Conway's law

“A conglomeration without any particular interconnections or functions [is not a system] … stop dissecting elements and start looking for the interconnections, the relationships that hold the elements together.”4

A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi

Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

Gall’s Law A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system. —JOHN GALL, SYSTEMS THEORIST