Diana Montalion

Mentrix: Principal

https://hachyderm.io/@diana
@dianamontalion

Diana is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book, Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills & Practices for Software Professionals. She has 18+ years experience engineering and architecting software systems for organizations including Stanford, The Gates Foundation, Memorial Sloan Kettering and Teach For All. She has served as Principal Systems Architect for The Economist and The Wikimedia Foundation. Her company, Mentrix, publishes courses and learning materials for aspiring nonlinear thinkers and builds modern software systems for diverse clients. Diana lives in the Hudson Valley (New York, USA) with three dogs, one cat and nine chickens.

Talk Session

Systems Thinking for Software Professionals

Systems experts have taught us how to improve our software systems:

• Peter Senge has demonstrated that we blame the wrong things (events, situations or processes) for our systemic problems.
• W. Edwards Deming says that 94% of the time, the system is to blame for performance issues, not the individual parts of the system.
• Jay Forrester discovered counterintuitiveness: most organizations “fix” systemic problems by inadvertently making them worse.
• Donella Meadows said, “We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.”

As relational complexity increases, we need to think in systems. I don't just mean adopt Kubernetes. Technology systems are always, also, people systems. Without systems thinking, nothing is transformed. As Robert Pirsig said,

"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory."

Systems thinking is becoming a core and critical skill. The Iceberg Model, for example, helps us understand "the rationality that produced" our current situation. As a software professional, you can use itwhenever you want to understand the root cause of a system challenge.

Using tools like the iceberg model is deceptively simple. Avoiding the iceberg ... takes committed practice.