Enough is enough
This series of article is translated from French articles on my employer’s blog, Arolla. The French articles may or may not be released at the time you’re reading this.
We consume too much. We eat, throw away, heat, send e-mails, spend, earn, too much. We need to learn how to do more with less.
We have limitless backlogs. We look for ways to produce more faster. Production is our main indicator. As a company or a country measuring its income growth to invest more to grow more, we measure our production to release more to have more features to earn more. Simple isn’t it?
We miss two parameters here:
- Complexity doesn’t grow linearly with size. It tends to grow in a chaotic and explosive way. Sometimes independantly of growth. And surely in an unpredictable way. The worst news is, complexity doesn’t have a maximum. It is not capped by your capacity, anyway.
- You can’t predict how the system you’re creating will evolve. It is a kid, living its growth in a chaotic way. You can’t predict consequences of the evolution of your system, as soon as it gets a little bit complex.
I can only see one way of keeping that under control: move slowly, carefully, checking how the system evolves while you touch it. In other words, evolve frugally.
Because frugality diserves loads of ink, and I’m paid by the article, I’l try exploring this topic in 4 steps:
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