Laws of Software Engineering · Framework
Framework
The Fifth Discipline
Systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. The five disciplines of an organisation that can learn.
How to use it. Use systems thinking as the integrative one. The others reinforce it. Look for the recurring patterns, such as limits to growth, shifting the burden, and the tragedy of the commons. They explain why obvious fixes do not work.
How it gets misused. Reduced to systems diagrams without the other four. Senge's claim is that the disciplines reinforce each other. A learning organisation that does systems diagrams without personal mastery or shared vision is doing one fifth of the work.
Related
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Framework
Deming's System of Profound Knowledge
Four ways of looking at a problem that work together: seeing it as a system, understanding variation, asking how we know what we know, and paying attention to people.
- 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.
- Framework System Dynamics A way of modelling systems made of stocks, flows, and feedback loops. The behaviour of a system over time follows from its structure, not from individual events.
Clusters
- The Systems Thinking cluster - Ways of seeing systems whole.