VFS Resources

Is the BIA Dead?

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:26:59 GMT

Are You Really Doing a Business Impact Analysis?

For many organisations, the term "Business Impact Analysis" (BIA) brings to mind a template - a form to be filled out, questions to be answered, and data to be collected. The very mention of a BIA can make eyes roll and even trigger heated debate. The assumption is often that once this template is complete, the BIA is done. This type of BIA should never have existed and should be dead.

This approach misses the true purpose and value of a BIA. When done right, the BIA is much more than a box-ticking exercise - it’s a strategic tool that reveals vulnerabilities, strengthens resilience, and informs better decision-making. Its real value lies not in a completed template but in the process: of analysing, questioning, and interpreting information to understand how disruptions could truly impact your organisation. Conducting a BIA requires critical thinking, deep analysis, and continuous engagement with the data to remain relevant. To put it another way, a BIA is not just a noun, it’s also a verb…not just an artefact but an activity.

The Value of Doing a BIA Well

A well-executed BIA transcends business continuity management (BCM); it equips operational leaders, risk managers, and finance teams with actionable insights. These insights can uncover vulnerabilities in operations, dependencies, and supply chains, streamline critical processes, and even highlight cost-saving opportunities. Beyond continuity planning, a BIA can drive value across strategic planning, resource allocation, and risk management.

Most importantly, the purpose of a BIA is to predict the consequences of disruptions and gather the information needed to develop effective prevention and recovery strategies.

By exploring dependencies, vulnerabilities, and potential impacts, the BIA facilitates effective conversations that shape informed decision-making. While identifying challenges is part of the process, the ultimate goal is to provide a foundation for practical, effective solutions that enhance both resilience and agility.

As emphasised in the Business Continuity Institute's Good Practice Guidelines (GPG), the BIA clarifies priorities and dependencies. But it can also pave the way for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of recovery strategies - a topic we’ll explore further in a future article.

So how do we do a good BIA? We will get to that, I promise. But first, let's explore what we mean by analysis , how BIAs can help us understand complex systems and how, when done well, they can play a key role in building or supporting a culture high in trust, autonomy and ownership behaviours.

Collecting Data Isn’t Enough - Analysis is Key

The name says it all: Business Impact Analysis . While gathering data about key processes, resources, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) is a starting point, it’s about analysing the information you collect to uncover meaningful insights that help your organisation understand how disruptions could affect its ability to operate and achieve strategic goals. This is where many BIAs fall short.

Key questions the analysis should answer include:

Which processes are truly critical?
Not all processes are created equal. A BIA identifies those essential for survival and success. While many may seem important, a thorough analysis will reveal which ones are absolutely essential for the business to function and thus, which must be prioritised for recovery when priority calls are needed.
What dependencies exist that could escalate an impact?
Internal and external dependencies can create cascading effects. A BIA brings these to light uncovering how one failure might cascade through the organisation, impacting other areas that initially seem unaffected.
How do different types of impacts influence decision-making?
Operationally critical processes don’t always equate to high financial impact, and vice versa. A comprehensive analysis may consider a range of possible impacts, for example, the FORCES [1] (financial, operational, reputational, customer and supplier relationships, environmental, and staffing). This ensures decisions are informed by the whole picture. By aligning these perspectives, organisations can better understand trade-offs and prioritise actions that support overall resilience.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Prioritising Recovery in Complex Systems

For smaller, highly autonomous teams, recovery priorities may seem intuitive. But in large organisations and sprawling enterprises, with complex interdependencies, the scale and complexity can make this level of intuitive understanding unrealistic. Dependencies across teams, functions, and systems can go unnoticed, leading to blind spots that could increase the severity of a disruption and its impacts.

Enablement for All

Even teams that see themselves as self-contained and autonomous may discover through a BIA that they play a critical role in enabling other parts of the organisation. Conversely, these teams may already recognise their importance but struggle to get the support they need to build and prove resilience.

The BIA process provides an opportunity for these teams to articulate their concerns, dependencies, and needs in a structured and strategic way. By using the language and channels of the BIA, they can elevate these issues to senior leaders, ensuring they are heard and understood within the broader context of organisational resilience. This makes the BIA not just a tool for analysis but a channel for advocacy and alignment across the business.

Building Trust

And of course, in modern management paradigms, a culture of trust is as important as ever. Trust is built with transparency . Teams can increase transparency by engaging with a BIA process.

How to Conduct a BIA That Delivers Value

As we've discussed, an effective BIA requires thoughtful interpretation and collaboration. Here’s how to ensure your process delivers actionable insights:

Engage Key Stakeholders Continuously
Involve decision-makers and subject matter experts throughout. Their input ensures data accuracy and builds buy-in for prioritisation decisions.

Their insights can help you verify which processes are truly critical and how their disruption would ripple through the business.

Balancing Internal Knowledge and External Expertise
While having a deep understanding of the organisation is important, the value of a BIA often lies in the ability to ask the right questions and challenge assumptions. External partners, though not as embedded in the day-to-day operations, bring fresh perspectives, objectivity, and experience from working across different industries. They’re skilled in identifying gaps, asking probing questions, and ensuring the analysis uncovers what truly matters, even in complex systems.

This combination of organisational knowledge and expert facilitation ensures the BIA process is thorough, insightful, and ultimately more effective. Whether as a supplement to internal teams or a full partnership, external expertise can make all the difference in ensuring a robust BIA that delivers real value.
Validate Assumptions and Dig Deeper
Don’t settle for surface answers like “This process is critical.” Ask why it’s critical, explore its dependencies, and test recovery estimates.

One of the most common traps in a BIA is taking initial responses at face value. Simply writing down the first answers to “Which processes are critical?” or “What are the consequences of downtime?” doesn't provide a full picture. Ask follow-up questions and challenge assumptions. Why is that process critical? What would happen if it failed for longer than the estimated recovery time?

But take care not to ask questions that you don’t need the answers to. ‘Analysis paralysis’ can set in when digging too deeply.
Use Scenarios to Understand Impact
Simulate realistic disruptions to see how systems respond. This approach reveals weaknesses and validates recovery priorities.

Good analysis comes from understanding the actual impact of disruptions. Don’t just rely on vague estimates and theory...get real. When drafting a BIA, discuss plausible disruption scenarios to explore how the loss of an activity or process would be felt, including the timing and nature of impacts. Later, use similar scenarios in exercises to test plans, build capability and experience, uncover weaknesses, and refine priorities. By aligning these approaches, you foster deeper understanding, greater adaptability, and stronger resilience.
Prioritise Holistically
Recovery prioritisation isn’t about individual processes in isolation - it’s about understanding the cumulative effect of disruptions and interdependencies.

After analysing potential impacts, take a step back. Prioritisation isn’t just about deciding which systems or processes to restore first; it’s about the broader context - the full system of the business. Processes that seem low-priority on their own may become critical when you consider how they connect to other essential functions. Similarly, processes deemed critical at first glance might not be as urgent when compared to others in the bigger picture. Taking this step back allows you to recalibrate priorities and focus on what truly matters most.

Even organisations designed to be modular and loosely coupled, with a culture of high ownership, can benefit from a holistic perspective. Recognising these interconnections strengthens recovery planning and resilience.

In Conclusion

The BIA’s value lies in its ability to transform data into actionable insights. Done well, it equips leadership with a roadmap for risk mitigation, aligns recovery strategies with broader objectives, and enables organisations to plan and respond with resilience.

Achieving this value depends on the quality of analysis and facilitation throughout the process. While internal knowledge is crucial, the right external expertise can take the process to the next level, providing fresh perspectives, challenging assumptions, and ensuring the analysis uncovers what really matters. Whether working alongside internal teams or leading the effort, expert facilitation can make the difference between a BIA that simply checks boxes and one that delivers real, actionable insights.

The question isn’t whether the BIA is dead, but whether you’re fully realising its potential. By embracing the BIA as an ongoing, analytical process, your organisation can move beyond merely documenting risks to truly understanding and addressing them.

If your BIA isn’t delivering real insights and solutions, it’s time to rethink your approach. Partner with us to transform it into a true enabler of resilience.

[1] Business Continuity for Dummies - Stuart Sterling, Brian Duddridge, Andrew Elliot, Michael Conway and Anna Payne

Beware of the Dark Side of Resilience

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:08:56 GMT

When Business Continuity Becomes Overkill

Business continuity and resilience are often hailed as essential components of a strong organisation. But we operate in a VUCA world - one defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In such an environment, having robust plans to keep operations running during disruptions is crucial, but an over-focus on continuity can lead to rigidity, stifling the agility required to navigate these challenges.

There’s a fine line between being prepared and being over-prepared. Sometimes, in the pursuit of resilience, businesses can go too far - becoming overly cautious, rigid, or risk-averse. When this happens, the very systems designed to protect the business can become barriers to agility, growth, and innovation, hampering the workforce and frustrating employees.

Let’s explore the potential pitfalls of over-investing in continuity planning and how businesses can strike the right balance between resilience and agility. [You might also want to check out our previous article on Business Agility .]

When Business Continuity Becomes a Burden

Business continuity is about ensuring your organisation can recover quickly from disruptions. But when the focus on resilience becomes obsessive, companies can inadvertently create inefficiencies that hinder their ability to adapt and grow.

