programmer's passion for toolmaking. But if it becomes an end in itself, it can drive the best-organized project into a ditch.
Scott Rosenberg in <a href="/node/3853" target="_blank">Dreaming in Code</a>
We assume that we see objects or things when we look at the world, but that’s not really how it is. Our evolved perceptual systems transform the interconnected, complex multi-level world that we inhabit not so much into things per se as into useful things (or their nemeses, things that get in the way). This is the necessary, practical reduction of the world. This is the transformation of the near-infinite complexity of things through the narrow specification of our purpose. This is how precision makes the world sensibly manifest.
That is not at all the same as perceiving objects. We don’t see valueless entities and then attribute meaning to them. We perceive the meaning directly. We see floors, to walk on, and doors, to duck through, and chairs, to sit on. It’s for this reason that a beanbag and a stump both fall into the latter category, despite having little objectively in common. We see rocks, because we can throw them, and clouds, because they can rain on us, and apples, to eat, and the automobiles of other people, to get in our way and annoy us. We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.
Furthermore, we see tools and obstacles at the “handy” level of analysis that makes them most useful (or dangerous), given our needs, abilities and perceptual limitations. The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through— not as something that merely is. We see the faces of the people we are talking to, because we need to communicate with those people and cooperate with them. We don’t see their microcosmic substructures, their cells, or the subcellular organelles, molecules and atoms that make up those cells. We don’t see, as well, the macrocosm that surrounds them: the family members and friends that make up their immediate social circles, the economies they are embedded within, or the ecology that contains all of them. Finally, and equally importantly, we don’t see them across time. We see them in the narrow, immediate, overwhelming now, instead of surrounded by the yesterdays and tomorrows that may be a more important part of them than whatever is currently and obviously manifest. And we have to see in this way, or be overwhelmed.
When we look at the world, we perceive only what is enough for our plans and actions to work and for us to get by. What we inhabit, then, is this “enough.” That is a radical, functional, unconscious simplification of the world— and it’s almost impossible for us not to mistake it for the world itself. But the objects we see are not simply there, in the world, for our simple, direct perceiving. They exist in a complex, multi-dimensional relationship to one another, not as self-evidently separate, bounded, independent objects. We perceive not them, but their functional utility and, in doing so, we make them sufficiently simple for sufficient understanding. It is for this reason that we must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world.
[w:Jordan Petersen]
<a href="/node/16663">Twelve rules for life: An antidote to chaos</a>
Twenty years ago we started sending our young people to Japan to study Toyota. They'd come back and tell us how good Toyota was and we simply didn't believe them. We figured they'd dropped a zero somewhere- no one could produce cars with so few defects per vehicle, or with so few labor hours. It was five years before we acknowledged that Toyota really was beating us in a bunch of critical areas. Over the next five years, we told ourselves that Toyota's advantages were all cultural. It was all about wa and nemawashi - the uniquely Japanese spirit of cooperation and consultation that Toyota had cultivated with its employees. We were sure that American workers would never put up with these paternalistic practices. Then, of course, Toyota started building plants in the United States, and they got the same results here they got in Japan so our cultural excuse went out the window. For the next five years, we focused on Toyota's manufacturing processes. We studied their use of factory automation, their supplier relationships, just-in-time systems, everything. But despite all our benchmarking, we could never seem to meet the same results in our own factories. It's only in the last five years that we've finally admitted to ourselves that Toyota's success is based on a wholly different set of principles - about the capabilities of its employees and the responsibilities of its leaders.
[w:Gary Hamel] in <a href="/node/3632">The Future of Management</a>
One approach to making a safer car would be to add structural support in the doors to make the car safer from side impact. It turns out that the additional door structure doubles the cost of the door, makes the doors heavier and harder to open and close, changes the fuel mileage and ride, and requires an adjustment to the suspension and braking systems. Making the doors stronger leads into other design problems, but also bounces back into marketing problems such as ‘What should the price be?’, ‘How much do people really care about side impact survivability?’, ‘What do customers really want in a car?’ All of these problems interact with each other. And at the senior executive level, the real question is ‘Should we continue this project to produce this new car?’
