Individual developer productivity vs Systems productivity
Individual developer productivity due to AI is up. Some claim 10x. Systems productivity is up by how much?
I ask every CEO and CTO I meet. The honest ones say: very little. A few admit it is retracting.
One executive told me commit velocity is through the roof, but my delivery milestones keep slipping.
Another told me quality has deteriorated so badly they are pausing product development for two weeks. Just to fix bugs, RCAs, and security issues. Pausing development is productivity retraction.
So what is the explanation? And you are not allowed to say "people" are the problem , if you say so you don't understand systems.
At SystemsWay we predicted this. Giving a Lamborghini to every driver in Bangalore does not increase the city's throughput and reduces cycle time. It can definitely retract it.
Here is the test of a great system: when individual productivity doubles, systems productivity should MORE than double. In a poor system, it retracts. Everyone else in between.
Your numbers are telling you what kind of SDLC [ Software Development Life Cycle] systems you have
And one more prediction. Your enterprise has hundreds of architects. Not one of them is an SDLC architect. Nobody owns the Software Development Lifecycle as a system.
So nobody gets the credit when it multiplies individual productivity, and nobody answers when it swallows it. All we do it push people harder who are already 10x more productive ? You see the whole paradox.
In the age of AI, it is time we stop seeing and designing SDLC as technological systems and start seeing and redesign as a techno-social systems because it's inte feedback loop that connect technical and social systems is where all productivity-quality-engineering effectiveness gain and loss happens. How to do that ?
Badhree Babu
I love thinking about problems and trying to solve some of them. I learned about systems thinking while working through one such problem and became captivated by it. I try to practice epistemic humility while also acknowledging the human emotions involved, particularly the dissonance that comes with realizing that I may be wrong.
Laksh Raghavan, Founder of Cyb3rSyn Labs
I’m a student of Systems, Complexity and Cybernetics. I have iterated and experimented with insights from the above, looping between theory and practice and accumulated scar tissues at various organizations, as a full-time employee and as a consultant.
Cyb3rSyn Labs is a startup born out of the failures of mainstream management practices!
It is a crusade against our blind chasing of Taylorism, reductionism and efficiency. It will primarily be in the business of trading ideas! Its immediate focus will be to help accelerate the transition away from mainstream management practices and build a new generation of entrepreneurs and leaders for the 21st century.
Cyb3rSyn is a leetspeak nod to Project CyberSyn, architected by Stafford Beer, the father of Management Cybernetics. The word CyberSyn is a portmanteau of the words 'Cybernetics' and 'Synergy'.
As its founder, I hope to learn the most profound lessons about intervening in complex systems!
I’m here to learn.
Shalvin Rautela, Marketing Lead of SystemsWay
Hello everyone, I’m Shalvin.
I’ve been on the internet for probably way too long, and somehow that has turned into me doing a little bit of everything. Marketing, growth, operations, product, tech, content, random side projects, and occasionally getting way too obsessed with some completely unnecessary ideas.
I’m generally curious about how things work. Businesses, people, technology, communities, why certain ideas spread and others don’t. I like building things, figuring things out, and trying to make sense of things that initially seem messy or complicated.
I’ve worked with creators and internet businesses, built content and growth systems, worked on products, and more recently gotten much deeper into the product and tech side of things.
Outside of work, I’m pretty much the same person. I’m always learning something new, watching movies, overthinking things, trying to get fitter, and again, starting random projects that I probably didn't need to start.
I joined SystemsWay because I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to do things, but I’ve become much more interested in understanding how to actually think about problems. That’s what initially drew me to the way Manish thinks. He is able to look at things that seem(and are) really complicated and ask what is actually going on underneath all of it. His ability to see through the systems at play is what has led me to join SystemsWay.
Learning to look at things that way can change how I approach pretty much everything I do. I’m hoping to learn a lot here, have my assumptions challenged, and hopefully contribute something useful to the community as well.
Looking forward to meeting everyone and getting to know you guys.
Manish Jain, Founder and Creator of SystemsWay
Hello everyone, I am the founder and creator of SystemsWay, and here is how I got here. A decade ago, I asked myself a simple question: why do technologists, who believe technology can solve every problem in the world, fail to solve their own organizational problems of productivity, quality, and engineering effectiveness, problems in which they themselves suffer? Over time the question grew more pointed and more general: why do people create systems in which they themselves suffer? And "people" included me. My quest for the answer led me to many places, but I finally found it in Systems Philosophy: the systems we lead, manage, and operate are nothing but collective reflections of what we want and of our understanding of how systems work. And since our understanding of systems is a function of our thinking, every dysfunctional system reflects a deficiency in our thinking itself. The further I went down this path, the clearer it became: we think about systems all the time, but we never think about the thinking using which we think about systems. It took me years to examine my own thinking paradigm, its strengths and its weaknesses. And once you see the weaknesses of your current paradigm, you cannot help but seek a newer one to cover them. Systems Philosophy gave me that paradigm. I have a few life goals. One is to disseminate the knowledge of systems to as many people as I can before I die; this community is part of that. Another, running in parallel, is to create a software development lifecycle system, an SDLC, that actually works. More on that soon. For those interested in my background: I hold a B.Sc. in Economics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Political Science, and an MBA. I taught myself computer science and served as a Distinguished Engineer at eBay and PayPal. But most of what I teach about systems is self-taught over the last ten-plus years, and I believe I can teach it to you in a year or two, provided you learn with intent and focus. That is my introduction. Now I would love to read yours: say hello, tell us which system you suffer in, and if you ever catch me being wrong, say so. Being proven wrong is how this community will work. More about me: https://systemsway.com/about/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishjain99/
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