Paul Welty2d ago

There's a design decision that looks like resilience and acts like rot. You catch the error, return something that looks like success, and the system keeps running.

Nobody gets paged. The error rate stays flat. And the thing that should have happened just… didn't.

Most systems have more suppression than their owners realize. So do most organizations.

https://www.paulwelty.com/silence-by-design/

#SystemsThinking #SoftwareDesign #OrganizationalDesign #Leadership #SilentFailure

Silence by design

Most systems have more suppression than their owners realize. It gets installed for good reasons. The cost accumulates slowly, in the form of systems you can't operate because you've removed the signals that would let you understand them.

Paul Welty, PhD
sayzard5d ago

Optimizing Software Factories
이 글은 AI와 인력 비율에 따른 소프트웨어 개발 조직의 변화와 최적화에 대해 논의한다. AI 에이전트가 많은 조직에서는 인력 감소 시에도 작업이 지속되지만, 핵심 인력의 지식 손실이 문제로 남는다. 전통적인 10/90 비율에서 90/10 비율로 이동할수록 조직 구조가 단순해지고, 엔지니어는 에이전트 관리와 설계에 집중하게 된다. 제조업의 공장 운영 원칙을 소프트웨어 개발에 적용해 적절한 여유를 두는 것이 중요하다고 제안한다.

https://tomtunguz.com/optimizing-software-factories/

#softwaredevelopment #aiagents #engineeringmanagement #automation #organizationaldesign

Optimizing Software Factories

As engineering teams shrink and AI agents multiply, key-person risk becomes existential. The ratio you choose determines your team's shape and its fragility.

Tomasz Tunguz
BusinessConsultantApr 30
Organizational Design Handbook | Kamyar Shah https://kamyarshah.com/organizational-design-handbook/ #OrganizationalDesign #BusinessScaling #OperationalEfficiency #CompanyStructure #FractionalCOO
The Organizational Design Handbook

The Organizational Design Handbook Why Structure Is the Reason Your Strategy Is Not Working — and How to Build an Organization That Can Actually Execute Most growing businesses do not…

Kamyar Shah
BusinessConsultantApr 30
Organizational Design Handbook | Kamyar Shah https://kamyarshah.com/organizational-design-handbook/ #OrganizationalDesign #BusinessScaling #OperationalEfficiency #CompanyStructure #FractionalCOO
The Organizational Design Handbook

The Organizational Design Handbook Why Structure Is the Reason Your Strategy Is Not Working — and How to Build an Organization That Can Actually Execute Most growing businesses do not…

Kamyar Shah
Ryan WinklerApr 20

Chesterton's Fence: The Product Leader's Test for Load-Bearing Legacy

Chesterton's Fence is a product leader's test for legacy systems: before you remove the ugly process, code path, or ritual, understand the failure it was built to stop.

https://ryanw.eu/field-notes/chestertons-fence-load-bearing-legacy/

ASO - URVApr 17

⚙️ How should organizations structure themselves for sustainable innovation in Industry 5.0?

Our ASO study explores how organizations integrating human values and sustainability into their structural DNA are better positioned to lead the #Industry5 transition. It's not just about the "what", but the "how" we organize.

📄 Industry 5.0 and Sustainable Innovation
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78623-5_53

#Sustainability #Management #Academia #Industry50 #SustainableInnovation #ASO_URV #URV #OrganizationalDesign

Paul WeltyApr 16

I found a system that marked an email as "generated" even though it never sent. The generation step worked. The delivery step crashed. The dashboard showed green.

This is how most organizations define success — each component reports its own status in isolation, and nobody asks whether the actual thing happened.

The most dangerous gap isn't what you don't know.

https://www.paulwelty.com/what-your-systems-wont-tell-you/

#SystemsThinking #OrganizationalDesign #Leadership #AI #TheWorkOfBeing

What your systems won't tell you

The most dangerous gap in any organization isn't between what you know and what you don't. It's between what your systems know and what they're willing to say.

Paul Welty, PhD
Alvaro LorenteApr 1
Scaling execution with AI alone won't cut it. The real bottleneck sits above execution: decision-making, ownership, and coordination. Redesign your system to make decisions explicit, replace approvals, and build frictionless coordination #OrganizationalDesign #Productivity
Marcus SchulerMar 31

Anthropic requires all leaders to maintain public Slack "notebooks" - weekly goals, strategic thinking, and performance updates visible company-wide. Head of Product Ami Vora revealed the practice at a Salesforce event. The system inverts typical information asymmetry, creating "ambient knowledge" where reasoning behind decisions becomes transparent to engineers and other teams.

#AIgovernance #transparency #organizationaldesign

https://www.implicator.ai/anthropic-makes-leaders-write-in-public-the-ones-who-resist-tell-you-everything-2/

Anthropic Requires Leaders to Think in Public via Notebooks

Every leader at Anthropic keeps a public Slack channel called a notebook, posting weekly goals and thinking for the whole company. Head of Product Ami Vora revealed the practice at a Salesforce event. It validates Yegge's hive mind thesis and filters for leaders comfortable with scrutiny.

Implicator.ai
Paul WeltyMar 23

Two independent teams hit the same failure this week. Both skipped their change-tracking systems. Not reckless—the process was built for a speed that no longer exists.

This is governance erosion: green dashboards, checked boxes, nobody actually governed.

https://www.paulwelty.com/your-process-was-built-for-a-different-speed/

#AILeadership #GovernanceDebt #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalDesign

Your process was built for a different speed

When work changes velocity, governance systems don't just fall behind. They become theater. And theater is worse than nothing—it gives you the feeling of control without any of the substance.

Paul Welty, PhD