Laws of Software Engineering · Principle
Principle
Sociotechnical Systems
Work systems have a technical subsystem and a social subsystem. Both must be designed together. Optimising one without the other produces worse outcomes than balancing both.
How to use it. When changing how work gets done, look at both halves. New tooling without changes to roles and rewards fails. New team structure without changes to tools and information flow fails. Tavistock's original insight applies wherever humans use systems to do work, software included.
How it gets misused. Treated as a corporate slogan ("people and technology together!"). The real claim is harder: the two subsystems shape each other and must be optimised together. Most "digital transformation" failures are sociotechnical failures. The technology changed and the social system did not.
Related
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Pattern
Conway's Law
The shape of your software ends up matching the shape of how your teams talk to each other.
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Pattern
Team Topologies
Four kinds of team (working on a stream of value, building a platform, helping others, or owning something complicated). Three ways teams can interact (working together, providing a service, or helping someone learn).
- Framework The Fifth Discipline Systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. The five disciplines of an organisation that can learn.
Clusters
- The Systems Thinking cluster - Ways of seeing systems whole.