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“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”. Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in

“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”. Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity… Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.) It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.

ikurei 7y ago
> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...] I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach. What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.
- jcbrand 7y ago
  Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure. It's a question of how far you zoom in or out. In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).
mekoka 7y ago
The complete tweet was: Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure. Fucking get specific. So you agree with its author.
mistrial9 7y ago
some authors try to distinguish complexity from .. hm.. "chaotic" ? in that, complex means a lot of working parts to form an action chain (or similar) .. contrast to other systems that are not knowable or repeatable, like actual economic systems, or an enterprise of humans doing a business function, including the considerations of humans Engineers are often taught to simplify and clarify, for great result.. but not all systems are actually decomposable that way .. some schools of business management too.. So a moving, non-trivial, not-reproducible system of systems cannot be considered 'broken' because.. there is no substitute for it to test a fix

ikurei 7y ago

> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...] I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach. What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.

jcbrand 7y ago
Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure. It's a question of how far you zoom in or out. In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).

mekoka 7y ago

The complete tweet was: Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure. Fucking get specific. So you agree with its author.

mistrial9 7y ago

some authors try to distinguish complexity from .. hm.. "chaotic" ? in that, complex means a lot of working parts to form an action chain (or similar) .. contrast to other systems that are not knowable or repeatable, like actual economic systems, or an enterprise of humans doing a business function, including the considerations of humans Engineers are often taught to simplify and clarify, for great result.. but not all systems are actually decomposable that way .. some schools of business management too.. So a moving, non-trivial, not-reproducible system of systems cannot be considered 'broken' because.. there is no substitute for it to test a fix