Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Thank you, Doug and Raquel.

One of the main things I have been working on these days is a book with my mentor Dr. Steven Spear, due to come out in a year. He is famous for many things, but probably most famous for writing one of the most downloaded Harvard Business Review papers of all time in 1999, called "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System." This was based in part on his doctoral dissertation at Harvard Business School, and in support of that he worked on the manufacturing plant floor of a Tier 1 Toyota supplier for six months.

Since then he has extended his work beyond the high-repetition work of manufacturing to engine design at Pratt & Whitney, to the building of the safety culture at Alcoa, to how to make truly safe healthcare systems, and he was part of a U.S. Navy initiative to create a high-velocity learning dynamic across all aspects of the enterprise.

In Las Vegas, we talked about what we have been working on and all the amazing discoveries that we made as we work toward getting our book out, which attempts to describe a theory of how organizations work, both in the ideal and not ideal. We are trying to synthesize what is in common between DevOps, Agile, the Toyota Production System, safety culture, and so much more.

It has been so valuable to use these DevOps Enterprise Summits as a forcing function as we write our book, to force ourselves to try to articulate as clearly and concisely as we can certain core concepts of the book. I think the presentation that we did two months ago was one of the most important ones because we are starting to zero in on the core concepts of the book. I am going to replay the majority of that presentation, and then we will present our most recent reflections and learning since then, which I am so excited to share.

I hope that this all strikes you as relevant and as illuminating as it has been for us. With that, Steve, over to you.

Dr. Steven Spear

Hey, good morning, everybody. Before I get rolling on this, Gene and I are trying out some new material today, and we would like your feedback. Throw it into the Slack channel. Here is the reason to do that: if you do not put comments into the Slack channel, when we finally publish what we are talking about today, you are going to have to read the same crap again. On the other hand, if you put some good comments in the Slack channel, when you get the book you can turn to your colleagues and say, "Hey, Dana, I am the one who bailed them out on that book." So lots of comments, please.

In terms of the work we have been doing, we start with the basic question: why are there winners and why are there losers? Let me say it again: why are there winners and why are there losers? We take for granted that there should be winners and losers because so often there are winners and losers. We should actually be surprised by the winning and losing in commercial competition. Why is that? Level playing field.

Everyone goes into a realm looking for opportunity. The opportunity is similar to whomever. They draw upon similar resources to construct solutions. They are using similar delivery channels to deliver those solutions. Level playing field all across the board, and yet there are winners and there are losers. When you take away all the common resources, you have to find something uncommon to explain uncommon outcomes.

What we think the answer is, is that the reason we get uncommon outcomes from common resources is that the winners are much better at harnessing the brains in their enterprise. More particularly, when they have access to the collective intellectual horsepower distributed throughout their organization, they are way better at harnessing that through collective action toward common purpose than anybody else.

Here is how we are going to build out our thesis. Gene is going to introduce an example. I am going to throw in some color commentary and develop this into a model. As we go along, your comments into the Slack channel, please, so next year you can say, "Hey, that book is good because of me." Gene, over to you.

Gene Kim

Thank you, Steve. I must say this has been one of the most intellectually challenging things I have ever worked on and also one of the most rewarding. There are times when I think that I actually do not know anything. I want to explain something that you might have seen. I have been writing a series of blog posts, something that might be a little strange, but it is because I am finally getting some clarity after working with Steve for almost a decade. The aha moments came after Steve and I spent a week together in Boston.

The first essay I posted was about how even moving a couch is not just brawn work. It actually requires a lot of brain work. Suppose you have two people; let us call them Steve and Gene. There is a ton of communication and coordination required as they move the couch. When they start, they are immediately in conversation, actively communicating and coordinating. Where do you put your hands? How do you keep the couch balanced? What do you do to move the couch through a door, sideways or lengthwise? How do you get down stairs?

