Notes from YOW! 2014: Gojko Adzic on ‘Make Impacts, Not Software’

I attended YOW! Sydney 2014 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic) spoke about the trouble of aligning strategy and the desired impacts of projects with the implementation of the software.

Palchinsky Principles

An ant carrying a leaf. Ants are known to carry far more than their own weight, a great example of having a big impact.He spent some time discussing the Palchinsky principles, from Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky as documented in Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’.

The principles, intended to guide the development of innovations, are:

  1. Variation: We should seek out new ideas and try new things.
  2. Survivability: We should do things on a scale where failure is survivable. (This is why stories should be small. Not so that we can finish them in an iteration, but because they might be wrong.)
  3. Selection: We should seek out feedback and learn from mistakes.

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