Category: Uncategorized

I watched Sustainable: A Documentary last night. The concept of “industrialised agriculture” was brought to light.

It made me wonder this morning if some segment of the software industry has begun to travel down a similar path of “industrialised software development”.

(Work in progress)

Some of the symptoms of “industrialisation” observed in agriculture:

• Large, monolithic farming operations
• Uniformity; lack of diversity in crops, produce.
• Low yield, fragile production
• Vendor lock-in, reliance on centralised incumbents.
• Emphasis on focused intervention vs systemic rebalancing.
• …

On Diversity/Uniformity

There was a story that one of the presenters was sharing about landrace crops that really struck me.

Imagine you were a robber, and you wanted to break into a house. In order to do that, you would need to somehow get the key to unlock the front door. For every house you wante to break into, you would need a slightly different key because each lock is different.

This is what diversity gives us – a different lock for every door.

Now imagine if all the locks of the front doors of all the houses in the neighbourhood used the exact same key – a robber would only need to acquire one key to rob the entire neighbourhood.

This is the inherant danger of uniformity.

Excerpts from Chapter 15 of “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen.

The great nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim proposed a distinction that has proven central to virtually every anthropological account of culture since, between the profane and the sacred.

…

The profane is the world in which we live our everyday lives and spend most of our time. It is the realm of the pragmatic, material, secular, commonplace, and self-interested.

…

The sacred is the realm of the communal, the transcendent, the moral, and the spiritual. We recognize it from the feelings of the profound and sanctified it engenders, the stylized language it employs (e.g., “Thou shalt,” “And the Lord said unto him”), and the rituals it employs. These rituals take us out of our everyday existence and redefine objects, actions, or words that would be profane in any other context into profoundly meaningful (e.g., bread, wine).

…

Durkheim noted how feelings of the sacred often emerge in rituals that elicit what he called “collective effervescence,” the feeling of oneness with the larger community that can occur in settings as spiritual as a religious revival or as secular as a sporting event, with cheering fans jumping to their feet and hugging strangers. What these two seemingly disparate communal experiences share … are two central elements: a feeling of oneness or unity with something bigger than oneself, and a shared sense of community and identification with that community and its collective symbols.

The capacity for experiencing sanctity is built into the structure of the human brain. Neurologists and psychiatrists first discovered this when they observed that a subset of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy were oddly hyper-religious. It may be no accident that religious epiphany experiences seen widely across cultures, particularly those that create an experience of rebirth, often involve experiences of paroxysm—seemingly uncontrolled, jerking bodily movements, and altered states of consciousness, two cardinal features of seizures. And perhaps it is no accident that people often describe themselves at such moments as having been seized, possessed, or swept up.

Organizations as we know them today are simply the expression of our current worldview, our current stage of development.

Conflict and contention are natural in complex organisations, and they must be dealt with openly.

Honest political behaviour is a natural and healthy part of dealing with conflict and contention.

The problem lies with dishonest political behaviour.

Supporting facts are overemphasised, opposing facts are suppressed. Gets in the way of rigorous decision making.

Deteriorates honesty and trust within the organisation.

Managerial procedural strategic decisions have no clear cut answer. More about getting people to agree

Technical decisions are about people working to arrive at a superior solution.

What feeds resistance in others, and how do you turn a resistant person around?

What practices do you use to surface and manage misalignment on your team?

The Garden

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships

The Stream

In the stream metaphor … you jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.

It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments — exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.

the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.

Random thoughts

• Slack sits squarely in the Stream category.
• Blogs made online publishing easier because one wasn’t forced to come up with title, category or concept. The format supplied a robust structure in the form of a timeline.
• Wikis don’t really give you that, so there’s more friction involved in getting “started”.
• This leads me to think about Oral traditions. It would be interesting to contrast with societies that adopted a writing system.

Some musings about Slack. Particularly switching over from Flowdock

• There is no threading.
• It forces you to decide up-front where a message or conversation needs to go (e.g. pick a channel before writing a message).