Suppose this homeowner shows up and insists that Steve and Gene can no longer speak directly to each other. In fact, certain actions should not be taken without first getting approval from the homeowner. Suddenly urgent messages like, "The couch is slipping, can we slow down?" or "The couch is pinching my finger in the doorway" are no longer making it through in time. Everything is getting worse. It takes longer, things are getting damaged around them, and it is even more dangerous as well.

I thought this had a whole bunch of profound insights for me. The second essay was an extension of the scenario. It turns out that Steve and Gene are moving the couch because they are helping Miriam and Marguerite paint the walls and ceilings of that room, and they are moving the furniture out because they do not want paint all over it. In the room now, with our two people moving the couch and two painters, strewn across the room are open paint cans and four ladders. Now the work, communication, and coordination required are substantially higher. People have to signal what they are trying to do and maybe ask people to get out of the way. Miriam and Marguerite may have to ask Steve and Gene not to move something yet. We can even imagine a scenario where they deadlock and no one can actually do anything. This is where coordination dominates and no energy is spent on the value-creation activity of the task at hand.

What we have been working on for two months is the extension of the story. The story begins because Miriam and Marguerite are so pleased with the way the painting turns out, and everyone is so impressed with the beauty of the rooms, that they have now been hired to paint all the rooms in an entire building: 50 rooms across 10 luxurious apartments. Marguerite and Miriam take charge of the entire operation. They receive a list of rooms from the apartment owners, along with the needs, size, variety, and so forth.

Their first decision is to appoint Steve as the chief moving officer responsible for managing movers. Gene is appointed as the chief paint officer responsible for hiring skilled painters to paint the rooms as desired by the customer. Gene takes the list from Marguerite and Miriam and creates a draft schedule of the rooms to be painted in what order. He shows that to Steve, who scrutinizes the schedule and makes whatever changes are necessary so that he can promise that when the painters are going to start painting, the furniture will be gone, and when the painting is done, the furniture will be restored so the owners can move back in.

They print out the schedule, put it on clipboards, and give it all to the movers and painters on day one. Things quickly go wrong. Sometimes painters show up to paint the room, but all the furniture is still there because the movers are running late; there is more furniture than expected or the furniture was harder to move than expected. Something else that looks benign is happening too: movers are removing furniture sometimes long before the painters arrive because painting takes longer than expected, or they cannot do the second coat of paint because it took longer to dry than expected. This leads to a spectacular moment where no one can start painting new rooms because the movers have run out of space to store the furniture. Now we have to reset the whole system and everyone potentially has to stop working.

At this point Gene is very frustrated with Steve. All of Gene's painters are complaining about how Steve's movers are never in the right place at the right time. Furniture is not being moved in the right way. Painters are starting to go directly to the movers telling them what to do, which leads to this weird situation where painters are not painting because they are too busy telling movers what to do.

Similarly, Steve is very frustrated with Gene because the schedule is wildly inaccurate and did not take into account all the unexpected variety being encountered in both the moving and painting operations. Steve is having to firefight, stealing movers from different teams with difficult jobs, and Gene does the same with painters. But something even stranger is happening: problems are now rippling out. Problems are not isolated to a room anymore. They ripple out through the entire system.

How are Steve and Gene spending their time? They are hopping from one problem to another, just trying to get teams what they need. Movers and painters are yelling at each other because they do not have what they need. It seems like everyone is talking to everyone else; everyone in the system is spending time coordinating just to get what they need to get the job done. The irony is that despite the huge amount of coordination, it is nowhere near adequate to the task.

Their bosses all agree on one thing: they think Steve and Gene are not very good at their jobs. Most importantly, Margaret and Miriam are both very unhappy with Steve and Gene because they have to explain to the customer why all their promises have not been met. None of the apartments have been painted as promised, and the apartment owners cannot even move back in; when they do, half the furniture is missing. At this point they think they might have to fire Steve and Gene before they are fired by the customer. All of these characteristics where good architectures and modularity that we have talked about over the last two days are absent.