Some common signs of “overkill” in business continuity planning include:

Overly Complex Procedures : Businesses may develop intricate and exhaustive continuity plans that cover every possible scenario, no matter how unlikely. While being thorough can be beneficial, overly complex procedures can overwhelm staff and slow down decision-making during a crisis. Instead of reacting swiftly, employees may get bogged down in ticking boxes and following detailed steps that don’t necessarily apply to the situation at hand. Worse, they may abandon the process altogether, missing essential steps and critical actions.
Excessive Focus on Risk Avoidance : Continuity planning is often built on risk assessments. However, when a business becomes too focused on mitigating every conceivable risk, it can lead to excessive caution. The organisation may begin avoiding opportunities that could involve even a minor level of risk - stifling innovation and growth in the process.
Redundant Redundancies : Having backups and redundancies in place is a core principle of business continuity. But there’s such a thing as too much redundancy. Duplicating systems, resources, and processes to an extreme degree can result in wasted investments and operational inefficiencies, tying up capital that could be used for growth initiatives.
Rigid Structures : An obsession with continuity planning can lead to rigid organisational structures, where flexibility is sacrificed for the sake of “stability.” This rigidity makes it difficult for businesses to pivot when needed, trapping them in outdated processes or technologies simply because they’re deemed “resilient.”

The Importance of Agility in Continuity Planning

Agility in business continuity means having plans that are not just robust but also flexible. It’s about preparing for the unexpected while keeping room for innovation and adaptability.

Here’s how to balance resilience with agility:

Simplify Where Possible : Effective business continuity plans don’t need to be overly complicated. In fact, simplicity often leads to greater clarity and faster decision-making in a crisis. Focus on the core elements that really matter, such as communication protocols*, key recovery objectives, and the most critical systems. By streamlining processes, you make it easier for teams to understand and follow the plan in real-time, without getting caught up in unnecessary detail.
Embrace Scenario-Based Flexibility : Instead of planning for every possible scenario, businesses can adopt scenario-based planning that leaves room for flexibility. This means designing plans around key types of disruptions but empowering teams to adapt their responses based on real-time conditions. Plans should act as handrails, not handcuffs - providing flexible guidance that encourages innovative thinking and responsibility, rather than limiting responses or allowing reliance on rigid instructions.
Align Resilience with Innovation : Risk management and innovation should not be seen as competing priorities. By fostering a culture that encourages calculated risks, businesses can embrace innovation without undermining their resilience. Continuity planning should not restrict business growth initiatives. For example, adopting new technologies or entering new markets might carry some risk. Identifying and managing risks with an innovative approach can lead to the development of unique intellectual property, which in turn becomes a differentiator and competitive advantage. Netflix's Chaos Monkey* tool exemplifies this, enabling the company to enhance agility while significantly reducing disruptions.
Leverage Technology for Flexibility : Modern technology can help make continuity plans both resilient and agile. Cloud-based solutions, for example, offer flexibility by allowing employees to access critical systems and data from anywhere. Automated systems can ensure rapid recovery from disruptions without needing extensive manual intervention. By investing in adaptable technologies, businesses can increase both their resilience and their ability to pivot when necessary.
Train for Agility : Employees play a critical role in maintaining both resilience and agility. Training shouldn’t just focus on following procedures but also on fostering quick decision-making and problem-solving skills. Regular simulations should include dynamic scenarios where teams need to adapt at pace, helping them become more comfortable with ambiguity and change.

Balancing Continuity and Growth

Ultimately, resilience is essential - but not at the expense of growth and adaptability. A strong business continuity plan should act as a foundation for agility, enabling businesses to recover from disruptions while remaining nimble in the face of change.

Striking this balance requires a mindset shift. Rather than seeing resilience and agility as separate goals, companies need to view them as complementary forces. Agility should be built into continuity planning, ensuring that when disruptions occur, the business can not only survive but thrive in the aftermath.

By taking a more balanced approach - one that focuses on both continuity and adaptability - organisations can ensure they are not just protecting themselves from risks but also positioning themselves to seize new opportunities and grow in an ever-changing world.

Want to learn more? Get in touch .

Footnotes:

1 Communication protocols refer to the structured methods and channels used to convey essential information during a disruption, ensuring that critical stakeholders, both internal and external, receive timely updates. This includes emergency notifications, internal briefings, media statements and coordination with external entities like emergency services. These examples are not exhaustive and can vary based on the organisation’s specific needs.

2 Chaos Monkey, developed by Netflix in 2010 is a tool that intentionally introduces disruptions to a system to test its resiliency and identify vulnerabilities.

Why not check out our free VFS Resources Hub for more content.

My AI Work Buddies

Mon, 01 May 2023 15:22:11 GMT

Future-Proof your business now to maximise AI in the workplace soon.

What's the key to leveraging the power of AI in the workplace?

Effective Communication

One of the most powerful predictors of team performance is Effective Communication. This is a broad topic considering brevity & conciseness, accuracy & ambiguity, a shared vocabulary and context, high trust, good alignment and many other factors. Whilst making predictions about the impacts of technology in the future is hard, and history tells us, generally inaccurate, it would make sense to assume (at least for now) that effective communication between intelligent, interacting entities (IIEs) will continue to be a key predictor of overall effectiveness and performance.

With this in mind, how might we future-proof our business and working practices to leverage the power of the rapidly advancing capabilities of Generative-AI? Well... in short, focus on improving effective communication between IIEs ... yes, there was a reason why we referred to "intelligent, interacting entities" earlier, and not simply "people". If we consider AI-powered tools and systems as IIEs, we think more carefully about how we create knowledge and share information in the workplace. Precise, unambiguous, concise, accurate (PUCA) language, within a common context, will remain just as important as ever.

We can improve our abilities to communicate with people today, relatively easily. But it may take a bit longer to be able to do so with AI. So you need to start now.

"Aren't you just talking about 'Prompt Engineering?"

Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is certainly a skill / role related to effective communication between IIEs. It involves crafting clear and effective instructions or prompts to elicit desired responses from AI language models, a form of Generative-AI. It's definitely a skill to formulate input in a way that guides the AI model toward generating specific and relevant outputs. But it has it's challenges, it's not very deterministic or repeatable, it's geo-language specific and comes with all the issues that is inherent in human languages. They're not PUCA.

When people converse, the current context, domain specific terminology, buzz-words and acronyms are a powerful short-hand ...and troublesome. So how do we maximise their richness whilst minimising their short-comings? We'll get to that in a moment.

Product & Software Development

What might this mean in the world of Product & Software development? Well, undoubtedly we will be employing AI systems to do much of the work, we can see this beginning to happen already. But how do we interact and communicate with them, and most importantly, who communicates with them? We touched on the 'who' point in a previous article last year, it's a very short read and is worth checking out.

Requirements Models

One approach to communicating in a PUCA manner is to create a model. Modelling requirements within a specific context and domain, serves as an excellent example (and a proven method) for communicating with PUCA language and powerful short-hand terms. Once a popular technique, requirements modelling has fallen out of favour in recent years. This is often due to it being perceived as time-consuming upfront work, at odds with a more agile way of working.

In reality, these models often still get built. What frequently happens is that automated test suites effectively create a type of model representing the requirements and their domain. Additionally, some would argue (with merit) that software architecture and software design practices, such as those related to Domain Driven Design (DDD) and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), also produce models. Whilst generally effective, they are not the most efficient method:

The level of experience and expertise one needs, to correctly, effectively, and safely practice these techniques is high.

In the hands of experienced developers and engineers, they are effective techniques for navigating a sea of complications and complexity. But for most people, it takes a lot of time, effort, and making mistakes, to become proficient.

In short, only a sub-set of your workforce can correctly and unambiguously communicate with IIEs this way.
An iterative approach can hide unnecessary rework and corrections.

These types of requirements models are rarely developed correctly at the first attempt. They become increasingly valuable as they undergo iterative updates, often as a result of finding and resolving ambiguities or from answering questions that nobody had the answers to at the start. This is sensible. But it can also be very inefficient. There are better ways of driving out uncertainties and ambiguities.

Also, this means that the PUCA 'expression of needs' doesn't initially exist in a manner that facilitates communication with a concise, correct and unambiguous language, whether to a person or an AI-powered tool.

We're not suggesting that we try to make a waterfall-like approach work. Rather, we are acknowledging that the reasons for the emergence of agile practices will persist, even within AI-powered software development. We will still need to iterate, experiment, learn and adapt. But there are better ways to model requirements such that we can unleash the power of AI in the workplace.
They're not really requirements models.

A Requirements Model goes beyond a simple list of written requirements by offering a comprehensive framework that captures the essence of what's needed. It provides a structured representation that illustrates relationships, dependencies, and interactions among various requirements. This holistic approach, often referred to as "cohesive rules," ensures a more interconnected and nuanced set of guidelines, which can be vital for effective system development and understanding the project's complete scope.

What if we could quickly model the requirements, communicating with PUCA language and powerful domain-specific terminology? What if we could shine a light on the scenarios and situations that mustn't be allowed to exist?

Well, we can, there are numerous techniques that have been used over the years. They use modelling languages (MLs) and they differ in their innate abilities to drive out uncertainties and shine a light on ambiguities . Most are valuable for being able to 'zoom out' and to be able to see a summary of a complex scenario.

Examples of modelling techniques range from graphical and notation based approaches such as UML and its various models, The C4 Model, Business Process Modelling such as BPMN , to more strongly typed, semantically rich and self-verifying MLs and finally to formal / mathematical MLs that create provable models.

What if we could do it in such a way that lowered the level of experience and expertise needed to do this accurately? After all, this both improves the usefulness of some of your workforce and teammates now, and takes you one step closer to being able to effectively and safely adopt AI-powered development tooling in the future. We can. Numerous methods have proved that they enable this, maybe not when practiced in isolation but when practiced together. But they don't get adopted by the mainstream development communities.

In Summary

Consider future-proofing your business with more user domain modelling and business domain modelling, to increase effective communication between intelligent, interacting entities.

Want to learn more? Get in touch.

Image Credit:

John Schnobrich on Unsplash

GPT Myth Busting

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 17:51:32 GMT

Is the new generation of Artificial Intelligence intelligent?

