Keynote: Don’t Hit the Iceberg

Systems experts have taught us how to improve our software systems:

• Peter Senge has demonstrated that we blame the wrong things (events, situations or processes) for our systemic problems.

• W. Edwards Deming says that 94% of the time, the system is to blame for performance issues, not the individual parts of the system.

• Jay Forrester discovered counterintuitiveness: most organizations “fix” systemic problems by inadvertently making them worse.

• Donella Meadows said, “We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.”

As relational complexity increases, we need to think in systems. I don't just mean adopt Kubernetes. Technology systems are always, also, people systems. Without systems thinking, nothing is transformed. As Robert Pirsig said,

"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory."

The Iceberg Model helps understand "the rationality that produced" our current situation. As a software professional, you can use it whenever you want to understand the root cause of a system challenge.

Using the iceberg model is deceptively simple. Avoiding the iceberg ... takes committed practice.