Actions and reactions

03/24/2006

Just a thought for the weekend:

Every action is like the flick of a spider web. It sends ripples throughout an endlessly woven net of life and time. —Robert Penn Warren, “All The King’s Men”

Systems Thinking (see Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline) makes a big deal of the point that everything is interconnected. You cannot deal with a problem in isolation, and in fact the very way we think about things is wrong.

There’s really no such thing as an object. There are only interconnected, interelated systems—and that’s true whether you’re talking about people, teams, your neighbors, or your software project.

Once you flick that spiderweb of interconnected objects, the ramifications ripple everywhere, one way or another.