1 minute read

Chat GPT has been making headlines recently and even your technophobe friends and family members have probably been speaking about it. It's inevitable that debates about the benefits and risks of advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) will be headline news soon as OpenAI's Chat GPT and similar AI systems get released to the public. Should we trust them? Are they safe? And here in lies the first irony... trust.

Trust

The concerns come from a lack of trust in both the systems themselves and the regulatory frameworks that they are developed and operated within. We have probably based too much trust in the abilities of this new generation of AI system, which has given rise to these concerns.

The phenomenon known as Automation Bias , studied in social psychology, suggests that humans tend to over trust decisions made by automated systems. On closer inspection, many responses from the LLM (Large Language Model) based AI systems resulted in the generation of inaccurate and fictional information. In fact the term "Hallucinated Facts " seems to be an emerging phrase to describe this intrinsic behaviour. It is acknowledged that AI can make mistakes, but it's the nature of the mistakes that's unusual and sometimes concerning, often flying under the radar of human reviewers.

LLMs

Large Language Models are not designed or optimised to prioritise factual accuracy. Instead, they are trained to "blur" the information from the web into a more abstract representation, which allows them to excel in creative and artistic generation. The ability of an LLM to generate any true statements is merely coincidental, as those statements appeared frequently enough in the training data and became retained, rather than being a result of explicit design. And here is the second irony...

A Tool for Experts

Due to the convincing but erroneous behaviour of this technology, these AI systems are best in the hands of experts, but they are available to everyone. Anyone can use them and use their outputs. Maybe the biggest risk at the moment is the human element...' who' does ' what' with their output.

Hallucinations can be useful

It is important to acknowledge that not every use case of LLMs requires accuracy. Some of the most remarkable instances of LLM and multi-modal LLM outputs involve the integration of creativity and "hallucination," resulting in significant artistic value. These outputs offer users novel combinations of styles that they might not have envisioned, adding to their overall appeal.

So what's next?

Trustworthy LLMs need to be paired up with other information and natural language processing (NLP) techniques... which of course is already well underway. We think that trustworthy AI systems will emerge from the synergy of LLMs and Knowledge Graphs . Combining the creative power of LLMs with the factual index of Knowledge Graphs will give rise to systems that inspire creativity and provide reliability for knowledge workflows and critical applications. The inclusion of Knowledge Graph technology may arguably make AI systems 'provable' where it is advantageous to do so.

And finally...

Let's not lose sight of the incredible achievements that the teams behind these emerging technologies have made in terms of understanding us users. The ability of ChatGPT in particular (at the time of writing) to not only remember the details of your conversation and understand our messages so well, is arguably the main breakthrough. The ability to understand our intent, to grasp and retain the evolving context of a discussion and to respond appropriately, is an amazing achievement.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

What is a Data Lakehouse?

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:20:08 GMT

It may be part of your company's technology estate and data infrastructure, or if it's not, it almost certainly will be. But what is it?

This is part of our ' Tech for the Exec' series.

“A picture paints one thousand words” as the saying goes. But equally, a name or a short description can conjure up a vivid image. The name “Data Lakehouse” did just that for me when I first heard it. A quaint, petite building on the edge of a vast, natural lake. So, what would this mean as a metaphor in the context of technology and digital infrastructure? Spoiler alert! Anything but this idyllic scene I’d imagined. Let’s jump back into the world of business and tech to explain.

Back to Business

Being able to perform effective data analytics efficiently has rapidly become one of the primary concerns for businesses, shaping the very foundations of organisational design, software and systems architecture (to support a more considered Enterprise Data Architecture), and data infrastructure. Even those of you far removed from your CTO and their band of technologists are likely to have felt the effects of good or poor data management. Whether it's driving your sales activities, your customer retention strategies, your revenue forecasting or ensuring you have your essential corpus of data to mine (supporting the development of your own AI-based systems), data management underpins them all.

Warehouses and Lakes

Both Data Warehouses and Data Lakes have played key roles in data infrastructure and data management to this point. Data lakes and data warehouses can be used in conjunction, a dynamic duo, working together to store and structure your valuable data. In our experience, however, many enterprises have not invested sufficiently and typically run from a Data Warehouse only.

Data lakes function as catch-all systems for new data, while data warehouses apply downstream structure and meaning to specific data from this system. Great, you might think. Well, yes…and no. Orchestrating these systems to provide reliable data can incur substantial costs in terms of time and resources. And here enters the concept of the Data Lakehouse. But before we delve into that, let’s take a whistle-stop tour of what Data Warehouses and Data Lakes do.

Data lakes: these are commonly built on big data platforms such as Apache Hadoop, known for being cost-effective and versatile storage spaces. They handle all sorts of data, from videos to text, creating an eclectic treasure trove. However, navigating these vast waters might require the guidance of data wizards—data scientists and engineers—to tame the data deluge. Additionally, as data governance is mostly implemented downstream from these systems, data lakes tend to be more susceptible to data silos, which can subsequently transform into a data swamp with scattered islands of data that should be connected. When this occurs, the usability of the data lake can be compromised.

Data warehouses: They're like wise librarians, gathering raw data from multiple sources, neatly organising it into a central repository that uses relational database infrastructure. These are central to data analytics and business intelligence applications such as enterprise reporting. Data warehouses employ ETL processes to extract , transform , and load data into the data warehouse repository. ETL processes are sometimes the means of moving data from the warehouse to a 'destination' system or tool. However, it is limited by its inefficiency and cost, particularly as the number of data sources and quantity of data grow over time. (We'll delve into this a little in our "Technically Curious" Section at the end.

Now, imagine a hybrid realm where the wisdom of warehouses meets the adaptability of lakes. Behold, the Data Lakehouse!

The Data Lakehouse

Data lakehouses are gaining popularity as an infrastructure choice, merging the capabilities of data warehouses and data lakes.

A "Lakehouse" is a misnomer in my opinion. It's a warehouse, a factory, a logistics office and a distribution network sitting next to a reservoir. A powerhouse of ability and potential. But a Data Lakehouse is what it's called.

----------

For the Technically Curious Exec

If you want to look a little deeper into this subject, read on...

Data Lakehouses are generally products provided by Cloud Infrastructure providers, moving into the traditional Data Warehouse market. This is useful to know because it helps to understand how they're able to (or almost able to) provide the benefits of a Data Lake and a Warehouse, and what the trade-offs are especially at an executive level.

Data storage is cheap in a Data Lake , the provider has vast amounts of it and utilise cheap cloud storage . It's the Data retrieval that is harder and thus costly. That's because the data has no structure, no strong relationships or ordering to make it easy to search for the data requested. It relies on a huge amount of computers to churn through all the data, all done behind the scenes by the provider. We say that Data Lakes are optimised for Data Write.
The opposite is true for a Data Warehouse . Data storage is more expensive, primarily because it uses high-end, high spec hardware under the hood. But also because the data is structured, contains copies, indexes (Look Up Tables) and duplications so that it can be linked together in different ways enabling quick and cheap data retrieval...Think Librarian and Library. We say that Data Warehouses are optimised for Data Read .
A Data Lakehouse doesn't structure the data to organise and store it. Instead, it does some clever parsing, attempts to categorise it (apply type to the data), compresses it and calculates meta data on it. This allows for some 'short-cuts' that a Data Lake can't perform when retrieving data for a data query. It also allows for the data to be chunked up and searched in parallel, using a large amount of compute power for that short period of time. Think of it like splitting a deck of cards into 5 parts and asking 5 people to find the King of Diamonds. It's much faster than one person perfoming this search. But you can't do this if you don't know that the stack of rectangular cards with information on has only one King of Diamonds. The Data Lake doesn't understand the rules of the data. A Data Lakehouse knows just enough to allow the search to be done by many computers working in parallel.

So, you can imagine that Performance and Operating Costs may differ between all three systems. Data retrieval times of a Data Lakehouse are not quite as fast as a Data Warehouse. This is constantly improving however. And at a greater cost, data retrieval can be improved in a Lakehouse.

Because of the way that these systems are built differently, the cost to operate them also differs. Which is cheaper? It depends on your usage patterns. If you remember that these providers usually separate out the cost of data storage from the cost of compute , you'll know to ask questions about what usage patterns your business has. Sometimes a Data Warehouse is the right solution for your business.

*ACID refers to atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, all of which are critical properties ensuring a transaction (a sequence of consecutive events and their consequent data updates) maintains data accuracy and consistency.

If you found this insightful, you might want to checkout our Resources Hub .

My AI Work Buddies - explores the importance of data models as part of a future-proof strategy to leverage AI technologies.

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www.peakpx.com

www.oblivionstate.com

Perfectionism and how to Overcome it (Part 2)

Sun, 29 May 2022 16:23:02 GMT

I want to overcome the negative impacts of unhealthy perfectionism

Thanks to our friends from the VFS Performance Coaching practice for this article.

VFS Coaching

6 Minute Read

This is part 2 of a 2 part series.

In part 1 of this short series on Perfectionism we explored what perfection is from a clinical psychologist’s perspective and looked at how it drives high standards which can lead to excessive worry and a low self-esteem. In this second and final part, we will look at more side-effects of perfectionism in the forms of procrastination and burnout, before exploring ways to overcome it.

So without further ado, let’s dive into it.

Procrastination

Procrastination is common among perfectionists (Stoeber, 2018). Along with tackling other counterproductive behaviours, we may suggest that you self-monitor behaviour and thoughts linked to procrastination, such as obstructing or delaying tasks.

As we’ve seen, perfectionistic-concerns generate a gap between a person’s actual and ideal self. This sense of falling short leads them to put off until tomorrow what they could get done today (Smith, Sherry, Saklofske, & Mushqaush, 2017).

