Notes: Beyond the Phoenix Project


Summary blogposts (by the author)



theory of constraints


Dr Demming
Out of the crisis - Demming
14 points
Revived Japan after the war

New economics - Demming
his last book, system of profound knowledge
  1. Appreciation for system
  2. Knowledge of variation
  3. Theory of knowledge
  4. Knowledge of psychology


Module 4 - Lean
5 classic areas of lean

7 sins in manufacturing

Mary poppendich - lean software development
Translates these 7 sins and lean stuff



Erik Ries
-lean StartUp (book)
-lessons learned (blog)

The principles of software development flow
Dr.

4-PULL
Kanban - David J Anderson

5-KAIZEN
Toyota kata - Mike Rother
  • Improvement Kata - 4step process
  • Elevate problems, swarm them
  • If you don't have enough learning, then you are getting behind
High velocity edge - Spears


Module 5 - safety culture
Aka resilience engineering
John Allspa

Dr Sydney Decker
"a culture that allows the people to give their boss bad news"
Safety 1: who caused the problem
Safety 2: what caused the problem
  • Blame vs learning

Inmates are Running the Asylum
  • We create very mean software

Normal Accidents
Just Culture - Dr Sydney Decker

How complex operations fail - devops perspective (blog)

Dr Erik Hollnecker
  • ETTO (efficiency thoroughness trade off)
  • Equilibrium

Google Sri story - error budgeting
  • Service level objective

Dr David Woods
  • Lots of different industries
  • Behind human error - book/paper
  • (Nobody understands his work, Dr Sydney decker Translates it, John does it extremely practical )
  • Dynamic fault management
  • Summary: when people are trying to deal with..., they use their mental models, the feedback is late, sometimes you need to fix even if that blocks your learning, it's very complex
  • Cf John's master's thesis at etsy

Velocity conference

Dr Cook's 18 points
Complex systems are
  1. Intrinsically hazardous
  2. Defended by us by building around it
  3. Catastrophe requires multiple failures
  4. Contain changing mixtures
  5. Run in integrated mode
  6. Catastrophe is always right around the corner
  7. Post accident attribution to root cause is fundamentally wrong
  8. Hindsight bias
  9. Human operators are producers and defenders
  10. All practitioner actions are gambles
  11. Actions at the sharp end, resolve all ambiguities
  12. Human practitioners are the adaptable elements
  13. Human expertise is constantly changing
  14. Change introduces new forms of failure
  15. Views of cause limit the effectiveness of defense against future defence
  16. Safety is a characteristic of the system, not the components
  17. People continuously create safety
  18. Failure free operations require experience with failure

Mike Nagards - Release it (book)
  • Circuit breaker pattern: Built in failure detection
  • Proactive design your failure modes

Netflix architecture
  • Release it - dev
  • Drift into failure - ops

Netflix
  • chaos monkey
  • Latency monkey
  • Conformity monkey
  • Security monkey
  • FIT (fault injection transaction)

Just Culture (justice) - Dr. Deckers
  • Punishing vs Restoritive culture
  • Bad apple theory
Other books
  • field guide to human error
  • Safety anarchist

Blameless postmortem
Dr. Westrom
The westrom organisational model
  1. Pathological: blame
  2. Bureaucratic: justice
  3. Retributive: genuine inquiry

Blameless post mortem
  • Etsy



Module 6 - Learning Organisations

The 5th discipline (difficult)
A field guide to learning organisations (difficult)

The 5 disciplines
  1. Personal mastery - self-improvement
  2. Mental models
  3. Systems thinking
  4. Building shared vision
  5. Team learning
Integration of 1-4

Is yours a learning organisation? (blog)
  • Psychological safety
  • Appreciation of differences
  • Opennees to ideas
  • Time for reflection (Slack time)
  • Education
  • Experimentation
  • Reinforcement of learning

Peter Senguei
Fast feedback loops

MIT beer game

Swarm problems
  • Build breaks


5 capability of transformational leadership
  1. Vision
  2. Intellectual stimulation - challenge status quo
  3. Inspiration
  4. Supportive leadership
  5. Personal recognition


"we're just at the beginning of a 20 to 30 year golden age" - Chris Little
Book: Technology revolutions and financial capital: the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages - karlada Perez
(not the easiest book to read, but definitely worth it)
4 macro
  1. Industrial revolution


  2. Ict revolution
Every 50 to 70 years.
There are 5 reasons these things happen
  1. Critical factor of production that becomes very cheap
  2. Creates a surge of infrastructure
  3. Laisser Faire, Wrenching innovation, Bubble
  4. Post bubble recession
  5. Period of consolidation and widespread gains, deployment period, most value created, with production capital



Sharing stories

Dynamic learning organizations




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