When does the car become ‘safe’? There is no natural stopping point in working out the tradeoffs among safety, performance, appearance, and cost. At some point, the design team will be forced to make a decision. If it were not for project deadlines, the team would swirl indefinitely in ‘analysis paralysis.’ When the car gets produced, there will be reviews pointing out that the doors are heavy and difficult to open when parking on a hill, mixed with lawsuits from people who were injured in side-impact accidents despite the stronger doors.
The design of safer doors is thus not merely a technical problem: It is a political and PR problem as well. The design team can build prototypes of the car and test them, but there is no way to anticipate the unintended consequences of producing and selling the new vehicle. The safe door problem does not have a few discrete possible solutions from which to choose. There is an immense space of options in terms of structural reinforcement, materials, cushioning, window design, hinge placement, and how the door latches and opens. The design team cannot select from a few options – it must collectively exercise creativity and judgment about an elegant resolution of all the design priorities.
Jim Conklin
<a href="/node/14863" target="_blank">Dialog mapping</a>
Consider a simple example of a design problem, the choice of the materials to be used in the mass production of any simple household object like a vacuum cleaner. Time and motion studies show that the fewer different kinds of materials there are, the more efficient factory assembly is - and therefore demand a certain simplicity in the variety of materials used. This need for simplicity conflicts with the fact that the form will function better if we choose the best material for each separate purpose separately.
But then; on the other hand, functional diversity of materials makes for expensive and complicated joints between components, which is liable to make maintenance less easy. Further still, all three issues, simplicity, performance, and jointing, are at odds with our desire to minimize the cost of the materials. For if we choose the cheapest material for each separate task, we shall not necessarily have simplicity, nor optimum performance, nor materials which can be cleanly jointed.
[w:Christopher Alexander]
<a href="/node/14378">Notes on the Synthesis of Form</a>
Power can be concentrated both by monopolistic control of a technology (such as telephony or film) and by the integration of industrial functions (as when a single entity controls every stage of creating and delivering the product). Such concentration through horizontal monopoly and/or vertical integration typically finds its license, its basis for societal acquiescence, in a specific kind of consumer gratification that size and centralization make possible: reliable, universal telephone service (the Bell system), radio shows backed by advertising (the networks), big-budget movies (the Hollywood studios and the media conglomerates), a dazzling device that seems to put the world in the palm of your hand (Apple and its collaborators). To see what is sacrificed to such efficiency, polish, and convenience, however, takes work, and to some it may forever remain invisible. It requires appreciating the merits of systems in which, so to speak, the trains do not always run on time.
[w:Tim Wu]
<a href="/node/12575">The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empries</a>
Size is a natural result of growth, but growth itself cannot be commandeered; it can only be nurtured and encouraged by providing a suitable environment. Growth occurs; it is not made. Within a growth model, all that human intervention can do is to discover the best conditions for growth and then try to meet them. In any given environment, the growing organism...
Production, then, is predictable, while growth is not. There is something comforting in a production model — everything seems in hand, nothing is left to chance — while growth is always chancy.
Ursula Franklin
<a href="/node/16129">The Real World of Technology</a>
Unhappy with late deliveries, a project manager decides he can reduce variability by inserting a safety margin or buffer in his schedule. He reduces uncertainty in the schedule by committing to an 80 percent confidence schedule. But, what is the cost of this buffer? The project manager is actually trading cycle time for variability. We can only know if this is a good trade-off if we quantify both the value of the cycle time and the economic benefit of reduced variability.
Donald Reinertsen
<a href="/node/12635">The Principles of Product Development Flow</a>
In a business, departments are coordinated into divisions, divisions into groups, groups into giant corporations. The various levels are themselves largely autonomous and the controls exerted are mainly algedonic.
The head of the corporation himself looks upwards to a metasystem called 'the industry', and beyond that to another called "the government'. Both of these are linked to his corporation by algedonic loops. But although one can readily envisage the rest of the hierarchy until a total system of cosmic size is envisioned, one must in practice settle for a particular level above as the ultimate arbiter of one's own affairs. None of us can manage to influence more than one or two metasystems above our own, and normally, we accept the next-level algedonic input as speaking an 'ultimate' language.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Any transmission contained a countable number of symbols. Each symbol represented a choice; each was selected from a certain set of possible symbols—an alphabet, for example—and the number of possibilities, too, was countable. The number of possible words is not so easy to count, but even in ordinary language, each word represents a selection from a set of possibilities...
