A high-resilience org chart

TL;DR: The old-style, bureaucratic org chart has a bunch of levels; information flows up the levels, decisions flow down. A resilient, generative org chart is nested; information flows up and down; decisions flow sideways.

A high-resilience organization solves novel problems, such as building software. It is generative, always creating the next version of itself to solve the problems that will appear tomorrow. A resilient org creates positive outcomes, even when something is going wrong somewhere all the time. Just like resilient software.

Software is all novel problems: everything we do is design; everything is new, because if it had been solved already we’d call that code and be done. (Sometimes the novel problem is connecting our system to the service that does what we need.) The work of development is making decisions: what questions to ask, what to implement, how to know it works, all the way down to what character to type next.

These decisions take information. We need all the details of the particular code we’re working with, the service we’re trying to call, and the production constraints. We also need the broader purpose of what we’re doing, so we know how to handle errors, how much work to put into speeding it up, and how to “compromise without derailing.” (Evans)

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