Brevity

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

A metalanguage for organizations

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>

A stakeholder's tunnel vision

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 mistakes

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>

Accessibility of value

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>

Accounting for software

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>

Achieving balance

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>

Acquiring knowledge

...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

Action

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

Frank Tibolt

Action orientation

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>

Adaptive learning organizations

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).

Adding value through rearrangement

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>

Adjacent possible

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>

All glory is fleeting

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)

Almost right

The difference between failure and success is the difference between doing something almost right and doing something right.

Ben Franklin

Amplifiers of human capability

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>

Anticipation

You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

Henry Ford

Architectural orientation

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>

Architectural problem structuring

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>

Architectural solution harmonization

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>

Architecture goodness

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>

Are plans worth it?

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

<p>- [w:Dwight Eisenhower]</p>

Are you certain?

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. 

Are you going to enforce the rules?

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]

Areas of concern

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>

Artifacts

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>

Authentic ends

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>

Authority boundaries

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>

Basic decision elements

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>

Batches too big to fail

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>

Benefits of views and viewpoints

• 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>

Best and worst of times

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]

Best practice risk

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>

Binary classifiers

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>

Blends of hierarchical and market features

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>

Blueprints as metaphors

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>

Boundaries and interfaces

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>

Bravery

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]

Breaking up batches

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>

Breaking up the work

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>

Brrvity

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

Bugs

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

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status

Lawrence J Peters

Bursts of value

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>

Business case

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 as a tool

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>

Cast your nets wide

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]

Causal inference gaps

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>

Causation vs Correlation

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.

Central vs distributed control

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>

Changing the rules

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>

Changing the World

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]

Channel and transducer capacity

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>

Characteristics of four operating models

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>

Checklists under pressure

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.

Classical hierarchical decomposition

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>

Cleanliness next to godliness

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

Clogging the pipeline

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>

Clueless precision

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about

[w:John Von Neumann]

Collaboration

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>

Commander's intent

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:

1. If we do nothing else during tomorrow's mission, we must:

2. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is:

Commitments

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>

Communications attenuation

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>

Compensating for mental models

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

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>

Competition and efficiency

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>

Complex system principles

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>

Complexity

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>

Computers as change agents

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>

Conceptual framework

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Conceptual schemes

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>

Configurability

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>

Connectivity

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

[w:John Muir]

Connectivity

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

[w:John Muir]

Consolidation

Nature... doth not that by many things, which may be done by few.

[w:Galileo Galilei]

Consolidation

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>

Constrains of scare relevant information

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>

Context matters

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]

Control points

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>

Controlling process variability

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>

Coordinated teamwork

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.

Copying best practices

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>

Copying mindsets

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>

Correcting transfer functions

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>

Cost and efficiency

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

Cost of underutilized capacity

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>

Cost-cutting and quality

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>

Counter-intuitiveness

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>

Creation of new order of things

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]

Creativity and testable hypotheses

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>

Critical ratios

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>

Cultural change

In the end, management doesn't change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

[w:Lou Gerstner]

Dealing in abstractions

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>

Deconstructing messes

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>

Decoupling complexity

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>

Defending the status quo

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>

Defining the problem

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]

Defying comprehension

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>

Denial

It is hard to get a man to understand something if his living depends upon him not understanding it.

[w:Upton Sinclair]

Denial is not just a river in Egypt

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 and politics

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>

Design and problem solving

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>

Design conversations

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>

Design entanglements

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>

Design is important

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>

Design philosophy

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>

Design substance, not presentation, is king

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>

Design's Best Practices might not be

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]

Designing around constraints

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>

Development is messy

Those with a passion for law or sausage should watch neither being made

<p>[w:Mark Twain]</p>

Developmental consequences of delay

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>

Discovering the problem

 Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is.

Gordon Glegg

The Design of Design

Disenfranchisement

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>

Disorientation

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

Distilling different perspectives

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>

Distributed computing

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>

Diversity

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]

Diversity of viewpoints

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>

Elacticity of supply

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>

Embedded system definition

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>

Emergent capabilities and values

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>

Enabling convergence

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 as a profession

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>

Engineers do not lead normal lives

If an engineer loses The Knack, the results can be devastating.

Baby Dilbert's doctor

<a href="

target="_blank">The Knack</a>

Epic abstractions

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>

Epistemological Contextualism

...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>

Essential learning by doing

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>

Essential lessons

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

[w:Mark Twain]

Estimates and plans

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

Evidence of Momentum

Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

Henry Ford

Exercising real options

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>

Expectations of project management stakeholders

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>

Experts, consultants, and change

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>

Exploiting production cycle efficiencies

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>

Exploration, Valuation, and Foundations

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>

Extreme accountability

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>

Fallible filters

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>

Faster horses

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.