The number of symbols available at any one selection obviously varies widely with the type of symbols used, with the particular communicators and with the degree of previous understanding existing between them...
[w:James Gleick]
<a href="/node/12611">The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood</a>
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration... System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2...
The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away... attention is needed for the surprising stimulus to be detected. Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.
System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions... System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains... System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.
The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance. The arrangement works well most of the time because System 1 is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and generally appropriate. System 1 has biases, however, systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances. As we shall see, it sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked, and it has little understanding of logic and statistics. One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot be turned off.
[w:Daniel Kahneman]
<a href="/node/12721">Thinking Fast and Slow</a>
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Edward Abbey
The correct solution of any problem depends primarily on a true understanding of what the problem really is, and wherein lies its difficulty. We may profitably pause upon the threshold of our subject to consider first, in a more general way, its real nature: the causes which impede sound practice; the conditions on which success or failure depends; the directions in which error is most to be feared. Thus we shall attain that great perspective for success in any work—a clear mental perspective, saving us from confusing the obvious with the important, and the obscure and remote with the unimportant.
Arthur M. Wellington
The Economic Theory of the Location of Railroads
When companies and divisions and departments get themselves totally stuck, when they can't learn their way out of a paper bag, they often look to change the lines and boxes on the org chart. They'd be better off to concentrate on the space between those lines and boxes. Since healthy organizations use this white space as their learning center, you can bet that the nonlearners have got trouble exactly in the white space. Instead of being vital and collaborative, their white space is isolating and dangerous to explore.
[w:Tom DeMarco]
<a href="/node/12672">Slack; Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency</a>
People can do remarkably well in controlling complex machines whose workings are fully understood and open to view. One example is how crews manage to land airplanes on the decks of aircraft carriers at one-minute intervals or less with very few accidents, especially considering the hazards. When meeting a new system, people need time to know its workings under good conditions and bad. The most dangerous time is when the operators don't know what they don't know.
Jame R. Chiles
Inviting Disaster
.. language ... allows us to treat the abstract concept of the business result as if it were an actual object that existed separately from the messy, organizational context which gives rise to it. You don't recognize this abstraction. The quantifiable business result that we entertain only in our minds seems to be more real and concrete than does the real situation from which it emanated in the first place. It is not a great leap, then, from seeing abstract results as concrete realities, to trying to manage them by arbitrarily manipulating the relationships from which they emanate. Such manipulation involves separating ends from means, or goals from the acts that achieve them. In Western culture, this separation of means (the way our goal was achieved) from ends (the goal or what was to be achieved) has often been accompanied by a belief that the end or goal is immutable and prominent, and the means are ephemeral and changing. Therefore ends seem more "real" and more "valuable" than the means.
H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms
<a href="/node/5657">Profit Beyond Measure</a>
Much of everyday human decision making appears to be of a similar nature—it is based on a competent ability to predict from past observations without any good articulation of how the prediction is made or any claim of fundamental understanding of the phenomenon in question. The predictions need not be perfect or the best possible. They need merely to be useful enough.
First, there is the notion that it is important to specify what we expect a learning algorithm to be able to do before we can declare it to be successful. Second, using such a specification, we can then discuss problems that are not learnable—some environments will be so complex that it is impossible for any entity to cope. Third, there is the question of how broad a functionality one wants to have beyond generalization in the machine learning sense. To have intelligent behavior, for example, one needs at least a reasoning capability on top of learning.
