Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills

16 years ago, my teammates and I built software for big internet properties. We spun up a single instance of open-source software, then added a lot of custom code. Now, we build information systems – data platforms, decoupled frontends, event streams, lots of interdependent software and services with many types of consumers.

In the world of “digital transformation”, software is becoming systems. While organizations keep hitting the same iceberg … we don’t think in systems.

Systems are nonlinear. They reorganize our mental models and communication structures. Yes, we need to learn cloud-native architectures, Kafka, Kubernetes, GoLang, Terraforming, etc. But we also need to transform how we think, alone and together, or we will build the same old things with fancy new tools.

In this talk, we’ll explore essential nonlinear skills and practices for IT professionals. Skills we might not think of as “IT”. Yet these essential practices help us navigate from software to systems.