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
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.”
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.”
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
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
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.”
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