Ruth — of systems & design

“1. You don't know what to build

This is the one nobody wants to talk about because it's embarrassing. Your PM hasn't talked to a real user in two months. Your requirements arrive as a Jira ticket with three sentences and a Figma link to a design that was approved by someone who's never used the product. Your engineers are making fifty micro-decisions a day about behaviour, edge cases, and error handling that nobody specified, because nobody thought about them.”

https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

OH: “Being passionate about something, makes you exploitable”

‘Customer centricity becomes the anchor. The Bear aligns everything to the dining experience, just as successful tech organizations align everything to user value. This requires a massive identity shift for the practitioners. They must move from the mindset of "I am the hero engineer solving hard technical problems" to "We are a collaborative system serving the customer."’

— Anyul Rivas

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/escaping-kitchen-from-accidental-complexity-flow-anyul-rivas-oayhc

I’ve been doing this systems stuff so long, I’ve forgotten things a decade ago incarnation of me knew/did lol

Totally forgot about this slide (swiped from the quoted tweet) from a conference talk I did:

#internationalwomensday

@debcha@saturation.social
How Infrastructure Works
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-infrastructure-works-inside-the-systems-that-shape-our-world-deb-chachra/4ac5390bcd3d4868

@diana@hachyderm.io Learning System Thinking
https://bookshop.org/p/books/learning-systems-thinking-essential-non-linear-skills-and-practices-for-software-professionals-diana-montalion/c20f2cf47e1d19ba

@selketjah@mastodon.social Collaborative Software Design
https://bookshop.org/p/books/collaborative-software-design-how-to-facilitate-domain-modeling-decisions-evelyn-van-kelle/ee2d22318caff628

Forthcoming (exciting!!):

@testobsessed@ruby.social
Signals and Levers
https://bookshop.org/p/books/signals-levers-systems-thinking-tools-to-unblock-software-delivery-elisabeth-hendrickson/bf2d9d17012f909f

Next up in #PapersInSystems :

“The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments” by Fred E. Emery and Eric L. Trist (1965)

https://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/64/04702605/0470260564.pdf

Discussion will be led by @trondhjort@hachyderm.io — who has been bringing many of these classics in sociotechnical systems to broader attention in our field. Very excited that Trond will lead this!

Monday April 6, 1-2pm Eastern Time (US/Canada).

More info/sign up: https://ti.to/bredemeyer/causaltextureofenvironments

If you ever wonder about my sense of humor, bear in mind that this was real… (Kulula was a South African airline)

(not recent… the last several years have changed our sense of airline safety…)

Everyone is looking for confirmation/reassurance that their thing, is the thing that survives…

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charity-majors_boris-tane-activity-7431120481639997440-RWIx

I don’t like the term reductionist because it hits like a negative label (exacerbated when used in a “them” way…)

but this is a short (7 minute) and useful introduction to some of the ideas emphasized in his (Patrick Hoverstadt) book on systems (Grammar of Systems)

(via @antlerboy@mastodon.social )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ_njaSaBE8

One of the things we think of as a downside of human interaction (disagreement, friction, the work it takes to understand and resolve, or not…) is also upside. Where power isn’t distorting too much, one person’s views aren’t being centered. There’s the need to get ideas (about the problem, and how to approach it) expressed in a way that conveys, which yields discovery & interwoven perspectives (across views — both in the sense of views of the system eg in sketches and models, and persons’ views)

“It turns out that operating at cross-odds creates friction, which is obvious. What’s not obvious is that this particular flavour of friction is incredibly valuable and deeply informative. When you know actors are working towards compatible goals and yet are operating at cross-odds, it forces you to consider the design space and the solution space in a more diverse and interesting way.” — @hazelweakly@hachyderm.io https://hazelweakly.me/blog/observations-of-leadership-part-two/