That evening they come up with a different structure. They realize that even if they had the world's best movers and painters, they would not solve the problem. Instead they have to figure out how to get their painters and movers to work in something that looks like harmonious coordination and collaboration. They get one more chance from Margaret and Miriam. Instead of sending painters and movers to a room on schedule, they form room teams assigned to a group of apartments that the room teams will complete one after another. In each room team there will be a coordination lead responsible for all the internal moving, sequencing, and coordinating within that activity.

Now all the room teams can work independently. They own all the sequential steps of removing the furniture, painting, and restoring the furniture within the team. When something goes wrong, it can be handled within the team. If they really need help, they can go to Steve and Gene. What is Steve and Gene's job now? It is to create great painters and great movers that they can give to the room team, because the room team becomes the customer.

Instantly, if something goes wrong and the furniture takes longer to remove, painters will wait patiently, or maybe they will even help. The notion of what the team is at the edge changes. In the previous scenario, the team was the movers or the painters. Now it is all around the room. Instead of a transactional interaction, now they are in a co-creation activity of giving rooms that are beautiful.

The result is that movers and painters are happier. They feel like they are working toward a common purpose with a genuine sense that they are on the same team. They are actually creating knowledge that benefits every future room they paint. Some teams decide not to return the furniture until the paint has dried. Some teams close the windows when they notice pollen sticking to the walls, which requires repainting. In comparison to the previous system, the system is calm, quiet, and orderly. Communication is way down; instead, they are collaborating around the value-creation activity. Apartments are beautifully painted at a level of quality that Marguerite and Miriam are delighted by, which also delights the customer.

I will end with a couple of observations. Steve and Gene had to jump from crisis to crisis in the first scenario. Instead, they are now in a contemplative mode. Steve notices that some furniture teams are using blankets to protect the furniture and decides to roll that out and create blanket teams to help support the movers and elevate the quality. Steve also notices many innovations and exemplary practices that are now spread through the organization. In this way, they are experimenting with new structures, configurations, and architectures to improve performance, and they are pushing the frontiers of what is possible.

I learned from MacCormack, and I was reminded about cohesion and coupling. In the first scenario, we had high coupling and low cohesion. In the second, we have low coupling and high cohesion. The teams are able to work independently, but also in harmony toward a common purpose. This parsimonious example gives us ways to see, in Team Topologies, the notion of enabling teams, productivity teams, and all these things. What is the difference between the first and second scenario? Nothing except for the management system that Steve and Gene used. Steve, how did I do? Is there anything I forgot?

Dr. Steven Spear

No, that is good. Let us step back a moment to our thesis, which is that there are winners and losers, and the reason the winners win is because they are way better at harnessing the intellectual horsepower distributed throughout the organization, harnessing it through collective action toward common purpose. Losers do what Steve and Gene were doing, which is they are very poor at harnessing that intellectual horsepower.

Let us walk through the case. This is one part where we want some Slack comments. If we are competing on our ability to harness the intellectual horsepower in our organization, what are the conditions in which we are really bad at solving problems, and what are the conditions in which we are really good? Conditions in which we are really bad: we have really hard problems, they are very complex, the environment is moving very quickly, we get few iterations, if any, to get learning loops going, the hazards and risks are very high. It is wicked hard to do slow, deliberative, contemplative problem solving when the environment is so aggressive against you.

In contrast, if that is the danger zone, what would we call the triumph zone? The triumph zone is all the opposites. Things are slow moving, decoupled, less complex. You get iterations, shots on goal, low hazard, low risk, lots of safety. When we think about our own organizations, ideally we are helping people get out of the danger zone and more and more into the triumph zone to do their problem solving.

With this example Gene illustrated this. The first setup was total chaos: people showing up on a job trying to figure out what to do while they are actually trying to do it. Then they do a little bit of simplification. They decouple, they partition time, so there is a moving element and a painting element. It helps a little bit, but it is not great. The movers are still arguing with each other and the painters with each other.

