Some Reflections on Principles

2023 Jan 27

Some Reflections on Principles

This is an Encore of a 2021 essay originally published on Medium

Some definitions and reflections on their application in socio-technological systems

balance

This essay (or attempt at one) is a set of reflections and collages over approximately 7 years of my professional life, living in organizations with numerous fundamental principles and others without any operational principles.

My goal was never to “write this essay” per se, but rather to close, even if partially, this subject in my head through observation, reflection, empiricism, and speculation about how organizations without any type of principle are by default chaotic and dysfunctional.

If you wish to stop reading here, I leave only a partial conclusion of what I have thought over this time:

Organizations structured on solid and explicit principles have a higher degree of cohesion among people, fewer conflicts due to fundamental aspects, greater coherence in the decision-making process, and correct themselves at a faster speed.

I will try to pull the topic towards technology aspects as much as possible, but first, what is the definition of what principles are?

What are principles?

There are many definitions on the interwebs regarding what principles are, some going for a more etymological sense and others with a bit more semantic weight.

Some definitions of principles are:

At the risk of abusing semantic vulgarity, I see that principles in technology would be a set of assumptions, norms, and/or a set of fundamental beliefs that serve as the rationale to guide any and all actions of a socio-technological system.

These principles serve as a kind of compass or reference for grounding behaviors and choices, through the establishment of a consciousness in the people within this socio-technological system.

The point I want to make here is that principles will, in the last instance, arbitrate the practices and choices of a certain collective of people.

And the choices can be very diverse, ranging from answering questions like “Which technology stack should we use for project X?” to “What are the behaviors that we intransigently reject within our IT team?”

With this, all practices gain a slightly more objective aspect, given that there is a north, a direction, a foundation for why something is being done. And here, arbitration becomes much simpler and more direct for everyone.

But before going to the technology examples, I want to illustrate the strength of principles in a technical engineering domain.

Heavier than air…

To illustrate the strength of principles in engineering/technology, I will use aircraft flight activity.

If we think roughly about the principles that govern aircraft flight, there are 4 fundamental principles that will guide any and all activities of aircraft design, engineering, and construction, which are:

  • Aerodynamic lift as the vertical perpendicular force that offsets the weight of the flying object and keeps it flying;

  • Drag which manifests as the aerodynamic force created in opposition to the object that is flying;

  • Thrust which is represented by positive impulse; and

  • Weight which is established due to the gravitational force that “pulls down” all objects within the Earth’s gravitational field.

In a hypothetical scenario where we need to build a plane, no matter how much we can discuss aspects such as project design, operational capacity, aesthetic elements, cockpit philosophy, etc.; by force of these fundamental principles, the socio-technological system that will build this aircraft will have to submit to these principles for the construction of an airworthy aircraft.

Period.

Ultimately, an aircraft to be minimally airworthy will have to stick to the principles; otherwise:

  • An aircraft that is not capable of having aerodynamic lift cannot even get off the ground;

  • A wing design with laminarization problems can excessively increase drag, which can make the aircraft unstable and threaten flight safety;

  • An engine that does not have the capacity to perform the necessary thrust will not make the aircraft have enough positive speed; and finally

  • An aircraft that has a weight much greater than the operational capacity will not be able to take off, and a very light aircraft is at the mercy of storms, turbulence, gusts, and wind shear more easily.

And without fear of committing a leap of logic with such a common example, we can see that (i) there is an interrelationship between the principles, as none is a sterile and disconnected unit, but rather a part of a synergistic set of forces, and (ii) that the violation of one or more principles causes the system itself to become, by definition, either (a) dysfunctional or (b) unfeasible.

Principles: To have or not to have?

I have had experiences in technology teams at both extremes, some with very established operating principles, and others with a complete lack of minimum operating principles.

Comparing organizations with explicit operating principles with those that do not have them, at least in my view, some differences became clear:

  • While organizations with operating principles managed to have most people make an objective judgment on fundamental things such as the choice of a technology stack, their counterparts without principles always had elements of subjectivity and arbitrariness in practically everything, not infrequently with people choosing the best technology that would sound good on their own resume, disregarding the trail of destruction and costs it would leave behind;

  • Some companies knew how to make use of the flexibility of their principles, since even when established, they still allow a spectrum of interpretation for application. Meanwhile, companies without principles had as a norm infinite ad hoc rules (usually arbitrary) that stifled any and all practice and always converged to micromanagement (e.g., a company that tolerates toxic behavior in code reviews, or harassment); and

  • In companies with principles, people in most cases have a predictability regarding behavior of other people, and doing the right thing is always expected; while in companies without principles, insecurity was the reigning feeling given that the possibility of some arbitrary attitude by any member of that socio-technological system was always open.

Like the example of our aircraft, an organization without principles becomes totally dysfunctional since without the central ideas of how something should work, anyone can decide anything, and in the end, everyone will be right.

Idealized and defensive principles

I believe no organization establishes its principles simply by chance or by having an external source as a reference.

A characteristic of organizations that grounded their operation in very well-defined principles is that they formed their principles like a patchwork quilt containing values, experiences, present knowledge, perceptions, heuristics, and very unique visions of how something has to or should work.

But as much as all these principles were unique to each organization, they all fell into two categories: the first of idealized principles and the second of defensive principles.

The idealized principles are related to a vision of the future and how adherence to them would lead to an ideal path to reach a location and/or something specific. This specific thing can range from operational excellence to even the establishment of a new quality standard.

An example of idealized principles are Apple’s design principles.

These principles advocate that the entire human-machine interface experience provided by their devices should follow principles such as simplicity, minimalism, focus, precision in detail, aesthetic integrity, intuitive user control, and interface consistency.

We can notice that these principles sound extremely positive, as they refer to a potential apex where following these principles, their interfaces will offer the best user experience on their devices.

In turn, the defensive principles are those that are thought out in a way to safeguard the organization if something goes wrong, or when in some extreme cases these principles are defined when something goes catastrophically wrong.

Here enter numerous principles such as reliability engineering to guarantee resilience, direction for technology choice (as here as well), safety principles for critical industries such as aviation where if things go wrong people simply die, or even privacy principles in industries that have client trust as a business model.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

In a future opportunity, I will talk a bit more about defensive principles, especially in situations for preventing catastrophic events and how that can be good or bad.

A case where a defensive principle with a correct rationale was decisive in avoiding a failure: I worked in a company where Windows was banned for SysAdmins and developers with access to servers because the company had a principle of not using closed code. This principle saved the company from the 2017 Ransomware attack in which while 90% of our partners were down, there was not a single second of interruption by the company.

The opposite situation also occurred where a defensive principle that went very wrong was from a technology team that put all applications in the cloud after years of reliability problems with on-premise data centers. The result was that due to a poorly made contract and political instability, the company paid a bill in dollars at R$ 3.98 + IOF and all other taxes to the cloud provider, when the exchange rate at the time the contract was signed was R$ 2.27; all this without counting the “forceps migration” of what was in the cloud provider back to the old data center.

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