I was going to write this up. I stumbled upon this video of John Seddon presenting. But seriously, WATCH the video, especially if you work in an enterprise. If you’re in management or in executive leadership you desperately need to watch this and know it, understand it and listen to it. To benefit of yourself and those around you and those that interact with you business. Whatever I write is tertiary in relation to what John says here.

Watched the video? Well, either way here’s a quick overview of things. John breaks out why targets make organisations worse and controlling, or managing costs, actually makes them higher. He explains, in a rather entertaining way, why the public sector along with the private sector is doing horribly compared to what they should be doing. As stated in the video description, the best way to put it is “Target Obsession Disorder” laid bare!

It’s like a breath of fresh air.

How does this tie back to programming and code? Simple. To truly draw together what needs to be built, to see the big picture, the focus of the consumer and where we’re heading one must try, as hard as it is, to understand the whole of a system. Thus, systems thinking is the cerebral approach to actually write software well, for what it is really needed for. As I’ve been saying a lot as lately, “Never make a decision on a single metric, it’ll very likely be the wrong decision.”

As John states, I’ll leave this article with, destroy your “failure demand“.