[w:Leslie Valiant]
<a href="/node/14836" target="_blank">Probably Approximately Right</a>
Since man does not create physical matter, those who handle material objects in the production process are not producers in that sense. Economic benefits result from the transformation of matter in form, location, or availability (intellectually or temporally). It is these transformations that create economic benefits valued by consumers, and whoever arranges such transformations contributes to the value of things, whether his hands actually come into contact with physical objects or not
[w:Thomas Sowell]
<a href="/node/12627" target="_blank">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
[w:King Solomon]
Ecclesiastes 9:11
In cybernetics, the number of distinguishable items (or distinguishable states of some item) is called the "variety'. So we may sum up by saying that the output variety must (at least) match the input variety for the system as a whole and for the input arrangement and the output arrangement considered separately. This is a vitally important application of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, which says that control can be obtained only if the variety of the controller (and in this case of all the parts of the controller) is at least as great as the variety of the situation to be controlled. This, like all profound statements of natural law, is perfectly obvious once it has been pointed out.
There is no great difficulty, however, in finding examples of attempted control systems which disobey this law quite flagrantly, and therefore do not succeed. From traffic control to the control of the national economy, this fallacy is apparent; indeed, this is one of the key problems of control in a firm. For management always hopes to devise systems that are simple and cheap, but often ends up by spending vast sums of money to inject requisite variety which should have been designed into the system in the first place.
Stanford Beer
<a href="/node/16083">Brain of the firm</a>
Thinking is important because, as we have seen, it is that function in which given or ascertained facts stand for or indicate others which are not directly ascertained. But the process of reaching the absent from the present is peculiarly exposed to error; it is liable to be influenced by almost any number of unseen and unconsidered causes - past experience, received dogmas, the stirring of self-interest, the arousing of passion, sheer mental laziness, a social environment steeped in biased traditions or animated by false expectations, and so on... Any inference may go astray, and there are standing influences ever ready to assist it going wrong. What is important is that every inference shall be a tested inference; or (since often this is not possible) that we shall discriminate between beliefs that rest upon tested evidence and those that do not, and shall be accordingly on our guard as to the kind and degree of assent yielded.
Views are formal, bounded perspectives of an overall project or problem. Views are typically maintained by a single person or a like-minded, similarly skilled team... We rarely have the opportunity to build a complete, self-contained system on a Greenfield site with a local team. Whatever we build must satisfy the new capabilities required and also use the information and facilities that are present in the existing IT environment. For example, for any new system that must communicate with other existing systems, existing users must be able to operate it, and the existing maintenance staff must be able to support it. Each of those areas (business analysts looking at new functions, data modelers and database administrators looking at existing data and other system owners, and so on) requires us to find, talk to, and establish a working relationship with yet another group of people. This is increasingly difficult when groups are located in separate time zones... This tendency to segment the whole into a complex network of intersecting and overlapping Views causes three types of communication difficulties: Inconsistency, Ambiguity, and Parochialism...
If a programmer notices during the project's coding stage that the system under construction needs to talk to another system, many previously written documents will need to be updated, including plans, architectures, designs, and estimation models. In addition, many people will need to know about those changes so that they can act on them. Whenever the shared information is updated in one place, it must be updated in all the other places it is found. Unfortunately, this requires everyone to know where the information is duplicated and to follow a rigorous process.
The more connections exist, the greater the burden of keeping everything in step and the reduced likelihood that it actually will happen. This growth in connections is exponential instead of linear in nature because every new View could conceivably be connected to every previous View. In reality, each new View is connected to only a small proportion of the other Views, but even in such a model, the communication overhead grows faster than the size of the project.
Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
<a href="/node/15893">Eating the IT Elephant</a>
What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature in the scheme of things.
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
What you typically find in this situation, as we have all seen, is the “vision statement” that says nothing (“We want to be the best.”) or worse, collects a grab bag of trite clichés in one convenient location (“We aspire to empower all our people to achieve their personal goals, while delivering the greatest value proposition to our customers.”) My experience suggests that the reason many companies find it so hard to write vision statements that work is that they have no vision that employees or customers find compelling.
Chet Richards
<a href="/node/12690">Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business</a>
Monarch is easily debunked. The actual record of kings is abysmal - full of tyranny. And yet where we are forbidden to honor a king we will honor millionaires, athletes, and film stars instead - even famous gangsters. For spiritual nature, like physical nature, will be served. Deny it food and it will gobble poison.
Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization. That is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.
[w:Kevin Kelly]
A group of programmers were presenting a report to the Emperor. "What was the greatest achievement of the year?", the Emperor asked.