Then they say, "We have to slow things down. We have to calm the situation. We have to move into the triumph zone, a slow-moving one." They stage in the basement a mock-up area so they can figure out where the furniture is starting, where the furniture is going, where they have to put ladders, where they have to put cans of paint, and then create standards that they can bring back into the operating environment. Now they have an edge over the fast-moving environment.

That works somewhat, but not perfectly. There are still some problems. They say they have simplified things and created standards in the slow-moving environment to bring into the fast-moving environment, but there is still stuff they do not anticipate. The first instinct is to grab Jeff off another paint crew and have him help out in the apartment over here that is having problems. What happens then? You have now coupled the systems, because the problems in one apartment ratchet right over to the other apartment because you pulled Jeff across.

Now Gene and Steve have this third realization. To get people from the danger zone into the triumph zone, simplify things. That is good. Stabilize things with standards, which you can do in that offline preparation. Then stabilize things, but not by pulling one resource from another project and making the systems more tightly coupled and more prone to failure. Actually throw a little slack into the system. Maybe we will have Steve Thomas, who is there on hand just in case.

Once we have much simpler flows and it is easier to make sense of things -- what is feeding me, what am I feeding -- and we create standards, now we can ask what can I expect that I have to do and what can I expect about my surrounding environment? Then we stabilize the whole thing with Steve Thomas coming in. All of a sudden this thing can self-synchronize. We do not have the paint crews going up and down all the time trying to find Gene or Miriam and Marguerite to figure out what to paint, when to paint, and where to paint. We do not have the movers going up and down to Marguerite and Ann and Jeff trying to figure out whether to move the couch first, or the ottoman or the chair, and where to put it.

Now that we have simple workflows with standards built in and stabilizing factors, the work itself becomes self-synchronizing. We have created a much simpler, less complex, calmer environment in which people can do their work in the operating environment, and now they have a huge advantage because they are carrying into it the product of their harnessed intellectual horsepower, harnessed through collective action toward common purpose.

What do we see Gene do here in managing this? He simplifies things, pulls things out of performance execution back through practice and to planning, and then takes what is developed in planning and brings it back into practice. That is our story. We wanted feedback on this.

I have two things: an ask and an admonition. On the issue of pulling people out of the aggressive, dominating, disadvantaging danger zone of trying to think during operations, and allowing people to do really good, hard, deliberate, collaborative problem solving in planning: it turns out that in the type of work you do, where we just type into keyboards and there is no movement of physical material, sometimes people lose track of the system into which they are embedded. Do me a favor: type in c2solve.com. My man Daniel is seeing how many click-throughs we get. We have a product called Flow; take a look at that and we think it will help you be more productive in the triumph zone.

As far as the admonition: if you have responsibility for other people, if you have responsibility for other people -- I think everyone here has responsibility at least for one or two, if not many, many other people -- then you are in a position to shape the time and shape the space in which they operate. If you have opportunity to shape the time and shape the space in which they operate, you have great authority and great power to determine whether they are operating in the danger zone, where they are constantly trying to solve problems on the fly, real time, with all the frustrations that ensue, or you can shape time and space so that when people are solving problems, they are solving problems in the triumph zone, where individually they can give fullest expression to their innate creativity and collectively they can give fullest expression to the collective whole.

If you are in a position to shape time and shape space, that is kind of like godlike powers. But what it really means is that you have opportunity, and consequently responsibility, to shape other people's time and space -- the finite space we occupy and the finite time allowed to us -- in such a way that at the end of every day someone can go home and say yes or no: today, the person responsible for me shaped my time and my space so that when I went into my moment of test, I was prepared to succeed. Not only was I prepared to succeed, but what I did was appreciated by somebody else. And when I went into my moment of test, the person responsible for me shaped my time and my space in such a way that when I did my work, it added value to my life. That is a choice, so make the right one.

Gene Kim

Steve, that was so fun. I mentioned in our Vegas presentation how working on this project with you has been one of the most intellectually challenging and rewarding things I have ever done in my career. I thought it would be useful for us to share some of our latest reflections and aha moments studying this parsimonious example, getting ready for the presentation and even afterward. Does that work for you, Steve?

