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Selected snippets

This page contains some quotations from books and other sources, which resonated with me when I first encountered them.

Selection

Make the change easy, then make the easy change.

  • Kent Beck

This describes how I work, and have worked for a number of years now. It is a wonderful way of building.

My early experiences in Singapore and Malaya shaped my views about the claim of the press to be the defender of truth and freedom of speech. The freedom of the press was the freedom of its owners to advance their personal and class interests.

  • Lee Kuan Yew in his memoir, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965 - 2000

Consider the state of journalism, popular media and adult education in the UK, and how different our situation might be today if these things were not treated as vehicles for the ultra rich (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) and foreign actors (e.g. Putin) to advance their personal and class interests at the expense of British people.

Our culture emphasizes that as leaders we must be wiser, set direction, and articulate values, all of which predisposes us to tell, rather than ask.

  • Edgar H. Schein in Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking instead of Telling

When I read this it reminded me immediately of one of principles of Sydney Dekker's Safety Differently. Instead of telling people what to do, we can empower them to make safer and therefore more performant systems by asking people what they need.

Safety currently: - People are the problem - We should tell them what to do - We measure success by the absence of negatives (e.g. counting safety incidents)

Safety differently: - People are the solution - We should ask them what they need - We measure success by counting our positive capabilities (e.g. enumerating them)

  • Sydney Dekker, In a slide of a 'Safety Differently' lecture

This slide has significantly impacted my understanding of safety in software. In theory, precisely prescribed processes promise protection against safety incidents. Yet in practice, such prescription breaks down in the face of the world's complexity, and we are forced to deal with the lived realities of people working on the ground in order to make progress on safety. I believe software development has so much to gain from this outlook on safety, if only it were adopted more widely.

Created on 2022-08-19

Updated regularly