Systems Thinking
Interactions and feedback loops rather than isolated components.
6 to work through
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intermediate
In April 2022 an Atlassian maintenance script deleted 883 sites belonging to 775 customers in 23 minutes. The script had passed peer review - the review checked which endpoint was called and how, not whether the supplied identifiers referred to an app or to a whole site. What happens if you respond by requiring a second reviewer?
2 min answer -
advanced
A change fixes the problem it targeted and makes the overall situation worse. What second-order effects should an architect learn to anticipate?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation finds most incidents are caused not by individual service failures but by interactions between healthy services. What discipline addresses this, and what specifically should be done?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation finds most incidents are caused not by individual service failures but by unexpected interactions between healthy services. What does systems thinking add here?
2 min answer -
advanced
The same class of incident has recurred four times in a year despite each postmortem producing actions that were completed. What is going wrong?
1 min answer -
advanced
You add an approval gate to reduce production defects. Six months later defect rates are higher. Explain.
2 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Constraint Removal Risk
The hazard that a limit, gate or slowness being removed was accidentally preventing something nobody documented - so the improvement's cost lands som…
conceptEmergent Failure
A failure produced by the interaction of components that are each behaving correctly - the class that component review cannot find and that dominates…
conceptFeedback Loop
A circular causal chain in which an effect influences its own cause, producing behaviour that cannot be understood by examining components in isolation.
conceptReview Scope Mismatch
A control that inspects the mechanics of a change while the risk lives in its reach - so the review passes honestly and the change still destroys som…
practiceSystems Thinking in Architecture
Reasoning about a system as a set of interacting feedback loops rather than as a collection of components, so that second-order effects are anticipated.
Neighbouring topics
Meta-Skills
General material on how architects think and work.
Trade-off Analysis
Making costs explicit and comparable rather than asserting a preference.
First-Principles Reasoning
Reducing to physics, mathematics and economics, then reasoning up.
Failure Thinking
Asking of every box and arrow how it fails and how you would know.
Constraint Thinking
Designing for the budget, skills and regulations that actually exist.
Pattern Recognition
Seeing a familiar problem, and checking whether the forces match.
Pragmatism
The simplest architecture that meets the requirements usually wins.
Judgement Under Uncertainty
Choosing the best worst case when information is missing.
Business Understanding
Connecting a design to the outcome that pays for it.
Influence Without Authority
Getting decisions adopted when you cannot mandate them.
Mentoring
Growing architectural judgement in other people.
Continuous Learning
Staying current without chasing every new thing.
Estimation
Sizing work and cost honestly, with the uncertainty stated.
Prioritisation
Choosing what not to do, and defending it.
Research & Evaluation
Assessing a technology quickly without adopting it by accident.
Handling Ambiguity
Making progress when the requirements are not yet knowable.
Technical Leadership
Setting direction and carrying accountability without a team reporting to you.
Ethics in Architecture
Privacy, accessibility, sustainability and the consequences of a design.
Career Development
Growing from senior engineer to architect and beyond.