why systems work: resilience, self-organisation, hierarchy
DESCRIPTION
Session at the Sydney Limited WIP Society about resilience, self-organisation, and hierarchy in systemsTRANSCRIPT
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Sydney Limited WIP SocietyJason Yip
[email protected]://jchyip.blogspot.com
@jchyip
Why Systems Work:Resilience, Self-Organisation, Hierarchy
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Why do systems work?
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“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.”
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Resilience comes from restorative feedback loops
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Meta-resilience occurs when you have feedback loops that restore other feedback loops
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Meta-meta-resilience (aka “self-organising” OR “antifragility”) comes from “feedback loops that can learn, create, design, and evolve ever more complex restorative structures.”
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Examples of resilient systems
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There are always limits to resilience
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Resilience != static or constant
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The resilient status quo could have short-term oscillations, periodic outbreaks, cycles of succession, climax, and collapse
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“...systems that are constant over time can be unresilient”
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Static stability != resilience
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Stability is easy to see; resilience is harder to see
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“...people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediate recognisable system property.”
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Large organisations typically lose resilience because their sense and respond systems have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion
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Discussion: How is an Agile, Lean, Kanban system resilient?
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Question: Does just-in-time sacrifice resilience (aka “just-in-case”) for cost efficiency?
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The capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organisation.
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Examples of self-organisation
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“Like resilience, self-organisation is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.”
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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
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Self organisation...
... scares individuals and threatens power structures
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Conway’s Game of Life
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“Even complex forms of self-organisation may arise from relatively simple organising rules - or may not.”
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Question: What are the organising rules that guide self-organisation with Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?
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“Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic.”
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Example of hierarchy of systems
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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”)
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“In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystems.”
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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
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“The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.”
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Question: Does anyone have any examples of hierarchy forgetting its purpose is to help subsystems do their jobs better?
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“When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimisation.”
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Highly functional systems need...
● Coordination toward larger system goals● Autonomy to keep subsystems flourishing,
functioning, and self-organising
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Question: How does hierarchy fit in Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?
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Question: Does that cover the essence of why systems work?
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Overall thoughts or questions?
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Images
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