Systems Thinking

Many critiques of Agile assume something went wrong. The story is usually told as a fall from grace: a practical response to software uncertainty that then disappeared beneath ceremonies, certifications, frameworks, and consultants. There is another way to read the same history. Perhaps Agile did not fail. Perhaps it succeeded, and what happened next is simply what institutions do to successful ideas. On that reading the interesting question is not why Agile became institutionalised. It is why successful ideas so reliably do. ...

Most engineering disciplines accept that method follows from context. Nobody expects a bridge engineer, a documentary director, and a trauma surgeon to share a planning model, and nobody finds the difference remarkable. Software is one of the few fields where people go looking for a single methodology and then try to apply it to everything in sight. Agile is the most successful instance of that search, which makes it an awkward thing to argue about. The useful question is not whether it is good or bad. It is what kind of work it was meant for, and that turns out to depend on two things that have nothing to do with how much anyone likes the method. ...

A few days after sending an application to the Dutch Ministry of Defence for a senior cyber and information security advisory role, I read an NRC article about publicly accessible details of Dutch military infrastructure. Not leaked documents. Not espionage. Not shadowy dead drops in rainy parking garages. Public websites. Pipeline routes. Radar dependencies. Cable maps. Technical drawings. Backup systems. Segmentation details. Power feeds. Coordinates. Bits of information scattered across agencies, permits, infrastructure registries, environmental datasets and planning portals like breadcrumbs dropped by a committee convinced that nothing bad ever happens in spreadsheets. ...

Architecture reviews exist to catch problems before they become expensive. In practice, most reviews catch a different set of problems from the ones they were designed to find, and miss a different set from the ones that will eventually cause trouble. This is not because the reviewers lack competence. It is because most architecture reviews are not designed to produce understanding. They are designed to produce alignment and distribute accountability. Once that is the function, the outcome is predictable. ...

Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved, just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most digital scenarios consistently overlook is the actual state of the world. You know, finite planet, finite resources, that sort of inconvenient reality. Likely effects Economic development might slow down, unless you’re a transnational behemoth with a flair for tax evasion and a fondness for shareholder value. Employees are already being told to “make do with less”, which in practice means being set up to fail and then blamed for it. Burnout, frustration, and plunging performance are the inevitable side effects of pretending scarcity isn’t a thing. ...

We’ve got two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical. The left one? Brilliant at building bridges, splitting atoms, counting beans. It’s been instrumental in all that humankind has achieved. Unfortunately, it’s also a terrible driver of the human experience. A wonderful servant, yes, but an appalling master. The right hemisphere, though not dependent on the left in the same way, needs it to achieve its full potential, to be its wild, flowing, metaphor-loving self. But the left? Oh no, it pretends it doesn’t need the right at all. Denial, thy name is cortex. ...