1.
Why Systems Work:
Resilience, Self-Organisation, Hierarchy
Sydney Limited WIP Society
Jason Yip
j.c.yip@computer.org
http://jchyip.blogspot.com
@jchyip

2.
Why do systems work?

3.
“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.”

4.
Resilience comes from restorative
feedback loops

5.
Meta-resilience occurs when you
have feedback loops that restore
other feedback loops

6.
Meta-meta-resilience (aka “self-organising”
OR “antifragility”)
comes from “feedback loops that can
learn, create, design, and evolve ever
more complex restorative
structures.”

7.
Examples of resilient systems

8.
There are always limits to resilience

9.
Resilience != static or constant

10.
The resilient status quo could have
short-term oscillations, periodic
outbreaks, cycles of succession,
climax, and collapse

11.
“...systems that are constant over
time can be unresilient”

12.
Static stability != resilience

13.
Stability is easy to see; resilience is
harder to see

14.
“...people often sacrifice resilience for
stability, or for productivity, or for
some other more immediate
recognisable system property.”

15.
Large organisations typically lose resilience
because their sense and respond systems have
to travel through too many layers of delay and
distortion

16.
Discussion: How is an Agile, Lean,
Kanban system resilient?

17.
Question: Does just-in-time sacrifice
resilience (aka “just-in-case”) for cost
efficiency?

18.
The capacity of a system to make its
own structure more complex is called
self-organisation.

19.
Examples of self-organisation

20.
“Like resilience, self-organisation is
often sacrificed for purposes of short-term
productivity and stability.”

21.
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

22.
Self organisation...
... scares individuals and threatens power
structures

23.
Conway’s Game of Life

24.
Boids

25.
“Even complex forms of self-organisation
may arise from relatively
simple organising rules - or may not.”

26.
Question: What are the organising
rules that guide self-organisation with
Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?

27.
“Complex systems can evolve from
simple systems only if there are
stable intermediate forms. The
resulting complex forms will naturally
be hierarchic.”

28.
Example of hierarchy of systems

29.
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”)

30.
“In hierarchical systems relationships
within each subsystem are denser
and stronger than relationships
between subsystems.”

31.
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

32.
“The purpose of the upper layers of
the hierarchy is to serve the purposes
of the lower layers.”

33.
Question: Does anyone have any
examples of hierarchy forgetting its
purpose is to help subsystems do
their jobs better?

34.
“When a subsystem’s goals dominate
at the expense of the total system’s
goals, the resulting behavior is called
suboptimisation.”

35.
Highly functional systems need...
● Coordination toward larger system goals
● Autonomy to keep subsystems flourishing,
functioning, and self-organising

36.
Question: How does hierarchy fit in
Agile, Lean, Kanban systems?

37.
Question: Does that cover the
essence of why systems work?

38.
Overall thoughts or questions?

39.
Images
● https://flic.kr/p/J87zu
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