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fluid

17
Sep
Wednesday Reality: Most Failures Begin Between Two Competent People

Wednesday Reality: Most Failures Begin Between Two Competent People

The most dangerous point in a system is often not where someone fails. It is where one competent person finishes and another competent person begins. A product is not a baton passed from Product to Engineering. Value survives only when understanding travels through the whole loop.
8 min read
15
Sep
Monday Myth: Every Failure Needs Someone Responsible

Monday Myth: Every Failure Needs Someone Responsible

When failure demands a name, organisations usually find one faster than they find a cause. The person nearest the rupture gets corrected. The system that produced it quietly returns to service.
8 min read
18
Aug
Monday Myth: More Visibility Gives You More Control

Monday Myth: More Visibility Gives You More Control

The objective becomes a programme. The programme becomes initiatives. Initiatives acquire milestones. Milestones become features. Features enter quarterly roadmaps. The roadmap reaches three quarters into a future nobody has yet observed
9 min read
11
Aug
Monday Myth: Small Teams Move Faster

Monday Myth: Small Teams Move Faster

In 1989, Volvo opened a car factory at Uddevalla on Sweden's west coast that looked strangely unlike the factories which had come to define twentieth-century manufacturing.
12 min read
04
Aug
Monday Myth: Performance Comes from Power

Monday Myth: Performance Comes from Power

True Engineers rarely optimise machines because they admire elegance. They optimise economics.
4 min read
07
Jul
Monday Myth: Success Creates Scalability

Monday Myth: Success Creates Scalability

What appears inefficient to someone measuring today's utilisation often represents resilience, flexibility and optionality for tomorrow. Spare capacity is not evidence of waste. It is evidence that the system was designed to survive its own success.
6 min read
26
Jun
Friday Fun: The Order of the Sacred Meeting

Friday Fun: The Order of the Sacred Meeting

A curious account of an order whose discipline became legendary, though few could remember what it had once been founded to accomplish.
4 min read
03
Jun
Wednesday Reality: Nobody Knows What They Are Doing

Wednesday Reality: Nobody Knows What They Are Doing

The knowledge required for success frequently did not exist at the beginning of the journey. It emerged through the journey itself.
4 min read
28
May
In Technology, Ideas Rarely Die. They Wait for Better Constraints.

In Technology, Ideas Rarely Die. They Wait for Better Constraints.

Late at night, long before cloud dashboards and AI copilots, engineers sat in front of green phosphor terminals listening to the mechanical rhythm of VT100 keyboards. Machines had little memory, networks moved slowly, storage remained expensive, and every abstraction carried a visible cost.
5 min read
25
May
Monday Myth: If Every Team Wins, the Company Wins

Monday Myth: If Every Team Wins, the Company Wins

Resilient environments absorb variability without major consequences. Fragile ones behave asymmetrically instead. Pressure accumulates silently until a threshold suddenly triggers disproportionate reactions.
6 min read