Ruth — of systems & designHere are pages related to Scope of Complexity and Time Span of Discretion
with credits to @PavelASamsonov @johncutlefish @cyetain @yvonnezlam and Nivia Henry and others :)
They expand on the pages that Yvonne added here:
https://mastodon.social/@yvonnezlam/112475015951527765
https://mastodon.social/@yvonnezlam/112475015951527765
Where could those 4 pages possibly go next? Welll.... right now they go to:
Each of those “with credit to” quotes (ie what is quoted on the pages upthread), contains an important idea (or set thereof). And as with anything “systemsy,” interaction across ideas (and with context, in this case your thinking-understanding and its history), gives rise to new ideas.
And that brings us back to this page..
And pretty soon you have over 500 pages — and it’s still incomplete!!!
Because compliments are self-esteem food, haha, I’ll pay one forward with another page ;) (don’t worry; i think one or two appreciations is still below a healthy daily allocation :))
This one is important: we’re making decisions that impact various contexts
Related to scope of complexity and time span of discretion (and teams and sphere of authority and autonomy):
John Cutler on Mandate Levels https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-2752-mandate-levels
Scope (as a concept, in the mix) allows us flexibility to address how we will approach matters at system scope.
Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @jenniferplusplus Lately I’ve been thinking about ways to reframe organizational hierarchy in terms of •scope• rather than •authority•, i.e. who is zoomed out looking at big picture and who is zoomed in on local details, instead of who is the boss of who. This structurally acknowledges nobody can (or should) have all information. Good orgs already tend this way. I’m sure others are way ahead of me on this line of thought, but I haven’t found the definitive piece on it yet.
fanf42@RuthMalan ah, I see that my ideas are not novel 😅 https://speakerdeck.com/fanf42/devoxxfr-2021-systematic-error-management-in-application?slide=14
@fanf42
By which i mean — *nice*; will reference :)
By which i mean — *nice*; will reference :)
@fanf42 hope it’s okay to boost your response/slidedeck! I think this is an important idea/set of ideas.
@RuthMalan yes, of course, thank you for your feedback :)
Damon Kiesow@RuthMalan Are these from a course or they available anywhere as PDF?
In part:
https://ruthmalan.com/Leadership/20240220TechnicalDecisions.pdf
And
https://ruthmalan.com/Leadership/20221031TechnicalLeadership.pdf
And this thread hahah
(But yeah. From the workshop “book”)
@dkiesow i think of putting the systems intro section (that the above pages are from) up online, and then i see all my mess ups and delay doing so :) and so it goes :)
@RuthMalan Well, they are fantastic. Thanks.
@dkiesow thank you!!!
@RuthMalan oh yes please, these resources are awesome!
@fanf42 thank you!! I needed to hear that today *in particular*
Some of the ideas are here, but i do need to update it to latest version : https://ruthmalan.com/Leadership/20221031TechnicalLeadership.pdf
Another important cluster of ideas:
Continuing the cluster (exploring system integrity and conceptual integrity):
Which gets us to the ideas from this thread: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/112462518849147839
And Mary Parker Follett. Again. :)
@RuthMalan thanks 🤩
At least I read Meadows and MMM 😅
You can't imagine how /impactful/ it is to have so many big ideas of a domain sum up in that one page format. It conveys enough nuances / details to get a raw idea of the Big Idea without getting lost in hundreds-page books (which will worth it most of the time, but perhaps not at that time or in that order).
So yes, really, thank you. I will perhaps even be able to use them as introduction points in my team
@fanf42 yes! Thank you! For seeing and saying that! I try to make pages that can act alone, and together in chunks, and add up to something overall that is… a shift…
@fanf42 drawing on the works referenced, so that it “expands” in directions folk have already been, or might be intrigued to go :)
@RuthMalan it's really, deeply appreciated 🫶
@RuthMalan I'm glas6that reading that iw let me think that some of my intuitions were ok when I did that talk https://speakerdeck.com/fanf42/devoxxfr-2021-systematic-error-management-in-application?slide=11
Now, having the shoulders of others who are spending their life studying these things to step up brings a lot of clarity
@RuthMalan skimming through the book, there's SO MANY CHEAT SHEET FOR SO MANY IDEAS I HAD TO WAVE EXPLANATION FOR.
I will made a card game of it and call it the deck of thousands answers and distribute it around
@fanf42 in just the last couple of workshops, we tried this… I’m not confident about it yet… but folk have created some really great cards. Speaking of user/ops/dev, one group created an observability card, with practices for those 3 areas :)
(thank you!)
@RuthMalan hiiii
OK, consider me a fan in the live concert of the decade
It's a bit like if someone has took the time to clearly pin, summerize, annotate, keep reference, and unveil interaction of all the disruptive texts I ever read and never had the diligence and rigor to keep trace of.
Seriously, that scholar work is impressive
@fanf42 thank you!! I mean, humbling! But also it’s been A. Week. On a “tear down the ego and reconstruct” front. So super appreciated!!