Other studies, particularly in sports, have found that perfectionists are also more likely to experience a fear of failure (Correia, 2018). Procrastination may be a response to concerns regarding making mistakes or performing poorly.

Procrastination is one of the main contributors to performance levels. We all do it from time to time. The two most important points are 1, to recognise when it’s happening and 2, to know how to overcome it. Perfectionism is only one of many causes of procrastination.

Burnout

Burnout is a “psychosocial syndrome that is associated with motivational, performance, and psychological difficulties” and has three core symptoms (Hill & Curran, 2015, p. 1):

Emotional exhaustion
A general feeling of being overstretched due to excessive demands.
Impersonal or cynical attitude
A sense of indifference or detachment from others or the environment.
Reduced sense of competence or accomplishment
The higher the sense of incompetence or failure, the more burned out the individual.

Perfectionism gets in the way of successfully managing our workload and can sometimes be a factor in burnout. Excessively high standards may mean perfectionists are less successful at delegating, prioritising, and even saying no, leading to a higher volume of tasks (Harvard Business Review, 2021).

Possibly because of its negative effect on motivation, perfectionism is associated with burnout and its symptoms (Hill & Curran, 2015).

If you suspect that you may be suffering from burnout, it may be worthwhile identifying your degree of perfectionism.

So, how do we overcome perfectionism?

We are undoubtedly living in a time when we are inundated with images and information like never before. Comparing ourselves to others or to the unrealistic targets from social media, high-pressure workplaces, and demanding educational standards. So how do we manage the need to always do better?

There are ways to combat our desire for perfection. For some, depending on how you are feeling and acting, self-help books may be sufficient. Others may need talking therapies or Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to break out of negative thinking patterns (Thomson, 2019).

Clinical perfectionism is often best treated with CBT.

This first step involves educating the person about the difference between useful and clinical perfectionism, the damaging aspects of clinical perfectionism, and how it can actually make it less likely people will achieve their goals.

Therapists encourage clients to experiment with different ways of approaching their goals, and to have flexible standards and self-compassion rather than self-criticism. They also try to eliminate procrastination and avoidance.

Former clinical psychologist Alice Boyes suggests focusing on aspects of perfectionism and their potential solutions on a day-to-day basis. The following two approaches can help you overcome perfectionism in (and outside of) the workplace and ultimately get what is really needed done (modified from Boyes, 2020):

Re-assign tasks
Perfectionists can find it difficult to let go of control; they don’t want to hand over work for fear that it will not be done properly, or because it feels like some admission of failure that you can’t do it yourself.

Learn to enjoy handing over tasks to other people and being relieved of the decision-making burden. Ask yourself: Would my time be better spent elsewhere? Could someone else step up and be accountable for this task?
Stop over-delivering
It can be tempting to think, “If I’m not over-delivering, I’m under-delivering.” This is unlikely. If given time, resources, and payment to complete a piece of work, perform it well, but your standards and time investment should not be disproportionate to its value.

Recognise that a client may not expect you to reply within two hours. Depending on the task, try to focus on areas where you can add the most value according to the time and resources agreed.

Essentially, these are about balance . High standards are required in almost all jobs, but they have to be realistic, and you need to be aware that mistakes can lead to development and growth.

At VFS Consulting we spend a lot of time with businesses and their employees helping them to understand quality and what high and low quality is. Quality is how well something fulfils its intended purpose, meeting the requirements and producing something of the correct grade. For example, whilst some luxury goods last longer or perform better, mostly they simply cost more to make because they use higher grade materials or employ more manual input. They do not necessarily function any better than a less expensive alternative… they are no more fit-for-purpose, just more expensive.

In technology you may hear the term “over-engineered” which generally means that something is too complex, too highly spec’d and as a result more expensive that it needs to be. It is of high grade but of no higher quality.

So you see that high grade and high quality aren’t the same.

For perfectionists, it's useful to consider that an appropriate level of quality considers the costs, the time and the grade of the output.

What other techniques can I consider?

The following interventions and exercises go deeper, exploring how we can change the beliefs associated with avoiding setting impossible-to-maintain standards.

Your Lifestyle

5 tips to dilute perfectionism and boost self-esteem

1. Acknowledge any perfectionistic traits

Frankly acknowledge that perfectionism is not doing you any favours. In fact, it is actually preventing you from feeling joy and satisfaction from your achievements. Predominantly, you are likely feeling a failure from not meeting your own expectations. How often can you realistically achieve perfection? 1-5% maybe? There is significant room for fruitless berating of yourself for the other 95-99%.

2. Understand your emotions and what drives your unhealthy perfectionism

Understand where the early perfectionist messages are rooted. What experiences have contributed to you believing that you have to be perfect? Write this down in a journal and begin to view it from a new and different perspective. Consider the types of authority figure you would have liked to have had in early life. What kind of qualities would they have demonstrated to support you in feeling encouraged, accepted and wholly good enough?

3. Recalibrate

Question your beliefs about needing to please, perfect or appease others in your life today. Will you really be rejected for not being perfect? Do people care as much as you think? Often, we are placing far more pressure on ourselves than others ever would do. People often prefer someone who is real, genuine and imperfect. Perfectionism can lead to competitiveness, rigidity and a lack of personal warmth which can be off-putting.

Allow your perfectionistic strivings to aim for honesty, to be honest with yourself and work on achieving an accurate representation of what is an acceptable level of competence to portray and embrace being authentic .

4. See Social Media content for what it really is

Be mindful of your social media usage. If you are comparing yourself and feeling low, then take a step back. Observe the images that are presented with a critical eye. This is just a snap-shot of someone’s life and is not the day-in-day-out real-life story. Understandably, people will post their best photos, accompanied by a favourable filter. How can you compare yourself to these? You can also reduce your social media engagement if you find this triggering.

Of course, comparisons don’t just happen on social media, and comparing & contrasting two similar things can be a useful approach for assessing differences. But it is unlikely that you are comparing apples with apples.

5. Focus on your Qualities & Strengths

We are all flawed human beings with our strengths and weaknesses. No-one, yes, no-one has it all sorted out! Remember this, when you are tempted to idealise someone and assume they have it all together. There may be aspects of another that you wish to emulate or aspire to, but no-one is faultless. Instead, focus inwards and notice your own positive qualities and strengths. This is not about being arrogant, but rather having a quiet, inner acknowledgement and acceptance of the things you can do well. Jotting these thoughts down in a journal can be helpful, enabling you to begin to shift your focus. If you have a performance coach, ask them to work with you on this. If not and you're struggling with this exercise, ask a friend whom you trust to give feedback to you.

If you are struggling to control your inner perfectionist and are longing to feel self-acceptance, now could be the time to reach out and get support through our performance & wellbeing coaching. You can read more about focussing on your strengths .

Considering your Personal Strengths Profile

At VFS Coaching we use the VIA Character Strengths research programme to underpin this area of Positive Psychology that is at the heart of our coaching. If you're not currently or have not been a coaching client of ours, you can skip this section.

Whilst character strengths were not conclusive in terms of diagnosing perfectionism, some interesting correlations have been identified:

Perfectionistic strivings were explained by the optimal use of spirituality and infrequent underuse of perseverance and prudence .

Perfectionistic concerns related to the overuse of humility , underuse of hope and humour alongside a lack of optimal self-regulation .

Consider exploring this topic with your coach to identify opportunities to improve your performance and wellbeing. We have interactive tools on the Members area of the VFS Coaching site that can help you explore this. It is a fully personalised experience if you enter your PSP Code.

So, to summarise both articles:

There is healthy and unhealthy perfectionism
Typically a person will tend to have either healthy of unhealthy perfectionism but not a balanced mix of both
It can cause excessive worry and anxiety - perfectionistic-concerns generate a gap between a person’s actual and ideal self
Procrastination, low Self-Esteem and Burnout are common symptoms
Clinical perfectionism is often best treated with Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy
Other, more easily achievable personal actions in the workplace include:
Reassigning tasks (and learn to see this as a responsible thing to do)
Stop over-delivering (it doesn't mean your under-delivering and see this as delivering high quality)
Outside of work:
Acknowledge if you have perfectionistic traits and how they are not actually helping you achieve of feel good
Be aware of your time on social media and in-particular avoid making unrealistic comparisons
Focus on your strengths

References

Antony, M. M., & Swinson, R. P. (2009). When perfect isn’t good enough: Strategies for coping with perfectionism. New Harbinger.

Boyes, A. (2020). Don’t let perfection be the enemy of productivity. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved August 24, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2020/03/dont-let-perfection-be-the-enemy-of-productivity

Correia, M. E. (2018). Fear of failure and perfectionism in sport. Cuadernos de Psicología del Deporte, 18(1), 161–172.

Frost R. O., Marten P., Lahart C., Rosenblate R. (1990). The dimensions of perfectionism. Cogn. Ther. Res. 14 449–468. 10.1007/BF01172967

Hill RW, Huelsman TJ, Furr RM, Kibler J, Vicente BB, Kennedy CJ (2004. A new measure of perfectionism: the Perfectionism Inventory. )Pers Assess. 2004 Feb; 82(1):80-91.

Hill, A. P., & Curran, T. (2015). Multidimensional perfectionism and burnout. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 269–288.

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships: As developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science: Vol. 3. Formulations of the person and the social context (pp. 184–256). McGraw-Hill.

Smith, M. M., Sherry, S. B., Saklofske, D. H., & Mushqaush, A. R. (2017). Clarifying the perfectionism-procrastination relationship using a 7-day, 14-occasion daily diary study. Personality and Individual Differences, 112, 117–123.

Slaney R. B., Rice K. G., Mobley M., Trippi J., Ashby J. S. (2001). The revised almost perfect scale. Meas. Eval. Couns. Dev. 34 130–145.

