Conway's Law
Good morning. Let’s start this Tuesday together. Because, as always, “It is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.”
In 1968 a computer scientist named Melvin Conway published one thesis: any organization that designs a system ends up building a copy of its own communication structure into that system, whether anyone intended it or not.
A new hire spends her first week logging into five systems. IT issues a laptop. HR sends contract paperwork. Learning and Development schedules her onboarding modules. Her manager assigns the actual project three days later. Four departments built their own piece, without once sitting in the same room.
How Does It Work?
Conway’s Law says a system mirrors how the people who build it talk to each other. The mechanism is coordination cost, not incompetence. When departments report to different managers and get measured on different numbers, that boundary hardens into a form, a login, a contact. The five logins are not a design flaw. They are an accurate map of who has no reason to talk to whom.
Why This Is Important?
Leaders assume the onboarding flow or customer journey is designed around what a new hire or customer needs. It is not. It is generated automatically from existing reporting lines, and keeps regenerating from that source no matter how many redesigns get commissioned.
And Now?
The real intervention happens before the software. Put the teams who do not talk to each other into one recurring meeting with a shared owner and a shared metric before buying anything new. Run the same audit on the customer journey.
Core knowledge: every system an organization produces is a copy of how its internal teams currently talk to each other, and no redesign holds until that conversation changes.
Map every handoff point in your last redesign and name the two teams on either side.
Check whether those two teams share a metric or a manager.
Before commissioning a new system, sit the owning teams in one recurring room first.
Ask a new hire where they hit a contradiction. That marks an internal seam, not their mistake.
Video companion
If today’s mechanism interested you, there is a video companion for it. We just started a series called The Bias Files: one true, well documented story per episode, the specific cognitive bias behind it, and where that same pattern still shows up in an ordinary week. Episodes run under five minutes. Watch the latest one on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thebiasfilesshow
Where are management decisions made every day that are still based on people acting logically? Where can you be a Chief Behavioral Officer yourself this week?
See you next Tuesday.
If you would like to send us any tips or feedback, please email us at redaktion@cbo.news. Thank you very much.