X : Your table on next gen practices?
Me : You mean this one? It's from 2010, published in 2011. Not really next gen today.
X : The chaos engines bit.
Me : Netflix Chaos Monkey, Amazon's "Master of Disaster" (early to mid 2000's), old manufacturing concept ...
... the constant drive towards ever greater levels of resilience through the constant introduction of random failures and chaos.
X : Is that the same as adaptation?
Me : Not quite. Adaptation is a much broader concept including themes like inheritance, mutation, exaptation ...
... but in general, nature (as a whole system) is the most resilient system we know. It has both engineering and ecological resilience. CS Hollings work is definitely worth a read.
X : Where does anti-fragile fit in then?
Me : I'm not the person to ask, I don't recognise that meme as being meaningful. As far as I am concerned it only exists because people redefined what resilience means. If you find it useful or it helps you then that's good for you.
X : You're not a fan?
Me : Of growing from disorder? That's part of resilience. Of the meme? No. If you find it useful then that's great for you, just don't go telling me that resilient systems don't learn from disorder or that resilient systems are confined to being robust.
X : Can you give me examples of resilient systems that learn from disorder?
Me : Sure. Amazon's "master of disaster" or Netflix's Chaos Monkey (I was a judge on), a host of older manufacturing examples and nature itself. That's why I pointed to chaos engines in 2010/11.
X : They're anti-fragile.
Me : Hmmm ...
X : Manufacturing?
Me : It probably started with the introduction of failure into manufacturing lines to ensure that Q&A function was working. Decades old.
X : What about growth?
Me : Evolution is a necessity in competitive systems to maintain a status quo - see Red Queen effect.
... for interest, this is why in highly resilient systems you don't design them as much as you grow them. You provide the conditions for a resilient system to emerge with all that adaptability and resilient goodness and what you do is more akin to gardening.
X : Do we do that in engineering?
Me : Biomimicry is a growing topic - engineers have been learning the concepts of evolution, exaptation, degeneracy, learning, competition, training etc for some time. Future starships will be grown not designed.
X : Examples?
Me : Lots in defense but take the Chaos Monkey example. Netflix's Open Source competition created new cases that hadn't been considered. The conditions were set for new modes of failure to be discovered and harvested.
X : Are you saying the next gen have gone beyond "Design for failure".
Me : Probably ... if not already then soon enough. That was next gen in 2010. Things evolve, we continue to learn from nature. It's still far more resilient than anything we've created.
X : Why probably?
Me : Well, there will be cases but maybe not enough to declare it as a next gen thing yet. There might be constraints to overcome. The path is clear enough though. Give it time.
X : Our organisation isn't even where you said the next gen was in 2010.
Me : That's common. Many organisations are 20+ years behind. That's ok, as long as your competitors are also 20+ years behind then no-one gains an advantage.
X : What happens if an advanced player moves into our space?
Me : You're toast.
X : Anything that can done?
Me : Regulatory barriers? If that fails - sweat and acquire i.e. sweat assets, return value to shareholders, acquire similar distressed competitors, sweat more ... repeat.
X : That doesn't sound like much of a survival plan.
Me : Depends upon how close you are to retirement? It's simply a way of buying more time. Maybe you'll strike it lucky?

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More from @swardley

2 Dec
X : Where is meritocracy on your culture map?
Me : Meritocracy is a dangerous one. First up, it's belief i.e. a value that a collective (a group, an organisation, a nation) might share. All collectives want to succeed in spreading their values, it's their purpose ...
... like all values then meritocracy is tied to both behaviour (how you act to support your values) and the landscape.

This is where the problems start ... Image
... many collectives believe they are successful at being meritocratic (value) but in fact, the landscape (what is happening) is anything but meritocratic. This leads to behaviour which can be highly discriminatory i.e. assumption that anyone can make it if they work hard enough!
Read 11 tweets
2 Dec
X : How do you undermine values in a collective? Using your map?
Me : Why do you want to know?
X : Corbyn? Socialism? Getting people to vote against policies that were in their favour.
Me : Not a topic I want to talk about.
X : Because you can't?
Me : Oh, reverse me? Go on ...
... you take the values you don't like and you associate them strongly with some person (a cult of X). Then you destroy the behaviour of that person pointing to how it is counter to some of the values held. You don't stop until you've destroyed them. Basic statecraft. Image
X : Are you saying Corbyn is a liability?
Me : I think the world of Corbyn, he is a hero to many including me. But he is a liability, he has been played and the very values he stood for could be brought down by the continued focus on him. The party and its values matter more.
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec
X : Favourite cloud quote?
Me : Hmmm. Tough one. Probably 2012, a £2bn revenue company whose CIO's response to cloud was "to buy more Oracle licenses"
X : What happened?
Me : They are no longer in business.
X : Another?
Me : A company's $1.2bn private cloud effort. I said I could deliver the same result for $20m. How? Pay me $20m to sit on a beach drinking and in five years I'll phone up to say "we failed".
X : And?
Me : 5 years later they said "wish we paid you $20m".
X : Another?
Me : What is this? Drag up all the skeletons? Old hat. The largest hardware vendors in the world are all cloud companies - Amazon, Alibaba, MSFT, Google - that's the real world we live in. There are still some pining for lost times but it's a dull conversation.
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec
X : Do you play computer games?
Me : Sometimes, not often. Why?
X : Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077?
Me : Hmmm ... not something I will look at for at least a year or two and then I'll decide whether to play it or not depending upon the size of the modding community.
X : Really?
...
Me : Yep. If I want fun combined with useful management training then I'd play Eve Online. If I just want fun then I'll want to mod the game to exactly how I want the world to be. A game which is just someone else's vision and narrative is ... well ... dull.
X : Did you play Witcher 3?
Me : Hmmm, for a couple of hours. Honestly, I found that 3rd person perspective tedious. Not my thing. Skyrim SE / Fallout 4 are far more interesting because of the modding community.
Read 5 tweets
1 Dec
Our priority actions to sustain [Blah] in [Blah] and to improve
the [Blah] for our customers underpin our mission
to [Blah] as well as being [Blah]
to encouraging our customers to [Blah] ... oh, I could do a lot of damage with this.

strategy-madlibs.herokuapp.com
->
Ah, looks like the damage has already been done -
X : Isn't this the fault of COVID?
Me : Some companies are growing during physical isolation. COVID has simply accelerated the path we were already on. It's a forcing function. There are few genuine examples of "our brilliant strategy would have worked if it wasn't for covid" ...
Read 6 tweets
30 Nov
I have multiple UPS covering critical systems (server + network) plus my Tesla battery connected to solar ... switching off main power, everything keeps running (even over the 100ms switch of the distribution board) ... happy bunny. Three power cuts in last year (I live in UK).
X : Server?
Me : My desktop. Beefed up system, liquid cooled, decent graphic card, multiple networks (I triplicate traffic over three lines to a server in London to cope with poor networks) ... it gives me a solid base to connect to all my cloudy services (where work is done).
The weakness in the cloudy world is not cloud services - we can architect highly resilient systems (because of low MttR) across multiple zones - instead the problem has always been my connection to it (i.e. the home) both in networks and the odd power cut here and then.
Read 6 tweets

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