Smith, B.J. (2020). Can Perfectionistic Strivings be healthy? The association between Perfectionism, Character Strength Use and Flourishing. https://dissertations.library.lincoln.ac.uk/893

Stoeber, J. (2018). The psychology of perfectionism: Theory, research, applications. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Note: Some of this content has been adapted from positivepsychology.com

An Introduction to Systems Leadership

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 15:56:56 GMT

Systems Thinking... Systems Dynamics... Systems systems systems.

Another Systems Buzz Word? Maybe. But a useful one.

Some time ago I was described as having applied systems leadership to a project I was delivering. It wasn’t a term I was familiar with, so, being the questioning type that I am, I took to the internet to find out a little bit more…and wow, it delivered.

I very quickly discovered this was a vast subject area. Systems, Systems Dynamics, Systems Thinking, Systems Leadership, Systems Entrepreneurship are just some of the terms I came across and each of them are interesting and in depth subjects in their own right.

Systems Leadership really isn’t complicated. If I were to take it to the most simplistic level I’d say it’s the use of questioning , influencing and collaborating skills. Things that many of us do naturally in our workplaces without a second thought.

However, whilst it’s helpful to see it in a nutshell, it’s also quite reductionist and I felt that to understand Systems Leadership properly I needed to go a bit deeper and gain at least a basic understanding of what was behind it. What I am setting out to do here, is provide an introduction to Systems Leadership and share with you some of the points and expert views I’ve found most helpful in developing my own understanding.

I have also provided some suggested reading and learning resources for those, like me, who may want to explore a little deeper.

Systems and Systems Thinking

Let's begin with some clarity about what is meant here by systems and s ystems thinking .

We’re not talking about computer systems or management control systems.

What we are looking at is interconnectedness and viewing an organisation as a dynamic process.

The OED describes systems as a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole.

Systems vary in their size and complexity but they are all around us. We are part of them in our families, at home, in our workplaces and in society, and there are systems within systems.

Systems thinking is about seeing the bigger picture, seeing the “complex whole” as well as the parts within it, that is to say the relationships, distinctions, systems and perspectives that are present in each and every system.

“ Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ”snapshots.” It is a set of general principles—distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management…. During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems.

And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character. ”

(Senge, 2006 pp 68-69)

As you can see, Systems Thinking isn’t new. However, in recent years it seems to have grown in consciousness, particularly in the public and charity sectors.

This is, in part, down to the large and complex systems found in those environments such as education, healthcare, transport and humanitarian concerns such as the global refugee crisis, modern slavery and climate change.

At first glance you might not think of some of these issues as systems. A seemingly more accurate description would probably be a ‘wicked problem’. In other words, a problem that is extremely difficult to solve due to its complexities and interconnectedness. However, when we perceive these issues as systems it becomes easier to think about them in a different way.

Systems Thinking is often described as holistic but that’s not an entirely accurate description. Yes it is holistic, but we also need to zoom in on the details. We apply analysis to isolate and view the parts and synthesis to pull everything back together to view the whole.

It doesn’t mean that as individuals we have to be experts in every aspect of the system. This is where we harness the power of the collective and Systems Leadership comes to the fore.

Systems Leadership

(Sorkin, 2016)

Systems Leadership is a set of skills and attributes that can be applied by anyone wanting to drive or support a systems level change. And, whilst it’s an ideal approach for the big and complicated social issues, I believe it’s just as valuable scaled down to organisational and workplace levels. Perhaps you have a particularly difficult situation or challenging project to manage, or a great idea but you need your voice heard to influence upwards. Adopting a systems leadership approach can be a great way to tackle these issues.

But what does all this look like in practice, how do you do it?

Talk to people about your vision, the changes you believe are necessary, get their views. Don’t be put off by those who disagree, listen to their reasons. Some people will be anxious about any kind of change but hear them out. They will shine a light on your blind spots. A room full of ‘yes men’ isn’t healthy, but there is a lot of value in constructive challenge.

Ask questions, find out how things work, what the interactions are, the dynamics at play, how things fit together.

Collaborate. Agree on a shared ambition. Involve people, use their passion, expertise and ideas and work across the boundaries. If everyone is working to the same end goal and adopting a systems mindset, your colleagues, each expert in their own area, will drive the change where it's needed. But don’t fall back into silo working. Facilitate ongoing communication.

Making changes in one area will undoubtedly impact on another so it’s vital to identify stakeholders and engage them. Draw on a wide range of views both internally and externally. Your stakeholders will all bring different perspectives, you’ll learn how they relate to one another, where the dependencies lie, where the tensions are and what the constraints are. This is where you gain your systems insight. Your role will see you bridging the gaps between the different parties whilst simultaneously holding the shared vision.

It’s not about one person leading from the top with a systems leader hat on. The power in systems leadership comes from these collaborative, dynamic relationships so do what you can to foster community and create a framework for creativity and change-making.
And let's deal with ego. You are a catalyst and facilitator of change but the end result will be a group effort, this is shared leadership. Take pride in the achievements of others and in the outcome.

Accept that this is going to take time. Part of your role as a systems leader is to create the space that’s needed to work through these complex issues. Give people time and space to think and be creative.
Get comfortable with uncertainty and working in ambiguity, accept that sometimes a partial solution might be the best you can reach.
And finally, remember you are part of the system and its associated problems, not separate from them. Real change comes when you accept this and work to co create transformation from within.

Systems Leadership: A tool for our times

Systems Leadership is a set of skills and capacities that any individual or organisation can use to catalyse, enable and support the process of systems-level change. It is comprised of three interconnected elements:

If you think that your business would benefit from increased levels of Systems Leadership, get in touch.

Free Learning Resources:

Courses provided by The Open University exploring systems as a subject in its own right and subjects which can be understood through the application of systems thinking. As well as the overview, I’ve included the two I found the most helpful in building my own understanding.

List of all free OU 'systems' courses

Systems thinking and practice

Mastering systems thinking in practice

YouTube video by Systems Innovation providing a more in depth view of systems leadership.

Systems Leadership

References

Dreier L, Nabarro D, Nelson J, (2019) Systems leadership for sustainable development: Strategies for achieving systemic change. Available at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Systems%20Leadership.pdf Accessed 20th April 2022

Senge, P. (2006) The fifth discipline . New York: Doubleday/Currency.

Sorkin, D. (2016) Systems Leadership for Beginners: what it is, how it works, and why it helps Available at: https://www.nationalvoices.org.uk/blogs/systems-leadership-beginners-what-it-how-it-works-and-why-it-helps (Accessed 20th April 2022)

Perfectionism and how to overcome it

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:31:32 GMT

Do I want to overcome my perfectionism?

Thanks to our friends from the VFS Performance Coaching practice for this article.

VFS Coaching

7 Minute Read

This is part 1 of a 2 part series.

Ok, so the headline says it all…but before we continue, I want to be very clear about something. In this article, we explore a very real personality trait, as recognised in the field of Psychology, perfectionism. As with all these traits and biases, there are varying degrees to the extent that someone demonstrates these behaviours or thinking patterns. VFS Coaching provides articles such as this one to help people develop a greater understanding of personalities. It’s easy to read articles like this and think “ahhh! this is me, this explains why I think this… or feel that”. And whilst self reflection and personal discovery is great, it’s really… and I mean REALLY important to recognise when these traits and their resulting behaviours kick in and when they don't. The intention of this article is not to encourage you to apply a label to yourself or others.

Ok, now I’ve said that, let's get to the topic, Perfectionism and how to overcome it.

The term perfectionist conjures up a variety of images and thoughts. It can be used as a compliment and as a derogatory term. It can also be used as a means of justifying someone's actions…..your own or those of another.

Perfectionism can drive impossibly high standards and have dramatic consequences. Perfectionism is a complex characteristic that according to experts, can be “adaptive (healthy, positive, functional) or maladaptive (unhealthy, negative, dysfunctional)” (Stoeber, 2018).

There are several ways to define and describe perfectionism, but most theories identify the following three features (or traits) of perfectionists (Antony & Swinson, 2009).

Perfectionism:

Adopting standards that are extremely difficult or impossible to meet.
Setting expectations so high that they damage, rather than enhance, one's performance.
Tends to co-exist with other mental health problems, including depression and anxiety.

The number of people experiencing perfectionism is rising dramatically, especially among the young (Curran & Hill, 2019).

Is perfectionism bad?

Striving for the perfect, flawless performance in sport has led to incredible performances and achievements.

“While perfectionism in any activity requiring discipline and prolonged focus can have its benefits and deliver success, at other times, it can damage motivation and directly lead to failure” (Stoeber, 2018).

Striking a balance

I suspect you’re reading this article to learn how you might get better at managing your perfectionistic traits. So, how do we manage the exceedingly high expectations we have for ourselves and others while addressing our concerns over making mistakes and handling criticism?

Below, we explore this character trait in more depth. In part 2 , we look at techniques and approaches to help you combat perfectionism whilst understanding when good is good enough.

A closer look at Perfectionism

Whilst there have been many academic studies and almost as many ways to define and model this trait, there is common ground. There are two main dimensions of perfectionism, High Standards and Excessive Worry.

High Standards

Stoeber (2018) and Antony & Swinson (2009) describe Perfectionist strivings as a combination of (exceedingly) high personal standards that perfectionists set:

Self-oriented perfectionism:
Setting impossibly high standards for yourself
Other-oriented perfectionism:
Setting impossibly high expectations for others
Socially prescribed perfectionism
Assuming others have expectations of you that are impossible to meet

When working on this personal trait as part of a self-improvement or personal performance plan, it helps to consider which of these you may be doing at any given time.

Excessive Worrying

Stoeber (2018) and Antony & Swinson (2009) also describe a second factor that drives excessive fear and worry about making mistakes. Perfectionist concerns focus perfectionists’ attention, and thus excessive energy, on endless doubts about almost everything, from actions taken, parental expectations, and criticism of meeting social expectations.