@fanf42 i call it a field work — in various senses. And yes. It takes an enormous amount of care to use other people’s words to say what I want to say.
“Whoever helps me see or explain what I am trying to explain, I will cite them.” — Hortense Spillers
‘The British sociologist Marilyn Strathern … taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).”’ — Donna Haraway
@RuthMalan :)
I'm discovering "evolve-building" in an other post, I will steal it, it's so just exactly that. What could it be in French? Le système que nous construi-voluons? Sounds ok. Will test it.
@RuthMalan of course I know nothing about you, and actually I think I discover you/your work literally a few days ago. Still, I can confidently say that your work is great. In the top 1% of whatever non vanity metric you want to use. I have few skills, but I'm often good to remark that kind of grandeur.
And you're providing it for the commons, and even if I didn't spot Ostrom anywhere yet l'm confident you know what I mean when I value whose who fight against the tragedy of the commons fable.
So.. . Yeah, these set of resources you built (and I'm pretty sure it took a lot of time and skills and will), the are a gift for us all.
So thank you very much for that gift. And even if there's only one of me who sees so much value in that gift, I'm happy to let you know it's a super gift, and I'm humbled to get it.
Cheers!
And you're providing it for the commons, and even if I didn't spot Ostrom anywhere yet l'm confident you know what I mean when I value whose who fight against the tragedy of the commons fable.
So.. . Yeah, these set of resources you built (and I'm pretty sure it took a lot of time and skills and will), the are a gift for us all.
So thank you very much for that gift. And even if there's only one of me who sees so much value in that gift, I'm happy to let you know it's a super gift, and I'm humbled to get it.
Cheers!
@RuthMalan it's nice, the sum up format allows me to draw links more easily. For ex I never saw Keidel triads and Wardley ones similarities, but I'm wondering what pairs explorer/villager/town planners are at ease with, and I think that town planner optimize for control (obviously) and autonomy (which is not obvious) - but collaboration is too much disruptive whdn you push for optimisation, while autonomie can be... Measured.
And so the switch from custom made to product must let go autonomy for more control, keeping collaboration high. Yes, likely you're switching from a pizza team like org to something, with more organs of few people, one of the organ being "strategy and resource alloc", with high collab needed... But less autonomy. The moment the old time members of the initial pizza team have a very hard time to let go their old autonomy for more structured collaboration
And so the switch from custom made to product must let go autonomy for more control, keeping collaboration high. Yes, likely you're switching from a pizza team like org to something, with more organs of few people, one of the organ being "strategy and resource alloc", with high collab needed... But less autonomy. The moment the old time members of the initial pizza team have a very hard time to let go their old autonomy for more structured collaboration
@fanf42 this is pretty much an exercise/discussion we did in the last Organizational Dynamics workshop (i used Kent Beck’s S curve/3X model instead of Wardley — but still, the discussion about forces/pressures/demands at different evolutionary points is useful; lovely connecting it to Keidel there)
The bigger lesson is about contexts or situations, and exploring and understanding that together, before looking at (what others have found to be) various “solution” approaches and how they meet the needs of *this situation*… (but then also thinking across the “solutions” and how we’re understanding the situation, because they inform each other, etc… Our thinking isn’t neatly linearizable… It interacts.)
And we do this for design patterns — design of the org and design of the system (code). Too
By “solution approaches” … i mean, looking at what we might do … (including do nothing (different)) to address the challenges we’ve explored (situation, forces, outcomes we seek,..)
Sebastian Hans@RuthMalan Thanks a lot! This describes what I have been experiencing in the last few months pretty well. Due to organizational changes I have come to occupy 5 roles at once, spanning development, systems architecture, and a set of leadership roles not usually filled out by a single person, and this has enabled me to notice a need nobody else was in a position to see, and to start an important conversation, the outcome of which will probably become apparent in a year or so.
@sebhans thank you! Yeah, experiences like yours point to the value of “integrative” roles (which have the organization time-space to focus attention *across*) and perspectives!
@ahl kindly quoted me, reminding me of this point I’d made about conversations:
not always initiating them, nor always helping to focus or navigate them, but ensuring they do happen […] and guiding when needed
(quoted in https://martinfowler.com/articles/scaling-architecture-conversationally.html)
@sebhans that is, we talk about co-ordination (across), but i think there’s more to it — as you’re pointing out, with your experience there.
@RuthMalan @ahl I've read that article and liked much of it. Actually, I'm using ideas from it to solve the issue I'm involved in.
Unfortunately, my multi-role wasn't meant as an integrative role; it was more of an organizational accident. I was given neither time nor space to fill any of these roles properly and just decided for myself that this cross-role issue was the point where I could provide the most value. My effort was well received, however, and I think we are on a good path now.
@RuthMalan @ahl Actually, what I am currently doing feels more like planting seeds of ideas and watering them than 'classic' systems architecture. It's fun. 🌱
Andrew Harmel-Law@RuthMalan @sebhans I’d love to hear more if you can share…
Adrian Cockcroft@RuthMalan Good to see a “Where to focus” heading in a 500 page document… 😅