Initial reports suggest Iran may just have started the inevitable larger war in the middle east. Some of us have been waiting and wondered if the world really wants to wait until Iran has the nuke. I would not be surprised if that is the case, the West tried to smooth-talk Russia (again) from invading Ukraine the second time. It’s said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

How would I organize a company or organization if I had the opportunity to do so? Good question, I don’t really have a clear answer how that would look like, but I have an idea. The short answer I am heavily leaning on the concept of self-organization with team of teams arranged like an onion. The outer onion layer is the customer-facing tier. This tier consists of cross-functional delivery teams pulling work from the customer.

A complex system is “a whole that is more than the sum of its parts”. It is nearly impossible to understand a complex system by breaking it down into its individual components and it depends on the interactions and inter-dependencies through emergent properties, non-linear relationships, feedback loops and context dependence. A characteristic is that these systems are not proportional or linear in their cause and effect. Small causes does not always produce small effects, etc (i.

“The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.” — W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (1982) This is essentially what the third layer - social circuitry is all about in Wiring the Winning Organization.

I have just finished listening to the audiobook version of The DevOps Handbook Second Edition - an excellent book for anyone working in IT… meaning every company out there today. The first four chapters are relevant to everyone, which includes non-IT personnel, to get a better understanding of the abstract complexity of the systems that support most (if not all) business processes today. Back in the day… I never read the first edition, and not even The Phoenix Project when it was released.

The After-Action Review is an evidence-based approach for retrospectives and collective learning. The following is a quote from TC 25-20 A Leader’s Guide To After Action Review… “An after-action review (AAR) is a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that enables soldiers to discover for themselves what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses. It is a tool leaders and units can use to get maximum benefit from every mission or task.

Recently, we delivered a project in chunks. By design, there were lead time in-between the chunks. OK, perhaps the chunked delivery was not possible to design in another way in this particular case, but work in process can always be prevented in these circumstances. In this case we could have delivered the chunks without parking unfinished work in-between the chunks. This led to customer dissatisfaction as the team had switched out while the customer was expecting feedback up until the next chunk was to be scheduled (i.

…and failure. In Gene Kim’s (the co-author of The Phoenix Project and the author of The Unicorn Project) podcast (Idealcast), Gene interviews Dr Steve Spear, one of the most accomplished system thinkers I know of. The episode is titled The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures and Dynamics (Part 1). Steve’s observation is the following… Explanation for success: The more feedback you can generate in a situation, and the better you are at reacting to that feedback as bonified signal of opportunity, the better off you are.

I just got a cool version of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal in the mail… This version is adapted into a business graphic novel by Dwight Jon Zimmerman and illustrated by Dean Motter.

Privileged ports are ports below 1024. These usually require root privileges to bind (unless setting capabilities). Web servers run on port 80 and 443 and you have just made this neat little thing and want to bind it directly to these ports, but you don’t want to run it as root - what to do? Having misplaced my notes on how to redirect port 80 and 443 to unprivileged port (above 1024) so that normal users can bind them was the precursor to going live with this site/blog.