Kindness, Wickedness and Safety

I can’t resist to make a parallel with good or poor implementation of 6 sigma, 5S or any other lean methodology. If the environment is kind, they will help the worker and indeed increase the productivity. If not, they will squeeze him, and in the end become counterproductive.

It seems that avoiding wicked environments is extending far beyond security. Wickedness or fairness may have compounding effects on many subjects. I haven’t found a study about it with a quick search.

I prefer the word robust. Where most if not all reachable failure states are not total disaster.

The other word is reasonable: failure states are possible to reason about immediately, correctly and fully.

I wonder how much troubleshooting and debugging strategies in early designs play into the long term niceness of systems. Software and hardware developers who love debugging wicked systems may likely lead to the development of wicked products and processes. If debugging is a first class deliverable of the project then maybe the end product will be less wicked?

I have seen so many complex systems that are wicked to debug as they had absolutely no formal debugging strategy. Many failed as a result of this.

Needless to say, I am a big debug first kinda guy.

Reminded me of Bret Victor's dynamicland and this course on quantum computing: https://quantum.country/qcvc.

It's easy to forget that we can use all sorts of technology as mental crutches for making environments more kind and learnable.

It's interesting that a guy in Seattle has a South African TLD for his blog.