Dr. Steven Spear

Oh, absolutely. I agree with you about the sentiment and the experience, and I think explaining it would be fantastic.

Gene Kim

Awesome. Four observations. One, it is amazing to me to see how thoroughly we can screw up a system that only has two functional silos and only three interdependent steps. I think it is one of the simplest systems we can create in terms of number of functional specialties, frequency, complexity, variety, consequence, speed, and information density. Does that resonate with you?

Dr. Steven Spear

Absolutely. It is a beautiful example because what happens with the movers and the painters in that example gets replicated when you start adding the functions or the silos, or whatever else the case may be.

Gene Kim

Secondly, I love this parsimonious example because it can explain so much of the observable phenomena that we see independent of industry. I mentioned briefly that one of the surprising insights that came to me after doing that example was that in the software industry, we spent 30 years trying to figure out how to "shift left." It has always been a mystery why. I think it is because those interdependencies or interdependent steps -- if you go from design to development to QA to deployment to operations to information security -- are so costly. By having QA build automated testing, or rather by having QA with development build automated testing that can run on every code commit, we actually eliminate that interdependency, which has high value but also ameliorates so many of the downsides of that interdependency. Does that resonate with you, Steve?

Dr. Steven Spear

Absolutely, Gene. If you think about what we are trying to accomplish with this work, and I think part of the reason it has been both rewarding and hard to do, it is that no matter what sector you look in, there are these enormous differences in performance separating the very best from their peers. We have a fairly simple hypothesis as to why that is. All else equal, the only thing left is how superior performers manage human intellect within their enterprise relative to everybody else. They manage that human intellect in such a way that it is much easier for individuals and collective groups of people to solve really hard problems quicker and easier than in the peers and near-peers.

What we are trying to do is explain what you can do in terms of partitioning the space in which you work, and how you manage that space and the time, to make it much easier to solve hard problems than otherwise would be the case.

Gene Kim

Awesome. Maybe just to build on that, to me it is a minor miracle that we can actually execute work in all those domains of aviation, medicine, software engineering, and R&D despite all these problems. Make no mistake: I think we can do so much better.

The last observation I have is that this example shows how we can create the properties of modularity even in sequential processes that have interdependent steps. We talk a lot in the software community about software architecture, which enables teams to work independently toward common purpose. One of the key properties of modularity is that not only can teams work independently, but when things go wrong in one area, it does not spread and cause global impact everywhere else.

One of the key dazzling aha moments was that this explains how Toyota can do 3,500 andon cord pulls per day. You shared with me very recently that in a Toyota plant, an average worker will pull the andon cord every 40 minutes. This can only happen if you have a modular system where local errors can be contained and solved before rippling out and spreading everywhere. Does that resonate with you?

Dr. Steven Spear

That is right, Gene. One of the things we have been talking about in terms of making it much easier to solve problems is that we have to make our problems simpler and give ourselves the opportunity to have more learning loops, more experimental cycles, and so on. Referring back to Charles Perrow, he talks in terms of systems being complex and the parts of the systems being tightly coupled. The more complex the system and the more tightly coupled things are, one, it is much harder to do sense-making about any experimental cycle because there are so many factors at play all at once. The other thing is the more complex and tightly coupled the system is, the more laborious it is to coordinate testing a change in one locality with a change in another locality. Not only is the sense-making harder, the number of experimental cycles goes way, way down.

The reverse of that is to have simpler systems. Linear systems are very simple, and ones where what happens locally is decoupled from what happens more systemically. In the case of Toyota, that is exactly what the andon cord allows. If Gene is doing his work in the absence of an andon cord, what ends up happening is the work he does becomes much more tightly coupled with everything before and after, because the disturbance he is experiencing has to spread, whether it spreads in the form of a defect that gets passed along, or in terms of cycle-time corruption because Gene is either starving something downstream or blocking something upstream. Its presence causes greater and greater coupling of the system.

