Quotes About Adaptation

do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

We all know we need to change how QA does testing, but the best place to start is by changing how Dev does testing.

When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge.

Done poorly, Conway's Law will prevent teams from working safely and independently; instead, they will be tightly-coupled together, all waiting on each other for work to be done, with even small changes creating potentially global, catastrophic consequences.

THE PROBLEM: SOMETHING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION MUST NEED IMPROVEMENT (OR YOU WOULDN'T BE READING THIS BOOK)

If I fail, I'll try to make sure it's in a new and novel way.

Wes says defensively, "We all try to juggle the competing priorities as best as we can. That's life, right? Priorities change.

John Allspaw says, every incident is a learning opportunity, an unplanned investment that was made without our consent.

As Dr. W. Edwards Deming is famously paraphrased, "Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival.

doing the same thing twice will not predictably or necessarily lead to the same result. It is this characteristic that makes static checklists and best practices, while valuable, insufficient to prevent catastrophes from occurring. See

Murphy does exist, so you'll always have unplanned work, but it must be handled efficiently.

Make infrastructure easier to rebuild than to repair

DevOps isn't about automation, just as astronomy isn't about telescopes.

There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.

People don't change. Only their costumes do.

Retirement: It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese.

Remember how social change happens. Each of us has a worldview that pretty much interprets the world for us, puts our personal and public experiences in some kind of rational and understandable order. That worldview works fairly well for a period of time. Then something happens that renders it insufficient. Something happens that can't be fit into life as we have known and interpreted it.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared.

one of the Library's mottos was borrowed directly from the great military thinker Clausewitz: no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared.

I may take a while to learn from my mistakes, but I get there eventually.

My life is painfully full of learning experiences where I've had to be an expert at short notice,

I work in situations where random events happen. I can't forbid them to happen. I can only make allowances for them and deal with them when they occur.

How far could a person change and still remain human?