Ole Andreas Rydland

What is socio-technical architecture?

Recently we did a podcast (in Norwegian) at Boitano (my employer), where we discussed the term socio-technical architecture. The term is still unfamiliar to many, so I decided to write a post on it. Socio-technical architecture is a fairly new term, so it's hard to find precise definitions. But socio-technical

Anti-Patterns from Systems Thinking - Shifting the burden to the intervenor

The system trap called "Shifting the burden to the intervenor", also called addiction or dependence, is a very interesting anti-pattern, but one that can also be extremely challenging to identify and work with. However, leaving this anti-pattern unchecked can easily lead to unexpected, catastrophic failure. It's worth noting that a

Anti-Patterns from Systems Thinking - Perverse Incentives and The Cobra Effect

One anti-pattern from systems thinking we have probably all seen in action is perverse incentives. But yet, we seem to fall for this one over and over again. Perverse incentives is what happens when you try to stimulate a system to achieve a certain goal by giving incentives towards that

Anti-Patterns from Systems Thinking - Suboptimization

One of the things I learnt from the "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" book by Donella Meadows is a thing called suboptimization. I choose to call this an anti-pattern as it's a behavior you can frequently observe in systems, and one I think more people should be aware of. So

On human intuition, codifying knowledge and resilience

Coming out of Dave Snowden's 2 day workshop on Complexity-Based Design Thinking at DDDEurope 2019, it's easy to get many thoughts spinning in your head, and it definitely takes time to reflect on the dense knowlegde taken in over just 2 days. One thing that stuck with me, which has

Sensemaking

After learning about the Cynefin Framework at the DDDEurope conference earlier this year, it's been interesting to utilize the framework to try and make sense of observations at work. I've long been very interested in the DevOps movement (like most developers I guess), but I've been frustrated with: Having a

Cognitive biases in software design - The IKEA effect

Disclaimer: This is actually not based on science, just personal observation and opinion. Having worked in a large organization for almost 4 years now, I've (naturally) observed a lot of office and organization politics, both from technical people (developers, architects, etc) and people with a more business-oriented background. A recurring