Bulldozer00's Blog

This Tom DeMarco slide from his pitch at the Software Executive Summit caused me to stop and think (Uh oh!):

I find it ironic (and true) that when man-made system are composed of “large pieces tightly joined“, they, unlike natural systems of the same ilk, are brittle and fault-intolerant. Look at the man-made financial system and what happened during the financial meltdown. Since the large institutional components were tightly coupled, the system collapsed like dominoes when a problem arose. Injecting the system with capital has ameliorated the problem, but only the future will tell if the problem was dissolved. I suspect not. Since the structure, the players, and the behavior of the monolithic system have remained intact, it’s back to business as usual.

Similarly, as experienced professionals will confirm, man made software systems composed of “large pieces tightly joined” are fragile and fault-intolerant too. These contraptions often disintegrate before being placed into operation. The time is gone, the money is gone, and the damn thing don’t work. I hate when that happens.

On the other hand, look at the glorious human body composed of “large pieces tightly joined“. It’s natural, built-in robustness and tolerance to faults is unmatched by anything man-made. You can survive and still prosper with the loss of an eye, a kidney, a leg, and a host of other (but not all) parts. IMHO, the difference is that in natural systems, the purposes of the parts and the whole are in continuous, cooperative alignment.

When the individual purposes of a system’s parts become unaligned, let alone unaligned with the purpose of the whole as often happens in man made socio-technical systems when everyone is out for themselves, it’s just a matter of time before an internal or external disturbance brings the monstrosity down to its knees. D’oh!