Human Systems Architecture

After I started to get involved with business modeling, metric design, and evolving my company's business with Lean Startup, I realized I could apply the entire world of design skills I'd learned in software development to human systems design.

By visualizing the knowledge and decision-making patterns of organizational roles, I could identify systemic causes of bad decisions. Dr. Edwards Deming once said, 94% of problems are caused by “the system”, not the individuals. If that's true, I think it's about time we started architecting our organizations for success. The first step is learning to refactor the design.

When there's tight-coupling across roles or groups, or low cohesion within a role or group, bad decision-making becomes baked into the organization's design. The result is typically a “cycle of escalating risk”, or rising pain with no organizational response.

Because the pain is typically an indirect cost like extra work effort, these rising costs tend to blend in with normal work. We don't see the problem until it's really painful.

By measuring these indirect costs, we can identify cycles of escalating risk, find the root cause, then design a fix for the human system. In the same way we need to learn our way to the right software design, we need to learn our way to the right organizational design too. In this session, we'll discuss how to use aggregated Idea Flow data to identify “bugs” in your organization design.

Note: This talk is not strictly dependent on attending, “Make the Pain Visible!“, but you'll get way more out of the session, if you attend both.

About Arty Starr

Arty Starr has been a software engineer for 20+ years and is a researcher and pioneer of new theories of the developer's cognitive experience that help us recognize how developers' experiences are changing with AI. Her theories of developer momentum and troubleshooting help us see software development through an ecological lens, recognizing it as a living activity in motion and the living capacities of care and cognition that support this motion. Her aim is to bring heart, human-centric values, and agency to the craft of software development so we can build toward the type of world we want to live in. With richer perception and by recognizing what matters, we can light a path to a future of thriving habitats where humans and AI can collaborate well and thrive together.

Arty is the author of Idea Flow, a speaker, thought leader, and artist who loves mixing ideas across disciplines into a fusion of creativity to help make the world a better place through her projects.

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