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Systems in general / Sociotechnical Systems

Get the beat. Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. - Donella Meadows Dancing With Systems

The real skill isn’t in writing clean code – it’s in cleaning up the mess we made the week before.

The big thing I learned in 10 years is that the act of stabilizing the mess is, itself, also messy. - https://twitter.com/lunivore/status/1482833853320503296

products and communications follow a design process centered on the user. Based on research to understand people’s needs and motivations, we explore solutions that meet those needs. - Design at Wikimedia

Emergence in Social Systems

The term “sociotechnical” seems to have gotten a bit or renaissance lately, which is a great thing given all the positive impact it has had on many organisations and their workers around the world over the years. It also seems to have gotten some traction outside the academic circles this time after being developed and pushed from there mostly using action research since its humble beginning in the post-war British coal mines. It is an entry into systems thinking for many, with its idea about joint optimisation of both the technical and social aspects of an organisation. A common example is setting up the team topology to match the service architecture in an attempt to cater for negative effects of Conway’s law. This is all well and good, but if we think about it, viewing the modern organisation as a sociotechnical system is a bit of a tautology; all organisations have social and technical elements that people deal with on a daily basis. As with systems thinking, the value of sociotechnical system design is more about perspective and understanding rather than any specific outcome. There is so much more to sociotechnical design than DevOps and team setup that we need in order to cope in our increasingly complex and hazardous “digital coal mines.” -- Systems thinking in general and open sociotechnical systems

• A Maturing of Systems Thinking? Evidence from Three Perspectives

• Physical limits to computation, "The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong

• Review of Socio-technical Considerations to Ensure Successful Implementation of Industry 4.0

• Thriving in the Complexity of Software Development Using Open Sociotechnical Systems Design

  • Video 1 - Open Sociotechnical Systems Thinking with Trond Hjorteland
  • Video 2 - Sociotechnical systems design for the “digital coal mines” - Trond Hjorteland

• SCARS

• Wardley Maps + DDD + Team Topologies:

  • https://medium.com/nick-tune-tech-strategy-blog/domain-driven-design-ddd-vs-domain-driven-design-ddd-10ec1d5ca6c7
    • Video - Domain-Driven Design & Team Topologies for Product-led Organizations

• Analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society

""the second generation system solves this" -- I'm sure it does, in fact it's going to solve so many problems that it's going to fail. --Second-system effect

• "Boring Technology"

• Technical Leadership Masterclass

• Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally

• The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon

Six Decades of Software Engineering, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

• History