Perfectionistic concerns comprise an overly critical evaluation of oneself, such as:

The Future
Concern over making mistakes in the future
The Past
Adverse reactions to failure, such as rumination over mistakes already made
Skewed Self-Image
A perceived difference between one’s personal standards and one’s actual performance
Note: perceived, not necessarily an actual difference or shortcoming
External Validation
A high need for approval, seeking validation from others and being sensitive to criticism

(Adapted from Frost et al., 1990; Hill et al., 2004; Slaney et al., 2001)

These can all be in play at the same time. As with perfectionistic strivings, it can be helpful to try to break down your worries and (with your coach if you have one) try to pinpoint which is impacting you the most.

Self Esteem

Perfectionism is also linked with self-worth and self esteem disorders. The defining negative aspect of perfectionism is the belief that personal high standards are not being met, the Skewed Self-Image mentioned above. Studies show that unhealthy perfectionism typically results in high social stress and anxiety, reflecting one’s feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

High achievers tend to have high self esteem, but that’s not the case with perfectionists. Perfectionists tend to be very self-critical and unhappy, and suffer from low self-esteem. They can also be lonely or isolated as their critical nature and rigidity can push others away as well. This can lead to lower self-esteem.

If you’re unsure on what you are trying to achieve or have a lack of meaningful goals, this can add to the sense of not achieving or not meeting expectations. It’s healthy to have personal goals, even if they’re not ambitious and are simply grounded in what it is you already have and enjoy.

Your Persona & Facade

Perfectionism can be caused by a fear of judgement or disapproval from others. Self-presentation is how we present ourselves to others, be it authentic or an intentionally misleading facade. Early childhood experiences, such as having parents with unrealistically high expectations, may also play a role. Children that were exceptional at something and praised for it can grow up worrying about maintaining these levels of success. People with mental health conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may also tend to exhibit perfectionist tendencies.

Self-presentation involves two aims:

Promotion focused
Promoting the impression of being perfect
Prevention focused
Preventing the impression of being less than perfect

Side Effects

The strong links between OCD and perfectionism, and depression and perfectionism are well documented. From a Performance & Wellbeing perspective, let us consider if it is perfectionism that is causing your procrastination, tiredness (burnout) or a lack of motivation . As I mentioned at the beginning, in the world of performance coaching, we explore these areas, not to diagnose severe disorders, but to look for opportunities to improve personal wellbeing and performance.

Recap

In this first of two articles on the subject of Perfectionism we've introduced the concept and defined it as it is described in the world of psychology. We've covered unrealistic high expectations of oneself and of others, excessive worry, unhealthy levels of deliberate self-presentation and its effects on self esteem. We've also thrown in a few tips for you to consider.

In the second part of this series we will delve more deeply into these side effects and explore strategies for overcoming them in order to improve your personal performance and wellbeing.

The Problem with Coaching is...

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 16:16:48 GMT

So, you want to improve your abilities and your performance. What or who do you turn to first? A colleague? A mentor? Online or classroom training courses? Or a coach?

Executives and board members often turn to a coach first. But this isn’t true for all of us. Sometimes it’s simply down to cost - the cost of a personal coach is far greater than a training course or some form of internal mentoring scheme. Whilst this is true to a large extent, so too is the return on investment. And costs aren’t always prohibitive when compared to some courses.

So, the problem with coaching is that it’s often overlooked and misunderstood.

The problem with coaching is that it’s often overlooked and misunderstood. Don’t confuse it with life coaching and don’t assume it’s just meandering conversations. Great coaches really help you perform and to feel more fulfilled.

Consider investing in a personal performance coach.

Read more here… or get in touch to discuss.

Photos by Drew Beamer & Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

What is Servant Leadership?

Mon, 10 May 2021 12:30:55 GMT

And why is it still so misunderstood?

If you type “Servant Leader” into a search engine, you’re likely to be shown many more links to articles about why servant-leadership doesn’t work than what it is and why it can be very powerful.

When you read these articles, the author has typically fallen into one of two common misunderstandings. The first is to consider a leader as someone with authority or holding a senior position. The second is that leaders must have a grand vision. So let’s look at the leadership part first. Then we’ll look at servant-leadership before finally considering the importance of this leadership style when forming self organising and ultimately, high performing teams.

What is Leadership?

Let’s start with a few important points of what leadership isn’t. Leadership is not:

a special trait that only a select few possess
superiority - it doesn’t mean you are the smartest person in the room
authority - it empowers others, it is believing in peoples resourcefulness and helping them flourish
desiring or gathering followers - A true leader inspires others to find leadership within themselves
creating a group of people that wait to be lead
always about a grand vision - We can think of situational leadership and having courage in the moment of choice...taking responsibility for making something happen as opposed to focussing on the external factors for why something is not happening.

You don’t have to lead everyone all the time. Take a lead in the moment, maybe for just one matter.

DEFINITION:

Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.

- Kevin Kruse

Notice key elements of this definition:

Leadership stems from social influence, not authority or power
Leadership requires others, and that implies they don’t need to be “direct reports”
No mention of personality traits, attributes, or even a title; there are many styles, many paths, to effective leadership
It includes a goal, not influence with no intended outcome

So what is Servant Leadership?

Well, the term was originally coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 and it did in fact refer to a new style of leadership, strongly implying that this was relevant to people holding senior positions in an organisation. However, numerous other theorists have contributed to our understanding of servant leadership. One theorist, Larry Spears, outlined ten characteristics of servant leaders by analysing the writings of Greenleaf. These ten characteristics are:

listening
empathy
healing
awareness
persuasion
conceptualisation
foresight
stewardship
commitment to the growth of others
building community

The leader should be a servant first, leading from a desire to better serve others and not to attain more power.

Why is Servant Leadership important in self-organising teams?

‘Self-organising teams’ is a large topic in itself, so we won't attempt to summarise the concept in its entirety here. However, to consider why servant-leadership behaviour is so important to introduce and practice, let’s just recap the points that are relevant to servant-leadership.

In his book, the 7 Habits of Effective People, Stephen Covey says,

“You cannot hold people responsible for results if you supervise their methods. You then become responsible for results and rules replace human judgment, creativity, responsibility.”

You want to set your team up for success by creating an environment that empowers them to make the right decisions and choose how things need to get done.

Self-organising teams do not wait for managers to assign work to them. Instead, they identify the work that needs to be done, prioritise tasks that are required, and manage the timelines on their own. Teammates effectively communicate with one another to identify tasks that have been picked up by others already and the ones that are remaining. Every member of a self-organising team sees the list of pending tasks as what is remaining for the entire team and not just for the individual.

Two crucial characteristics of these teams are:

Respect and trust in the team - Team members need to have trust in the skills of their teammates and believe that everyone can get the work done even when there is no manager to hold them accountable. They should also respect each others’ opinions and find a way to work together even if they have opposing views.

Ownership - All members of a self-organising team should have a strong sense of ownership and commitment towards their work and generating value to their organisation. With no one to point out their mistakes, members need to learn from their mistakes themselves and apply the lessons they learn to achieve effective results.

As such, true leadership, and crucially, liberal portions of servant-leadership help to:

Prevent a ‘manager’ role emerging that can undermine true team dynamics where teammates want to do well for each other and not simply do something for (or impress) their boss.
Ensure that the team has contributed towards a decision or an idea: With a servant-leadership mindset, you will focus on shared decision making and helping to build a consensus over your own personal preferences.
Utilise the strengths of everyone.
Create resilience in the team with several leaders, we all have an off day and someone else can step up.

Four steps to develop into a better Servant Leader

Of course there are many ways to summarise how to become a better servant leader, but in an attempt to keep things simple...

Encourage diversity of thought
Create a culture of trust
Have an unselfish mindset
Foster leadership in others

Servant Leaders are motivational leaders who foster great teamwork and promote ownership from ideas to solutions. The result is happier employees, more innovation, increased productivity, and a healthier organisation.

So what specifically can you start doing more of?

Be a leader that helps them to achieve great things together:

Lead not by telling them.
Lead by helping them to set clear and elevating goals.
Lead by teaching an agile way of thinking.
Lead by teaching them to think through the problems that you yourself contemplate.
Lead by making them think for themselves.
Lead by encouraging them all to be their best.
Lead by example. I.e. exhibit the Scrum values. Be the change you want to see.

Self-organising doesn't mean there is no management, it means they can function without it.

References

https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2013/04/09/what-is-leadership/#305082665b90

https://davidburkus.com/2010/04/servant-leadership-theory/

The VFS Personal Agility Programme

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:45:35 GMT

Improving yourself with the intention of improving your entire team.

What is Personal Agility?

There’s been an increasing use of the term Personal Agility in recent years. Typically it focuses on Personal Effectiveness. Whilst this is a key part of our programme, we also consider how Personal Agility should help to make teams more effective as a whole.

Personal Agility is a collection of key knowledge and personal skills that each and every individual should possess to be able to help their team become high performing.

The skills make team interactions more effective and the knowledge helps to recognise the missing conditions (the Environmental Enablers) that are needed for teams to be truly high performing.

Leadership is everyone’s business, not just the preserve of those in positions of authority. Everyone can be taught the basics of powerful coaching techniques and when used in conjunction with catalyst skills will help make their team something truly greater than the sum if its parts. Understanding the environment that your team creates for itself and the essential conditions that need to surround your team, from stakeholders' behaviour, company culture, workplace constraints, business processes and measures of success - for example - is essential if a group of individuals are to come together and really perform. And of course, we all need role models to look up to, to learn from and to inspire us to be better.

The Personal Agility Programme is part of our ' Transition 2 Teal' suite of training and consulting packages.