What does the andon cord do? If Gene is doing his work and runs into difficulty, he calls attention to the difficulty and immediately gets support. Let us say Aaron comes over and says, "Gene, what is the problem? How can I be helpful?" What that does is it keeps that local disturbance local and keeps Gene's locality from coupling with the things that are fore and aft. Because of that, as we said, the beauty of having simple systems with low coupling is that now you get the opportunity to do independent experimentation, where you get more cycles and each cycle is easier sense-making. The andon cord, which triggers Aaron to provide support, means that everything fore and aft has these great learning dynamics without being corrupted in terms of defects being passed or cycle times being expanded because of the local problem Gene is having.

Gene Kim

To map it to the moving-painting scenario, we could put an andon cord through all the room teams. If they pull the cord, then the floor supervisor would be escalated to hopefully solve all the problems, potentially one more level, but all the floors would still be able to work independently. Taking that to the granularity of the individual mover, when he or she has difficulty because the couch is harder to manage, and calls attention to that, moving the couch does not then couple with moving the dining-room table or the chairs. Similarly, if the painters have this opportunity to draw attention to the problem and have it supported and contained, it keeps the painting decoupled from the other parts of the painting, keeps it decoupled from other parts of the moving, and keeps the experience in that apartment decoupled from the experiences in the other apartments.

I love it. That answers a huge question I have had for a decade.

One of the topics that we have been spending a lot of time discussing, and it showed up in one line in the Vegas presentation, was the notion of coupling and coherence. Why do you think this concept is so important?

Dr. Steven Spear

If you look at the definition of coherence, it has two related meanings. One is something being a unified whole. The other is that there is a logic and a consistency. If something is not a unified whole, it is missing pieces or there are pieces in there that simply do not belong. One can imagine that thing is going to start losing its logic and consistency.

One of the things we keep coming back to is our thesis: the enterprises that are far more successful in delivering value into the marketplace have created conditions in which it is much easier to solve hard problems. What we were describing with the painting-moving example was taking on a unified whole of the work required to transform an apartment and creating a coherent working unit, and making it smaller and smaller. Before it was the building; then it was the apartment; then it was the painting crew versus the moving crew in a particular apartment. What we are doing is trying to reduce the size of something that could be called coherent, that had all the resources that it needed and nothing else to get the work done. Because of that, it could be logical and consistent in its behavior.

With this idea of pushing toward smaller and smaller units of coherence, what we are really saying is that the sources in that coherent unit are increasingly decoupled from the rest of the system. Through this decoupling into smaller and smaller coherent units, they will get these beautiful advantages of simpler situations in which we are trying to make sense from our experience or our experiments, and the opportunity to get more experiential cycles and more experimental cycles in which to make sense.

Gene Kim

I love that notion that this is fully enabling the unleashing of problem solving and creativity. We were also talking about this magnificent example of Steve and Gene moving a couch, and how we can make their work situation increasingly coherent. Can you talk about that?

Dr. Steven Spear

That is right. When we started with that very simple example of two guys trying to lift a couch and navigate it out of a room to wherever it had to go, the complete unified unit is the two people trying to move the couch. The way they remain a complete, coherent, logical, consistent unit of work is through the communication that can occur: "Hold on," "slow down," "speed up," "lift higher," "I am moving to the left," "I am moving to the right."

What we introduced into that example was distractions and impediments to communication, whether it was the increase in background noise or the dimming of lights, so that Steve and Gene no longer communicate well enough to maintain their coherence, their unified wholeness, through the bonds of communication. Through the loss of coherence in terms of being a unified whole, their behavior would become increasingly inconsistent and apparently illogical, as one would do one thing based on his best understanding of the situation and the other would do something else in contradiction, from the system perspective, based on his understanding of the situation.

Gene Kim

I love that. To me, that is such a striking insight. If you degrade the communication or the quality of the communication, what is one team of two people can become two teams of one person, and all the bad sides of that.

