Human Systems Architecture

After I started to get involved with business modeling, metric design, and evolving my company's business with Lean Startup, I realized I could apply the entire world of design skills I'd learned in software development to human systems design.

By visualizing the knowledge and decision-making patterns of organizational roles, I could identify systemic causes of bad decisions. Dr. Edwards Deming once said, 94% of problems are caused by “the system”, not the individuals. If that's true, I think it's about time we started architecting our organizations for success. The first step is learning to refactor the design.

When there's tight-coupling across roles or groups, or low cohesion within a role or group, bad decision-making becomes baked into the organization's design. The result is typically a “cycle of escalating risk”, or rising pain with no organizational response.

Because the pain is typically an indirect cost like extra work effort, these rising costs tend to blend in with normal work. We don't see the problem until it's really painful.

By measuring these indirect costs, we can identify cycles of escalating risk, find the root cause, then design a fix for the human system. In the same way we need to learn our way to the right software design, we need to learn our way to the right organizational design too. In this session, we'll discuss how to use aggregated Idea Flow data to identify “bugs” in your organization design.

Note: This talk is not strictly dependent on attending, “Make the Pain Visible!“, but you'll get way more out of the session, if you attend both.

About Arty Starr

Arty Starr is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and author of Idea Flow, how to measure the friction in software development. Arty's PhD research is developing a theory of momentum in software development, and she is creator of the FLOWS platform designed to help developers thrive and find joy through more time in the flow state. The company she founded, FlowInsight, is on a mission to bring back joy to our everyday work.

Arty is also a 2D/3D animator and artist, and has spent the last couple years building 3D apps in AR. She loves to share about her experiences with these technologies.

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