Sep 20, 2026 • 3 min
The world around us are getting ever increasingly hard to understand and predict in the way that we are used to. Simply taking a system apart and studying the elements and making useful models out of them seems to fail more often than not. Systems thinking is by many regarded as an essential tool for dealing with this kind of complexity, where unpredictability and ambiguity is the name of the game. The thing is that even though systems thinking is regarded as a new science, it is not an easy task to get a hang of. Not only is it mind-bending and frequently counter-intuitive, there are also numerous different schools of thought that frames things very differently and are useful for different things.
Sep 20, 2026 • 12 min
The apparent contradiction between Yourdon and Constantine’s “organisation drives architecture” and Coplien and Harrison’s “architecture constrains organisation” resolves when we introduce time. At the outset of a greenfield system, the organisation drives the initial design. The very act of organising teams implicitly means that some system architecture decisions have been made. As the system grows, the design matures in couplings that constrain; it reverses this pressure. The system now begins to impose itself back on the organisation, narrowing our strategic options for structuring the organisation.
Jun 7, 2026 • 16 min
In 1968, Melvin Conway expressed a thesis on how system design follows the organisation’s communication structures. In the same period, the communities of Organisation Design and Product Design independently observed the same thesis, which later became known as the Mirroring Principle.
Apr 5, 2025 • 3 min
We see the world through the lens of all our experiences. This is probably obvious to most, but what is probably less apparent is that we also carry a coherent mental model of how we expect the world around us to behave. A preconceived notion of what to expect in any given situation, one that even goes beyond the basic laws of nature and common human behaviour. It is so ingrained that we do not know we even have it until made aware of it. Like do you assume predictability because science assumes determinism, or do you accept unpredictability because everything is contextual?