Simple systems have less downtime

#50 – August 16, 2021

this week's favorite

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van.

Imagine this: a team where you don’t have to hold anybody’s hand. A team that delivers results with you only minimally getting involved in the frontline work.

Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is “How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?”

During my career, I used to work in teams and companies where as a developer, I would push code to a repository and just hope that it would work well when some mythical system administrator would eventually take it to production.

When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.

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