The programmers spoke among themselves and then replied, "We fixed 50% more bugs this year than we fixed last year."
The Emperor looked on them in confusion. It was clear that he did not know what a "bug" was. After conferring in low undertones with his chief minister, he turned to the programmers, his face red with anger. "You are guilty of poor quality control. Next year there will be no bugs!", he demanded.
And sure enough, when the programmers presented their report to the Emperor the next year, ther was no mention of bugs.
[w:Gerald Weinberg]
Measuring the success of an organization hasn't been an easy proposition. As the manifestation of success, growth has been considered an important performance measure of an organization. If an organization is successful, most probably it will grow; however, if an organization is growing this does not necessarily mean that it is successful. One can easily grow by "faking," or making lousy acquisitions. But unfortunately two turkeys will not make an eagle. And that is exactly how many organizations have grown, only to destroy themselves... An organization's success is the product of the interactions among the five basic processes of throughput, decision making, learning and control, membership, and conflict management. These processes correspond with generating and disseminating wealth, power, knowledge, beauty and values.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
Most employees are simply not doing a good job; in fact, they barely do their jobs at all. Workers are poorly trained, if trained at all. Customer service isn't just bad, it is atrocious. And companies tolerate it, holding no one responsible while blaming the stupidity of the customer or a bad economy instead of their employees and, ultimately, themselves. Sales results are down in most companies because the salespeople don't pick up the phone and actually talk to customers. Customer service is horrible because employees aren't working at serving their customers, and their managers don't care enough to do anything about it. Employees don't do their jobs because no one expects them to, and there are no real penalties for not doing their jobs... What is work? Being productive. Getting results. That's why they hired you. You are there to generate more revenue for the company than you cost the company. Your contribution must outweigh your expense. You do that not by dilly-dallying around but by doing the assigned tasks in a fast, efficient, cost-effective way. You do that by being proficient at doing the right things. You will know you are doing a good job when you are tired from doing it. You will know you are working when you break a sweat - either physically or mentally. Got it?
Larry Winget in <a href="/term/847" target="_blank">It's Called Work for a Reason</a>
When deciding what to include in a view , ask yourself the following questions:
View scope: What structural aspects of the architecture are you trying to represent? For example, are you trying to define the runtime functional elements and their intercommunication, or the runtime environment and how the system is deployed into it? Do you need to represent the dynamic or static elements of these structures? (For example , in the case of the functional element structure, do you wish to show the elements and the connectors between them, or the sequence of interactions they perform in order to process an incoming request, or both?)
Element types: What type(s) of architectural element are you trying to categorize? For example, when considering how the system is deployed, do you need to represent individual server machines, or do you just need to represent a service environment (like Force.com SiteForce or Google AppEngine) that your system elements are deployed into?
Audience: What class(es) of stakeholder is the view aimed at? A view may be narrowly focused on one class of stakeholder or even a specific individual, or it may be aimed at a larger group whose members have varying interests and levels of expertise
Audience expertise: How much technical understanding do these stakeholders have? Acquirers and users, for example , will be experts in their subject areas but are unlikely to know much about hardware or software, while the converse may apply to developers or support staff
Scope of concerns: What stakeholder concerns is the view intended to address? How much do the stakeholders know about the architectural context and background to these concerns?
Level of detail: How much do these stakeholders need to know about this aspect of the architecture? For nontechnical stakeholders such as users , how competent are they in understanding its technical details?
Nick Rozanski
<a href="/node/16438>Software System Archiitecture</a>
To influence the actors in our transactional environment we have to understand why they do what they do. Understanding is different from both information and knowledge. Information deals with the "what?" question, knowledge with the "how?" question, and understanding with the "why?" question... The why question is the matter of purpose, that of choice. And the choice is the product of the interactions among the three dimensions: rational, emotional, and cultural. Rational choice is the domain of self-interest, or the interest of the decision-maker, not the observer. A rational choice is not necessarily a wise choice. It reflects only the perceived interest of the decision-maker at the time. Meanwhile, wisdom has ethical implications and considers the consequences of an action in the context of a collectivite.
John Sterman
<a href="/node/2040" target="_blank">Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World</a>
It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.