The Whiteboard Wizard

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

A clean whiteboard sets the right mood for your collaboration session...but how do you revive an old, tired, stained board?

It's not the most exciting of topics but a clean whiteboard helps to focus the mind and makes the content easier to understand. So let's talk about effective cleaning equipment.

I used to spend too much valuable time trying to clean whiteboards before and after team sessions, where capturing and visualising ideas & concepts would only really be engaging on a bright, clean surface. Being frustrated at the lack of decent pens and cleaning equipment, I eventually bought my own. Wow, why hadn't I done it sooner.

I high alcohol content cleaner is vital. I use a Whiteboard cleaner and maintenance Isopropyl Rubbing Alcohol 99.9% pure without additives. You can get them in 500ml and I used to be able to get it in a spray bottle, but have struggled to find these lately. Something like this is ideal:

So too is the cloth. Microfibre has a massive surface area, making for an efficient wiping and cleaning outcome. But it is also gentle on the whiteboard surface. Paper cloth is abrasive and damages the surface of the whiteboard, allowing ink to get engrained into the micro-scratches, which in turn makes cleaning even more difficult. This can arguably be reversed, see below.

Can old whiteboards be restored?

I have tried a few different techniques and the one that worked best for me was using a car wax. Before writing this article I researched online to see what others have tried and what was successful. Success rates understandably varied but a standout success story is below:

I have been very successful at reconditioning white boards by following these steps.

1. Wipe off the board of existing marks using the conventional felt eraser.

2. If there is any tape or sticker residue on the board or around the edges use an orange oil material such as Goo-Gone to remove it.

3. Use isopropyl alcohol to clean the board. For a badly gummed up board this will take some serious elbow work. I have cleaned with cotton cloth. Both seem to work equally well.

4. Let the cleaned board dry out completely.

5. Apply a generous layer of carnauba wax based auto finish to the white board. I have applied it using the small pad that comes in the car wax package but a cotton cloth can be used as well.

6. Let the wax dry for several days. It will look all yellowish colour, particularly if it was put in extra thick.

7. Use a microfibre cloth towel to rub off all the excess dried wax. This also requires some elbow grease and you want to really rub and buff the surface of the white board. If properly buffed out the board will be very smooth with none of the yellowish wax residue left anyplace on the board.

These are the recommended products on Amazon:

Onwards and Downwards - The Roundie Sharpens Up

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Roundie’s can stay on Mount Stupid or can begin a descent. You can help.

This is the second in our Roundie series, following the first post about Intellectual Snobbery .

I was thinking about the Roundies, the people stuck on top of Mount Stupid, and wondered if there were different types of Roundie. We know there are some that simply believe they know more than others . And as such, don't realise that they are on Mount Stupid.

However, are some Roundies unconsciously aware that their strong opinions aren’t underpinned by as much knowledge as they once thought they had?

Becoming aware that you're standing on the mount causes an unnerving feeling in all humans. Some of us then embrace it. Others remain aware but get stuck in some form of denial .

Coming down the enlightened side of Mount Stupid can be a difficult time for some. As a teammate, you can help, you just need to be considered in your approach.

Thankfully there is now more awareness of the importance of fostering Psychological Safety in the workplace and how essential it is for teams to become high performing.

It’s often discussed as a foundation. But how do you create such an environment? How can you help to foster Psychological Safety for your team?

As an individual, can you? Well, undoubtedly there are team-wide, department-wide and company-wide factors at play. But don’t underestimate your ability as an individual to make a positive difference . You can make a significant contribution towards creating a positive, safe working environment.

Having the skills to recognise a colleague stuck on top of mount stupid is vital. Equally important is having skills to help them move forwards on their learning journey.

Firstly, look for the signs . You may recognise the signs of a Roundie unable to move off of the mount...unable to move onwards and downwards.

They get frustrated when their ideas are challenged rather than embrace the questions that come their way.
They make statements and assertions more than asking questions.
Using arguments to make their point that are akin to Hempel’s Paradox. All Ravens are black, therefore everything that is not black is not a Raven.
"This apple isn't black! See... more evidence to support my point that all ravens are black . "
They try to justify a point of view that they have just realised not to be correct.

Change your mind, walk down the sunny side of the mount, towards the light.

Keep the shadow that you cast behind you so your way forward is well lit. Your next step is more important than your previous one.

Mutatio Cognitio

Top Tips to help your Agile Daily Scrum or Stand-up Rock

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Your Daily Scrum or Standup should not only help you stay focussed and be efficient in achieving the sprint goal, it can be the catalyst for so much more.

If you find your current daily scrum valuable, consider how it could be even more beneficial. If you question its value, consider what’s preventing it from helping the team perform better.

This ceremony is often seen as a daily status meeting and is even referred to as one of the levels of agile planning. Yes, its main intention from the origins of both Scrum and xP were to help the team learn, inspect and adapt. And it should absolutely be viewed as one of the opportunities to create new, shared knowledge and to be a 'feedback loop'.

But over the years much research has shown that the real, underlying benefits of the standard ceremonies are often something quite different to conventional wisdom.

At Victoria Labs we work with experienced agile coaches, use research and well established psychology theories to design simple, cost effective aids. We create aids to trigger behaviours and actions that help ordinary meetings and ceremonies become opportunities to foster real team behaviours.

When you have your daily scrum, ideally all of the points below are true. They are all conducive to a team performing optimally, creating real value for the business - normally by delighting the customer but there are other outputs and outcomes that benefit the business whilst improving your job satisfaction.

During the Standup

The Product Vision & The Customer
Always be mindful of why the product or service exists for your company, how it contributes to its success and what users need.

The Product Vision and the Sprint Goal are Highly Visible
Customers are identifiable and make user stories meaningful

The Sprint Backlog ...

Exists
Is Highly Visible
Is aligned with the Product Vision
Is Updated Daily
Communicates Intent - The Product Owner / Manager understands the purpose of all backlog items

Daily Scrum ...

Happens every day (at the same time)
Has the entire team participating (including PO for the majority of days)
Focusses on progress and achievement, not simply on what was done yesterday
Surfaces Problems & Impediments
Is done standing up to keep things moving along (proven to improve effectiveness)

A Definition of Done ...

Be clear on what 'done' means, that it ensures quality, can be achieved with minimal reliance on anyone outside of the team etc.

Exists (for User Story & Epic)
(For a User Story) Is achievable by the team and within a single sprint
Is respected by the team
Helps to protect the business from technology risks now and in the long-term

Sprint Burn-down Chart - Flow Rate Chart - Cycle Time Chart

Radiates information and, at a glance, suggests when things might not be on track.

If you are using fixed time-boxes you will burn-down or burn up valuable achievements across this time period.

If you are using Single Piece flow, such as Kanban, you have no time-box so you forecast 'backlog item completion dates' using metrics such as Lead-time and Cycle time*

Burn-down / Cycle Time chart is visible and updated daily
Helps to identify when stakeholder engagement may be needed

(e.g. the sprint goal is at risk)

Non-team members …

Are welcome
Do not distract the team from focussing on your goal, your progress or your opportunities to adapt
Understand they can raise questions at the end
Feel informed and that the team is transparent as a result of what they have heard and what they can see

After the Standup

At the End of the Scrum…

All team members are clear on their collective progress
It has helped to identify any course corrections that need to happen (inspect & adapt)
Team members feel reassured that they and their team are taking action where needed
Each team member knows what the others plan to achieve today
The entire team know the top 3 impediments
All impediments have an owner (default is the scrum master) to remove it

Can you see how each of these points can help to create an environment that helps teams thrive?

--------------------------

Research has shown that a well facilitated daily scrum has these benefits:

Increased visibility and accountability between peers, improving team performance
Improved team morale through a sense of both purpose and a chievement
Increased sense of autonomy through an improved ability to manage impediments
Creates a culture of knowledge sharing and a passion for learning
Establishes a sense of supporting one another to achieve a common goal
Helps to identify the ‘difficult’ conversations that may otherwise be “ swept under the carpet ”
Improves trust and a sense of support as everyone feels they can truly depend on one another

... and of course provides your team an opportunity to learn, inspect and adapt on a frequent basis. This should all help you and your teammates to meet your commitments to one another and achieve any progress forecasts that you've shared.

Use our Online Checklist to assess your standup.

--------------------------

*Lead time is the total amount of time a task spends from ‘order’ to ‘delivery’ in your system.

Cycle time is the amount of time you spend actively working on it.

Victoria Labs' Daily Prompt Cards are designed so team members can help Daily Scrums run smoother and quicker, and make it a place where underlying or systemic problems can get noticed more easily.

The Competitive Business Agility Framework

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Be flexible, adaptable and responsive to dynamic, ambiguous and unpredictable markets.

High-performing organisations and businesses will increasingly need to be flexible, to adapt and respond rapidly to dynamic, ambiguous and unpredictable markets. The entire business needs to be agile. Business agility creates purpose-based, outcome-oriented organisations.

Most major companies and enterprises rely heavily on technology in one way or another. The agile software development , Lean and DevOps movements help provide a business with one core tenet required for real Business Agility. But on it’s own it’s not normally enough to enable an entire enterprise to be agile and thus be high performing in these modern times.

Why strive for Business Agility?

The diagram below, summarises the main benefits of achieving a high level of business agility. It also includes the often overlooked benefits of improving Talent Attraction, Talent Retention and collective performance of the workforce. The way to read this diagram is to follow the flow of overlapping ovals, starting from the top-left .

So starting with the injection of external factors, two benefits of Business Agility are being able to adapt to changing circumstances and being able to explore and experiment . From here we can follow that this enables us to release value early and often. Done right, this can increase company cashflow. But a less obvious benefit is how it nurtures and encourages an entrepreneurial mindset, because people can have ideas and act on them. This in turn, along with other cultural and behavioural changes helps fuel business growth.

