API Resilience

We continue our talk with Dawn Ahukanna (Design Principal and Front-End Architect at IBM). She points out the importance of variability and sheds light on what makes an API successful. Dawn also makes an exciting analogy between REST and SOAP APIs and the VHS and Betamax cassette formats. In this conversation, we also deep dive into how one can define complexity - if possible - and whether complexity can be helpful.

In this episode, we discuss with Dawn Ahukanna (Design Principal and Front-End Architect at IBM) why it is essential to acknowledge the whole spectrum instead of the pieces and how it can help if one keeps in mind the end and works backwards. Dawn also mentions how one can make an effective change.

We continue with our conversation with Jabe Bloom. In this second episode we talk about how organizational design is still stuck in organizational engineering, how to get beyond that, and how we have to rethink our understanding of roles. Jabe explains Alicia Juarrero’s term or neurological recursion using high-school cliques, how do complex systems stabilize towards hetearchies of mediated interactions between co-existing hierarchies within the organization, and finally how this all informs creating APIs that enable the emergence of higher level constructs. Jabe currently works as a Senior Director in the Global Transformation Office at RedHat. Jabe has been transforming and researching the organizational dynamics and interactions of management, design, development, and operational excellence for over twenty years as an executive, academic and consultant. Jabe is also in the final stages of writing his PhD dissertation at Carnegie Mellon in transition design.

We talk with Jabe Bloom about how building software in enterprise is a philosophical argument and how knowing some philosophy can help. What is a pharmakon, and what is the Goldilocks space of complexity. Technical debt as an example of how deterministic systems can have agency within a socio-technical system. The origin story of Jabe’s model of the three economies and how it helps budgeting complexity and how it is a key to building successful platforms. Jabe currently works as a Senior Director in the Global Transformation Office at RedHat. Jabe has been transforming and researching the organizational dynamics and interactions of management, design, development, and operational excellence for over twenty years as an executive, academic and consultant. Jabe is also in the final stages of writing his PhD dissertation at Carnegie Mellon in transition design.

In the 2nd part of our conversation with Kenny Baas-Schwegler (Strategic software delivery consultant and Domain-Driven Design expert, Xebia) we discussed why most organizational changes don't work, and what are the four ways of Deep Democracy that can help move into a decision making.

It’s always important to ask: “What do you need to go along with this decision?” And it needs to be communicated what decision was made.

Hosts are Kristof Van Tomme (CEO & Co-founder, Pronovix), and Marc Burgauer (Principal Consultant and Co-founder at Contextualise).

We had a conversation with Kenny Baas-Schwegler (from Xebia), who is a strategic software delivery consultant and software architect with a focus on socio-technical systems. With his guidance, we deep-dived into Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Deep Democracy. How can fluidity and upfront communication help to create a shared language and understand the other’s needs? How does this help an organization to move forward with its strategy?

With collaborative modelling (like eventstorming) teams can experience the complexity within their organization. From there, it is possible to create a structure, but keep in mind that the structures are continuously evolving, they are not static.

Hosts are Kristof Van Tomme (CEO & Co-founder, Pronovix), and Marc Burgauer (Principal Consultant and Co-founder at Contextualise).

Continuing our conversation with Alicia Juarrero, we go deeper on enabling constraints, specifically catalysts and feedback loops, emergence, what this means for management and why in complexity you need to start with context. Our guest is Professor Alicia Juarrero, a leading complexity theory philosopher and academic, as well as the founder and president of VectorAnalytica, a technology company that specializes in large scale scientific data capture and real time analysis tools. Alicia's work in complexity theory is widely quoted by thought leaders in the technology space and referenced in many recent complexity-informed approaches for managing highly dynamic systems, as well as in knowledge management.

We talk about constraints, especially temporal and enabling constraints in complexity theory, how complex systems remember their past and what we can learn from boundaries in complex systems for APIs. Our guest is Professor Alicia Juarrero, a leading complexity theory philosopher and academic, as well as the founder and president of VectorAnalytica, a technology company that specializes in large scale scientific data capture and real time analysis tools. Alicia's work in complexity theory is widely quoted by thought leaders in the technology space and referenced in many recent complexity-informed approaches for managing highly dynamic systems, as well as in knowledge management.

In part 2 of our conversation with Matthew Reinbold, Digital Engagement Lead at Concentrix Catalyst API Practice group, we discuss how governance should drive change towards the desired behaviors, and why governance needs to have "power with" (not "power over") for sustainable change. It is a grave mistake to assume that all of digital transformation is programmatic: it is lines of communication that are now being rewired within the organization that are subsequently creating brand new interaction patterns. We agree on hoping the pendulum is moving back toward an idea that the sum is greater than the parts.

We got into a long conversation with Matthew Reinbold, Digital Engagement Lead at Concentrix Catalyst API Practice group, about how to get the outcomes you want from a transformation effort. APIs enable change, but they need to be accompanied by governance that drives the desired behaviors. Emergent behavior is essential, but it also crashed the stock market. We converse about coherence versus consistence–through salt and pepper–, and what about that alignment?