When Discipline Disappears, Reality Collects the Bill

Modern IT faces a paradox. Automation, observability, and programmatic compliance have reached unprecedented levels, yet fragile systems still ship, large‑scale incidents still occur, and customer impact reaches levels that other industries would never tolerate.

This situation does not stem from tooling gaps. It does not originate in talent shortages. It does not even result from speed pressure.

It reflects a discipline failure, reinforced by a growing disconnection from reality.

Discipline as a Proxy for Reality

Industries anchored in physical reality behave differently.

Construction, aviation, medicine, and craftsmanship share a defining characteristic: failure carries immediate, tangible consequences. Gravity does not negotiate. Physics does not tolerate optimism. Biology does not accept partial compliance.

As a result, these fields treat discipline as non‑negotiable:

• Assumptions receive validation before work starts
• Preconditions remain explicit
• Completion criteria remain strict
• Compliance integrates directly into the flow of work, not into post‑hoc discussion

The mundane does not attract disdain. It earns respect.

Modern IT operates at a distance from consequence. Failures disappear behind dashboards, reports, and post‑mortems. Impact arrives late, spreads thinly, or shifts onto customers. That distance creates a dangerous illusion: discipline appears optional.

DoR and DoD: Permission, Not Process

Definition of Ready and Definition of Done often attract criticism as bureaucratic overhead. That framing misses their actual role.

Definition of Ready grants permission to start work without guessing. It clarifies intent, constraints, and assumptions before effort begins.

Definition of Done grants permission to expose others to the result. It signals that output can interact safely with users, systems, and downstream teams.

Reality‑anchored industries apply these principles instinctively, even without naming them. No bridge receives concrete without validated load assumptions. No aircraft leaves the ground without a completed checklist. No surgical procedure begins without preparation protocols.

IT continues to debate these boundaries while holding tools that other industries would envy.

Automation Removed the Cost of Discipline

Continuous integration, infrastructure as code, policy as code, automated testing, and runtime observability aimed to reduce the cost of discipline.

They succeeded. Like any tool, they were designed to lift the work up, not to invite laziness. Behaviour did not follow.

Rather than using automation to enforce readiness and completion, many teams use it to accelerate the bypassing of judgement. Checks exist, yet weaken over time. Gates remain present, yet teams mark them optional. Definitions appear on paper, yet negotiation overrides them under pressure.

Automation without firm DoR and DoD does not reduce risk. It multiplies it.

Poor automation does not remove debt. It helps deliver debt faster, further, and at scale.

A recent example illustrates this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. In 2024, a faulty update distributed by CrowdStrike propagated automatically across millions of Windows systems worldwide. Airlines grounded fleets, hospitals lost access to systems, payment flows stalled, and critical infrastructure froze. No exotic failure occurred. No novel attack vector emerged. One assumption escaped sufficient Definition of Done discipline and travelled, at machine speed, into production everywhere.

The irony of the name writes the lesson on its own. The crowd did not receive protection. It received impact.

A single missing assumption, once contained locally, now propagates globally within minutes. One overlooked edge case reaches millions of users before detection occurs.

The Myth of Speed

Corner‑cutting often hides behind the language of speed. That argument collapses under scrutiny.

Other industries move slowly where consequences demand care and quickly where safety allows it. They front‑load discipline to avoid catastrophic rework. They recognise that some delays cost less than failure.

IT frequently reverses that logic:

• Teams skip readiness to start earlier
• Teams weaken completion criteria to finish sooner
• Teams push risk downstream into production and onto customers

This behaviour does not produce speed. It defers cost.

The absence of discipline does not create agility. It produces fragility.

Detachment Breeds Negligence

The deeper issue runs cultural. Many modern IT organisations operate far from the consequences of their systems. Outages turn into statistics. Breaches turn into press releases. Customers turn into tickets. Reality fades.

As consequence fades, discipline erodes.

Compare this detachment with a craftsperson measuring tolerances, a pilot running a checklist, or a surgeon preparing an operating theatre. Their work remains grounded in consequence. That grounding enforces humility.

IT already possesses tools capable of eliminating most mundane errors. What remains missing involves collective insistence on rigorous use.

In Conclusion

Serious industries assume immediate punishment when systems fail. Modern IT often treats apology as a probabilistic gamble: sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, yet the cost of being wrong keeps rising.

Definition of Ready and Definition of Done do not belong to process theatre. They serve as the final defence against detachment from reality.

Without discipline, automation amplifies failure. With discipline, automation fulfils its original promise: correctness becomes boring, progress remains quiet, and success repeats predictably.

The choice no longer sits in the technical domain. It sits in the ethical one.