Will Rogers
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.
[w:Peter Drucker]
As Thomas Hobbes observed in the 17th century, life under mob rule is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and hardly ever short enough. Life on a poorly run software project is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and hardly ever short enough.
[w:Steve McConnell]
<a href="/node/2415">Software Project Survival Guide</a>
The most basic of all decisions is who shall decide. This is easily lost sight of in discussions that proceed directly to the merits of particular issues, as if they could be judged from a unitary, or God's eye, viewpoint. A more human perspective must recognize the respective advantages and disadvantages of different decision-making processes, including their widely varying costs of knowledge, which is a central consideration often overlooked in analyses which proceed as if knowledge were either complete, costless, or of a "given" quantity. Decision-making processes differ not only in the quantity, quality, and cost of knowledge brought to bear initially, but also and perhaps still more so, in the feedback of knowledge and its effectiveness in modifying the initial decision.
[w:Thomas Sowell]
<a href="/node/12627">Knowledge and Decisions</a>
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
[w:Thomas Huxley]
What's the engineering specification for reasoning and learning? There are no engineering specs, so what are they working from except observation?"And we are notoriously bad observers of ourselves. "A vast body of studies in psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science show how over and over we are terrible at introspection," Granger said. "We don't have a clue about our own behaviors nor the operations that underlie them.
Granger notes we're also bad at making rational decisions, providing accurate eye-witness accounts, and remembering what just happened. But our limitations as observers don't mean the cognitive sciences that rely on observation are all bunk. Granger just thinks they're the wrong tools for penetrating intelligence.
Our Final Invention
James Barrat
The Fundamental System Success Theorem states:
A system will be successful if and only if it makes winners of its success-critical stakeholders.
The proof of “if” was summarized as follows:
Everyone significant is a winner.
Nobody significant is left to complain.
Some external critics may complain that the system did not use their favorite technology, but if they are not success-critical, they cannot affect the success of the project for the success-critical stakeholders.
The proof of “only if” was summarized as follows:
Nobody wants to lose.
Prospective losers will refuse to participate, or will counterattack.
The usual result is lose-lose.
Barry Boehm
<a href="/ICSM" target="_blank">Incremental Commitment Spiral Model</a>
Wisdom means "knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know," especially striking a balance between arrogance (assuming you know more than you do) and insecurity (believing you know too little to act). This attitude enables people to act on their present knowledge while doubting what they know. It means they can do things now, as well as keep learning along the way.
[w:Jeffrey Pfeffer] and [w:Robert Sutton]
<a href="/node/2000" target="_blank">Hard Facts</a>
Mulally and his boss, Philip Condit, instituted a new policy of enforced cooperation and transparency. This was Working Together, and it required the top leaders of each discipline and function to meet every week to go over their progress, discuss problems, and figure out how to deal with them as a team. “It was a point of conflict to begin with. You know, an engineer with pride wants to find the solution to his problems. And it’s not a natural thing to go out and explore publicly the particular problems you have,” said Ronald Ostrowski, who became chief engineer of the program after Mulally was promoted to general manager. “There was resistance at first.” Mulally overcame it by inviting a documentary crew to film the entire process. He knew the cameras would keep everyone on their best behavior.
Bryce G. Hoffman
<a href="/node/15126">American Icon</a>
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
John F Kennedy
on Theodore Roosevelt
Managers like to implement measurement systems, and they like to tie compensation to performance based on these measurement systems. But in the absence of 100 percent supervision, workers have an incentive to "work to the measurement," concerning themselves solely with the measurement and not with the actual value or quality of their work. Software organizations tend to reward programmers who a) write lots of code and b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and worry about fixing it later, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win.
[w:Joel Spolsky]
<a href="/node/3634">Joel on Software</a>
If software development activity is to be managed, the product must be periodically forced to the surface, where all of the team's efforts to date can be scrutinized and the effects of their creative or pathological drives analyzed. And the information that becomes available when the entire product under construction is forced to the surface as a united whole, or artifact, which provides the basis for the team;s further efforts.
Jim McCarthy
<a href="/node/12217">Dynamics of Software Development</a>