The magic of a gelled team is that they know how to work together, and together, they know how to do particular work. The members don’t know how to work together; the team does. These learnings don’t reside in the members individually, the learnings are in the interrelations. A shared know-how is jointly constructed between … Read moreKnowledge resides in teams
Art has progressed from “inner coherence” to contextual, interrelated meaning. Can software get there too?
It is better to practice risky things often and in small chunks with a limited blast radius, rather than to avoid risky things. Charity Majors, “Test in production? Yes“ Charity is writing about deploys. Not-deploying may be safer for tonight, but in the medium term it leads to larger deploys and bigger, trickier failures. In … Read moreTiny dramas, tiny deploys
In hard sciences, we aim to describe causality from the bottom up, from elementary particles. Atoms form molecules, molecules form objects, and the reason objects bounce off each other is reduced to electromagnetic interactions between the molecules in their surfaces. Molecules in DNA determine production of proteins which result in cell operations which construct organisms. … Read moreReductionism with Command and Control
In Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero describes human action as a selection, a sample, from probability space. Everything we could do, and the likelihood of each, is a function of our situation, our habits, and our intentions. From this we select some action in each moment. Karl Popper calls these possible actions propensities, and he … Read moreProbability Spaces as reality
It takes more than one skill to be useful these days. Development, communication, writing, interviewing, management, business — these skills don’t do anything by themselves. Developing what? communicating what? Which business? You need a domain of expertise to apply these abstract skills to. I can’t communicate what I don’t understand. Nor develop good software in … Read moreOne skill is not enough
The other day there was a tweet about a Chief Happiness Officer. Later someone remarked about their Agile Transformation Office. It seems like we (as a culture) think that we can add qualities to systems the way we add ingredients to a recipe. Systems, especially symmathesies, aren’t additive! Agility, happiness, these are spread throughout the … Read moreAdding qualities to systems
I begin to wonder whether I am mad or have hit on an idea which is much bigger than I am. Gregory Bateson As someone who grew up in a religion and then let go of it in my mid-twenties, it’s easy to say, religion is a useless fiction that persists because a powerful group … Read moreHow religion is important
Gregory Bateson talks about distinct levels of learning. From behavior to enlightenment, each level represents change in the previous level. Zero Learning: this is behavior, responding in the way you always do. The bell rings, oh it’s lunchtime, eat. This does not surprise you, so you just do the usual thing. Learning I: this is … Read moreFive levels of learning
We can develop things faster than we can define them. @jryanday I’ve remarked before that @cdupuis can implement new features way faster than I can document them. This is not ridiculous; creating something is often faster than connecting it to existing people who can use it. Ryan took this farther: we can’t even define what … Read moreDesign by implementation