How to achieve Business Agility?

Achieving enterprise-wide adaptability, flexibility and responsiveness, aka agility, requires all parts of the business to have specific capabilities, attitudes and behaviours, as well as alignment, clarity and purpose . VFS's model for Business Agility has been developed over a number of years through helping large and small businesses increase their success through improved agility. It is not a recipe book or an instruction manual, it’s a framework and a (very large) toolkit. We refer to it as The Competitive Business Agility Framework, or the CBA Framework for short.

How to create and introduce the ingredients, will depend on many aspects of your enterprise. This model is a set of tools, some for specific purposes, others more like a swiss-army knife with multiple uses. It has four equal, necessary and interdependent

tenets , each with three attributes that a business must possess to increase the chances of increasing company-wide agility. Business agility truly emerges when an organisation can “be” agile across all the tenets, across all areas of the organisation.

We introduce the CBA Framework below, stepping through the twelve attributes , grouped by the four tenets.

1. Capabilities & Activities

An agile organisation operates with:

1.1 Technical Agility at the individual & team activity level focuses on the capabilities of the Technology/IT teams to create, enhance and retire software systems in a fast, sustainable and secure manner.
1.2 Process Agility can be considered at the macro ‘value stream’ level, to the details of day to day practices. It is having awareness of the underlying principles of the various methodologies and frameworks that are intended to help create agility; and the ‘toolbox’ of approaches and practices that can be used to achieve it.
1.3 Systems thinking to retain agility at the organisational level by seeing and optimising the whole whilst understanding the detail. Systems Thinking should be applied to value propositions, solutions design, ways of working and organisational aspects.

2. Business Model

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3. Behaviours & Attitudes

3.1 Personal Agility is a collection of personal skills and knowledge that allows each and every individual to help establish their team as a High Performing Team.
3.2 A Learning Organisation is one that encompasses the Experimentation mindset. Most importantly this mindset is applied to everything from product development (hypothesising and testing) all the way through to encouraging personal development.
3.3 Effective Collaboration is as much an ethos and belief as it is a practice or a specific behaviour. Recognising the difference between independent and isolated working is vital. To be able to work independently is more advantageous to the business than being dependent on others. However, to be able to be part of a team, a community or a business... to be more effective together than as individual entities, is incredibly valuable. This is 'Effective Collaboration' and it results in a group of individuals becoming something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Often, partnering with others and supporting them, produces results that would not be possible were everyone operating as independent entities.

Sometimes effective collaboration can be based on the desire to serve and not with the expectation to get something in return.

4. Organisation Anatomy

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The Full Picture

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Be flexible, adaptable and responsive to dynamic, ambiguous and unpredictable markets. Competitive Business Agility creates purpose-based, outcome-oriented organisations.

We explore some of these topics on our Resources Hub .

The Personal Agility Programme

The Competitive Business Agility Framework - Summary

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

What is Business Agility? And how do we achieve it?

This article is intended for reference only, as a memory jogger or to be linked to as the original source . The full framework (not publicly available although a preview can be found here ), is intended for use only by experienced practitioners within the field of agile transformation and business improvement that have had VFS training and mentoring.

The Four Tenets:

The 12 Company Attributes:

The Business Zone and the Cultural & Sociological Zone:

The Identity & Alignment Zone and Nurture & Growth Zone:

This is for reference only and is the intellectual property of Value Flow Solutions ltd. Ideas can be shared and used freely but with reference to either Value Flow Solutions or Scott Potter .

Due to the interrelated nature of all these key attributes, the VFS Toolkit has models, smaller frameworks, resources and training aligned to Tenets, Zones and individual attributes.

Beware of Intellectual Snobbery - Don't be a Roundie

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Don’t be a ‘Roundie’

This is the first in an ongoing series 'The Roundie'.

I observed a senior manager interrupt a more junior member of staff the other day and watched as the manager had a rather painful and embarrassing reminder of the benefits of patience, to listen but also to explore why others are saying what they are saying... and why they hold such views.

The conversation was related to lean thinking, something the manager clearly knew quite a lot about, but not as much as the junior. Using a generic metaphor, this is effectively what I heard:

Junior: “Since the Earth is flat....."

Manager [abruptly interrupting]: “Flat? The earth is round and I’ve known this a long time. There was a time when people thought it was flat but many of us know better.”

Junior: “Sorry Sarah, what I was going to say was… Since the Earth is flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator, strictly speaking, the shape of the earth is an oblate spheroid . It is dangerous to assume that the earth is round with what we are about to undertake. Catering for the irregularities of the oblate spheroid is important when we’re considering the implications of gravity.”

Sticking with this simple metaphor, there are those that know the earth is round and those that know it is not.

The Roundies , as I’ll refer to them, often don't stop to listen to those that disagree because they think they know more. We all do it at times. I have equally seen it many times from people with a few years of experience under their belt, not paying due respect to more experienced colleagues.

Roundies are often found standing on Zach Weiner’s Mount Stupid.

Don’t be a Roundie , there is always more to discover and learn no matter how much we know .

Read more in part 2 - Onwards & Downwards: The Roundie Sharpens Up

Beware of the tangled web that we weave - Microservice Maintenance

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:08:31 GMT

From Monoliths to Microservices to Mayhem?

Introduction

This is a short post to help us think about the possible road ahead as the term microservices seems to be heard everywhere and even being touted as a Silver Bullet, an antidote to the pains of working on and owning a monolithic application.

We will carefully side-step the issue of the term 'Monolith' being misused, often incorrectly used to describe large codebases that are deployed as a single application. Whilst describing the main characteristic, a monolith actually describes more about the lack of internal layers and the absence of external integrations.

And we will also, carefully and deliberately place our leading foot over here.....again side-stepping another issue, the other issue of the term 'Microservices' also being used to describe a wide range of ideas from simple distributed systems to the very prescriptive architecture of protocols and data ownership. Some times pedantry and an attention to this detail is helpful, but not right now.

Modularity & Complexity

Modularity has long been the primary tool for managing highly complex situations and systems, not limited to the software world. The concept of modularity in Software architecture is that of separating out parts of the system into separately named, addressable modules often called components.

In doing so, it makes the source code mo re 'intellectually manageable'. It is therefore easy to conclude that, if we subdivide software indefinitely, the effort required to develop it will become negligibly small. Unfortunately, other factors come into play, resulting in this conclusion to be invalid. In the graph above, the effort (cost) to develop an individual software module does decrease as the total number of modules increases. Given the same set of requirements, more modules means smaller individual size. However, as the number of modules grows, the effort (cost) associated with integrating the modules also grows. This is true regardless of the specifics in which modules exist and the method of their integration. As such, we can assume that as the number of distributed systems, modules, microservices increases beyond a certain number, so too does the risk of a decreasing ability to effectively maintain the overall system and its codebase.

Conclusion

Without even considering whether the distributed nature of microservices and the new set of considerations that they bring, be it data ownership, or latency, managing cross-cutting aspects such as authentication and what may still need to be centralised , we can see that whilst we enjoy the benefits that they bring today, we must keep one eye on the future. That is not to say that the answer is to revert back to, or to stick with your existing monolithic architecture, it is simply to state that modularity is a vast continuum and not simply a debate between Monolith or Microservice. Beware of the tangled web that we may be weaving.

VFS Resources

Is the BIA Dead?

Are You Really Doing a Business Impact Analysis?

The Value of Doing a BIA Well

Collecting Data Isn’t Enough - Analysis is Key

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Prioritising Recovery in Complex Systems

Enablement for All

Building Trust

How to Conduct a BIA That Delivers Value

In Conclusion

Beware of the Dark Side of Resilience

When Business Continuity Becomes Overkill

When Business Continuity Becomes a Burden

The Importance of Agility in Continuity Planning

Balancing Continuity and Growth

My AI Work Buddies

Future-Proof your business now to maximise AI in the workplace soon.

Effective Communication

Prompt Engineering

Product & Software Development

Requirements Models

In Summary

GPT Myth Busting

Is the new generation of Artificial Intelligence intelligent?

Trust

LLMs

A Tool for Experts

Hallucinations can be useful

So what's next?

And finally...

What is a Data Lakehouse?

It may be part of your company's technology estate and data infrastructure, or if it's not, it almost certainly will be. But what is it?

﻿ This is part of our ' Tech for the Exec' series.

Back to Business

Warehouses and Lakes

The Data Lakehouse

For the Technically Curious Exec

Perfectionism and how to Overcome it (Part 2)

I want to overcome the negative impacts of unhealthy perfectionism

Procrastination

Burnout

So, how do we overcome perfectionism?

What other techniques can I consider?

Your Lifestyle

Considering your Personal Strengths Profile

So, to summarise both articles:

References

An Introduction to Systems Leadership

Systems Thinking... Systems Dynamics... Systems systems systems.

Another Systems Buzz Word? Maybe. But a useful one.

Systems and Systems Thinking

Systems Leadership

Systems Leadership: A tool for our times

Suggested Reading:

Free Learning Resources:

Perfectionism and how to overcome it

Do I want to overcome my perfectionism?

Is perfectionism bad?

Striking a balance

A closer look at Perfectionism

High Standards

Excessive Worrying

Self Esteem

Your Persona & Facade

Side Effects

Recap

The Problem with Coaching is...

What is Servant Leadership?

And why is it still so misunderstood?

What is Leadership?

Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.

So what is Servant Leadership?

Why is Servant Leadership important in self-organising teams?

Four steps to develop into a better Servant Leader

So what specifically can you start doing more of?

References

The VFS Personal Agility Programme

Improving yourself with the intention of improving your entire team.

What is Personal Agility?

The Whiteboard Wizard

This is part of our ' Tech for the Exec' series.