Steve, I also heard you recently share what you said to a bunch of leaders in a semiconductor manufacturer, and I thought it was so dazzling because it helped bridge the notion of modularity in a CPU to the modularity that we need in our organization to increase coherence and decrease coupling. Repeat that story for us.

Dr. Steven Spear

Absolutely. The problem they were addressing was the effort and time required to get an idea from its initial inspiration through its maturation to delivery. What was happening was that the management of ideas in their maturation was done in a very top-down job-shop approach, where a little bit of work was being done over here and a little bit over there. The people up here had to monitor what was being done where, its state of completion, and the state of engagement by the different engineers, technicians, scientists, and so forth.

In effect, their processes were very coupled and very complex, with the only awareness being at the very top of what was going on. To make the point that this is a difficult situation, we started reflecting on how one would design a microprocessor. A microprocessor has a huge number of functions, but what happens is that the functions are broken up, divided, and assigned to different parts, architected onto different discrete locations of the overall chip. Within that discrete location, the function is given all the devices it needs to perform that function, whether those devices are resistors, transistors, or whatever else.

That function gets everything it needs, and by and large, when a microprocessor is designed, devices are not shared, even if they are not used to full capacity. You would not take a resistor and say that resistor is only used half the time or half its capacity, so we will share it across functions. There is a reason for that. By making that function coherent, a unified whole, and then by making sure that function is not sharing devices, not only is it coherent, it is decoupled from some of the surrounding functions.

It means those people responsible for the design, improvement, testing, and validation of that function can run their experimental cycles quicker because they do not have to coordinate with the folks responsible for other functions. When they run their tests, they are running on a simpler system for which it is much easier to make sense than if they had to coordinate all their experimentation across the whole system.

What we are trying to do is establish a parallel for them: just as they do with their microprocessors, trying to get local coherence through the decoupling of the pieces from the whole -- they are still connected and still speak through interfaces, but otherwise decoupled -- doing the same thing for their processes would be advantageous.

Gene Kim

We had this incredible conversation about how we can do things to enable or not enable coherence in a house, whether we share dependencies or not. Can you talk about that?

Dr. Steven Spear

Bring this back to a very familiar situation. In most homes with some measure of material comfort, the chairs in the kitchen are separate from the chairs that might be in a dining room, if there is one, which are separate from the seating in the living room. If you were trying to do this in a resource-minimization optimization way, you would hardly ever need to do that, because it is very rare that all the seats in the kitchen, dining room, and living room are used all at once. You could argue that having all those chairs is redundant and wasteful.

I would argue just the opposite: having all those chairs creates a tremendous amount of clarity. When you are doing the interior design for the kitchen, you can pick chairs appropriate for the kitchen. They are good for casual dining, sitting and doing homework, bill pay, and local correspondence. How does that local coherence and decoupling help? When you pick chairs for the kitchen, you do not have to worry about the chairs being picked for the living room. You do not have to worry about the seating problem in the dining room. You have made for a much simpler problem to solve, one you can give much more thought to in iterative cycles to converge on a good answer without worrying about the answer you are trying to achieve in the living room or dining room.

Gene Kim

Another important property is that if you do not do that, you have inadvertently coupled anything that happens in the dining room with activities in the living room.

Dr. Steven Spear

That is right. The decisions made about picking and using the kitchen chairs now directly impact what you can do in the dining room based on the chairs you have picked, which have to be used. Also, if for some reason you need to have people sitting in the kitchen, then they cannot sit in the dining room or in the living room. That combination of coupling makes your problem solving much harder in design, and it makes the fragility of your system much greater in operation because of the shared resources.

Gene Kim

Awesome, Steve. This has been so fun. I mentioned it has been so challenging and rewarding, and all of this is just happening at a time as we are marching toward hopefully manuscript complete mid next year for book release late next year. Steve, thank you so much and to be continued.

Dr. Steven Spear

Absolutely, Gene. Thank you so much.