Why Systems Work: Resilience, Self-organisation, Hierarchy
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Session at the Sydney Limited WIP Society about resilience, self-organisation, and hierarchy in systems
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Why Systems Work: Resilience, Self-organisation, Hierarchy
- 1. Why Systems Work: Resilience, Self-Organisation, Hierarchy Sydney Limited WIP Society Jason Yip j.c.yip@computer.org http://jchyip.blogspot.com @jchyip
- 3. Why do systems work?
- 4. “Resilience is a measure of a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment. The opposite of resilience is brittleness or rigidity.”
- 5. Resilience comes from restorative feedback loops
- 6. Meta-resilience occurs when you have feedback loops that restore other feedback loops
- 7. Meta-meta-resilience (aka “self-organising” OR “antifragility”) comes from “feedback loops that can learn, create, design, and evolve ever more complex restorative structures.”
- 8. Examples of resilient systems
- 9. There are always limits to resilience
- 10. Resilience != static or constant
- 11. The resilient status quo could have short-term oscillations, periodic outbreaks, cycles of succession, climax, and collapse
- 12. “...systems that are constant over time can be unresilient”
- 13. Static stability != resilience
- 14. Stability is easy to see; resilience is harder to see
- 15. “...people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediate recognisable system property.”
- 16. Large organisations typically lose resilience because their sense and respond systems have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion
- 17. Discussion: How is an Agile, Lean, Kanban system resilient?
- 18. Question: Does just-in-time sacrifice resilience (aka “just-in-case”) for cost efficiency?
- 19. The capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organisation.
- 21. “Like resilience, self-organisation is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.”
- 22. Self organisation... ● Produces heterogeneity and unpredictability ● Likely comes up with new structures and new ways of doing things ● Requires freedom and experimentation and a certain amount of disorder
- 23. Self organisation... ... scares individuals and threatens power structures
- 24. Conway’s Game of Life
- 25. Boids
- 26. “Even complex forms of self-organisation may arise from relatively simple organising rules - or may not.”
- 27. Question: What are the organising rules that guide self-organisation with Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?
- 28. “Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic.”
- 29. Example of hierarchy of systems
- 30. Hierarchies... ● Give system stability ● Give resilience (unless they increase feedback delay) ● Reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of (aka “information hiding”)
- 31. “In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystems.”
- 32. In software programming... Cohesion: the degree to which the elements of a module belong together Coupling: the degree to which a module relies on other modules
- 33. “The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.”
- 34. Question: Does anyone have any examples of hierarchy forgetting its purpose is to help subsystems do their jobs better?
- 35. “When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimisation.”
- 36. Highly functional systems need... ● Coordination toward larger system goals ● Autonomy to keep subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organising
- 37. Question: How does hierarchy fit in Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?
- 38. Question: Does that cover the essence of why systems work?
- 39. Overall thoughts or questions?
- 40. Images ● https://flic.kr/p/J87zu ● https://flic.kr/p/72ozA1 ● https://flic.kr/p/9fqz6a ● https://flic.kr/p/7XSyuH ● https://flic. kr/p/mYbyZB ● https://flic.kr/p/bsjtmK ● https://flic.kr/p/6ERDDf ● https://flic. kr/p/ogHV6Q ● https://flic.kr/p/2GmX1 ● https://flic.kr/p/huEF2P ● https://flic.kr/p/dd8ofS ● https://flic.kr/p/cJcTVw ● https://flic.kr/p/58JLko ● https://flic.kr/p/7FHvkj