Platitudes Of Doom

Tight feedback loops are excellent tools for optimizing efficiency (eg, of understood production processes, operations, or distribution funnels). But if we’re dogmatic in adhering to a fixed feedback loop periodicity, we preclude ourselves from undertaking larger scale projects (the space program that reached the moon does not get fu

Process and Process Improvement Good process and continually improving process are admirable goals. They are also very natural goals: good technical workers will focus on them whether you tell them to or not. Formal process improvement programs costs time and money: a given process improvement effort may well set project work back. Even if producti

A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi

This has led to two problems: (1) business systems became overly rigid and thereby failed to take advantage of the adaptability, creativity, and wisdom of individual workers, and (2) there has been an overemphasis on planning, prevention, and procedure, which enable organizations to achieve consistent results in a mostly static world.