Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
Making impactful change is hard. Since January, I’ve been working on a project to improve our software reliability and delivery. Despite our efforts, my team hit roadblock after roadblock along the way. It’s been a humbling experience. Despite all our efforts, we were at a loss as to why we’d be struggling so much until I discovered Conway’s Law.
In June, I came across the idea while reading Fundamentals of Software Architecture for Book Overflow (we discussed the book and spoke to both authors; you can check that out here). Put another way, Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
If you want to make an effective organizational change and are struggling, look at the communication structure and the culture. If you try to fight against this, you’ll hit significant friction, as I experienced this year. Thoughtworks introduced the idea of the Inverse Conway Maneuver to address this. It’s a framework for building low-risk experiments and autonomous teams that are empowered to make changes in an org while sidestepping the constraints of the existing communication structures.
This reframing of our initiatives through the lens of Conway’s Law and the Inverse Conway Maneuver has fundamentally changed how effective my team has become. Now, we’ve been able to start shipping real value in a way that wasn’t possible before. If you’ve been struggling with making an impact, I’d recommend taking a step back, introspecting, and trying this strategy. It made all the difference for us.
Interesting Links this week
We Discuss Building Evolutionary Architectures (this book also covers Conway’s Law)
We Interviewed Scott Tolinski of Syntax Podcast on his favorite books (this was a lot of fun and I hope we do more episodes like this soon)
PBS Spacetime asks “Is gravity RANDOM Not Quantum?” (I want to believe it is not quantum)
This is an amazing performance of the Gerrudo Valley song from Ocarina of Time