[w:Henry Ford]

Feature categories

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>

Feedback

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>

Feedback filters

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>

Financial steerage

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>

Fiscal tradeoffs

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>

Fitness evolves

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>

Fitness to patterns

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>

Five myths of changing behavior

• 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>

Five thousand things

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>

Fixing technology

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>

Flawed cues

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>

Flawed understanding

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]

For recognition, decisions, and selections

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>

Foundations for success

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>

Frentic enthusiasm

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

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>

Fundamental laws of organizational systems

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>

Fundamentals of system success

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>

Futile limits of uncertainty

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

General thoughts on generalization

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>

Generally predictable

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>

Get branded!

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:

1. Think like an Entrepreneur

2. Always be a "Closer"

3. Embrace Marketing

4. Pursue Mastery

5. Thrive on Ambiguity

6. Laugh Off Vigorous Screw-ups

7. Nurture your Network

8. Relish Technology

9. Grovel before the Young

10. Cultivate a Passion for Renewal

[w: Tom Peters]

<a href="/node/1985" target="_blank">Re-Imagine</a>

Get it in Writing

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>

Getting to cash flow neutral

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>

Governance

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>

Governance failure

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

GQM consists of 3 steps

1. Generate a set of organizational Goals

2. Derive a set of Questions relating to the goals

3. 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>

Grasping the essence of what we know

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]

Group madness

Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Growing software

...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>

Half of your people are below average and don't know it

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>.

Handshakes

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>

Hard problems

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

Haste makes waste

The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!

[w:Pennsylvania Dutch]

Heuristic devices don't tell you when to stop

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>

Historical context of decisions

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>

Historical patterns

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

[w:Mark Twain]

<a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain>WikiQuotes</a>

Holistic technologies

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>

Homostasis

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>

Honeybees

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>

Hunches don't work

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]

Hundredth idiot

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

If you break it, you own it

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

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]

In the arena

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

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>

Information anxiety

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>

Information is change in what we know

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>

Information overload

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>

Initial medical results

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]

Innoculation against change

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>

Institutional decision-making

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>

Insulation from reality

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>

Integrated performance

"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>

Interactions

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>

Interdependence

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>

Introduction

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>

Investment-centric approaches

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>

Irresponsible pretensions to genius

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>

Isolated from reality

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>

It doesn't always pay to be an optimist

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

Just do it

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]

Justified business needs

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>

Keeping things wired

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 not factory work

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>

Laptops as symphonic instruments

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>

Learning by doing

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

[w:Mark Twain]

Learning from failure

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]

Learning from your mistakes

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>

Learning how to learn

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>

Learning through practice

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>

Learning to listen

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>

Lens of decisions

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>

Lessons of history

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

Let the blind see

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

Liability

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

Lifecycle cost

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>

Like doctors

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>

Limitations of design

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

Liquid networks

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

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>

Looters

"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>

Losing our marbles

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>

Low and high entropy

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>

Low rate production

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>

Making sense of reality

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 leverage

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]

Management summaries

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>

Managing complexity

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.

Managing invasively

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>

Markets vs hierarchies

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>

Maximizing value

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

Measuring productivity

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>

Mechanization becomes automation

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>

Mental models and assumptions

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>

Mentoring

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?"

Methodology fitness for purpose

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>

Missed opportunities

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)

Mistakes and wisdom

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]

Model distractions

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>

Models as figures of merit

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

Monopoly rules

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>

Moving from oral to written history

“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>

Moving up the stack

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>

Multi-disciplinary exchanges

[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

Multinodes

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 and storytelling

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

New lamps for old

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>

No fear

"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]

No longer a victim

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>

Nothing is autonomous

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>

Objective observers

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>

Observations of Babbage's Differential Engine

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>

On Architecture

firmitas, utilitas, venustas

(firmness, utility, beauty)

[w: Vitruvius]

[w:De Architectura]

On brainstorming

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>

On concensus

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]

On decision-making

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>

On reuse

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>

On scope

 I need four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going astray.

[w:James Taylor]

Bartender Blues

On standards

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>

One event from savagery

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]

Only a software problem

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 as organisms

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>

Organizations as systems

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>

Our destiny

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

Our instinctual shortcut in the presence of too much information

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>

Overcoming the status quo

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>

Overcommitment

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

Pale gleams

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]

Parsing customer signals

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>

Partitioning of Knowledge

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>

Pattern recognizers

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>

Pay for performance

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>

Peeling the design onion

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>

Peeling the onion

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

Performance improvement opportunities

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>

Perpetual infancy

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

Persistence

“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>

Personal mastery

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]

Perspective

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

Pessimism

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

[w:George Will]

Pfeffer's law

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>

Piecemeal growth

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]

Platitudes

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>

Practices

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>

Predestination

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

Predicting outcomes amid uncertainty

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

Predicting the future

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]

Preserving humanity in businesses

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>

Presumptions of order

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

Procedures at the bottom

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>

Process obsession

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>

Product development uncertainty

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 value creation

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>

Production refinements

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>

Professionalism

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]

Programming culture

"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>

Progress

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead

Progress requires discernment

Progress is not doing better what should not be done at all.

Anonymous

<a href="/node/5657">Profit Beyond Measure</a>

Progress requires particulars

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