LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #105:

UNBLOCKING YOUR ORGANISATIONS’ AGILE ADOPTION

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” ~ George Box

Hi! You’re reading Let’s be Fwends, a journal about technology, our relation to it, and how it shapes our environments and societies. Today, we have a look at what could help organisations that are still stuck in early-20th-century style structures, deal with facts that sound very implausible but are actually and provably true, familiarise ourselves with the concept of “plausible deniability”, and have a look at a list of “hacker laws”.

How to Unblock Business Agility

Agile Change is such a loaded concept, and it has so many layers to it, unpacking it becomes increasingly hard and difficult.

Why is it so hard to make businesses agile, when we have so much experience with using agile as a framework for teams?

Maybe one reason is that the most prominent agile framework - Scrum - is so focussed on delivery? Another reason might be that we often “install” agile into one part of a bigger system (like an App into an Operating System), ignoring possible incompatibilities. We’re running delivery teams in Agile cycles, but everything before and after their work is still in the same chain it used to be in.

Also, adopting Agile puts into question the hierarchical concept of command and control, leading to resistance from functional parts of the company that have well-established flows that work in such a way.

In any case, this article lists six areas of conflict everyone wanting to become more agile must address and eventually overcome.

A List of Things that Sound Wrong but are 100% Right

Hey, did you know that the release date of The Empire Strikes Back is closer to the end of World War II than to today? Check the math, I’ll wait.

Here’s are nice Twitter thread on similar counter-intuitive things that sound very very wrong but are 100% right.

A Plausibly Deniable Database

Although it might have limited practical application for me and anyone I know (but then again, what do I know?), I find the idea of an encryption scheme that hides the fact there is something encrypted at all very interesting. I guess it’s the second part of keeping something secret: Hiding the_existence_of the thing you want no-one to know. But then again, Bruce Schneier is of course right when he says that using such a plausible deniable database would keep the attacker from knowing when to stop beating the crap out of you to get all the decryption keys.

Hacker-Laws

A very thorough collection of all sorts of “Laws” that somehow affect how we conceive, design, build and maintain complex computer systems.

Thanks for subscribing to Let’s be Fwends, I hope you found something interesting! 🤓