What else is there to say?
A colleague chooses comfort over clarity. A systemic.engineering story about collapse, vulnerability and the cost of carrying the invisible.
Topic
People & Culture
A collection of 10 issues
Once Upon a Time.. There Was a Platypus
A neuroqueer techy reverse-engineers their own nervous system into a consulting practice. A systemic.engineering story about burnout, pattern recognition, and the moment two fields collapse into one body.
"I Can't Do That, Dave" — No Agent Yet
The industry is building agents that say "yes" faster. But what if the coherent answer is "no, not like this"? Fifty years of software engineering keeps arriving at the same conclusion: isolation produces the wrong system. We forgot again.
Regulation-as-a-Service: When Systems Become Extractive
Asymmetric regulation isn't a bug—it's a feature in some relationships. Extraction is when the SLA was never negotiated and shadow on-call is silently load-bearing. How to detect the pattern?
Who invited the agent? Oh God.. (Smith will suffice.]
Agentic AI collapses ambiguity without a body. This essay cuts through AI agent hype to ask the ethical question no system scaling agents wants to answer.
How Culture-As-Vibes Prices Silence Out of Human Systems
Why culture-as-vibes optimizes for visible contribution, misreads silence, and quietly breaks engagement and feedback systems.
When Conflict Breaks Teams
Conflict isn’t a people problem. It’s a pressure signal. A systems-level look at how teams break under load—and what gets erased when it happens.
Becoming an Observer in Human Systems
Why effective post-mortems and incident management fail under pressure—and how regulation, not authority or process, restores coherence under load by slowing time, holding silence, and making language a deliberate intervention.
Your Team Is a Distributed System
Model your team as a distributed system.
Learn why culture is structure—not vibes—through message passing, locality, loss, asynchrony, and non-linearity under load.
Title-based Authority Fails Under Load
Why title-based authority fails during incidents. Learn how regulation enables psychological safety, effective escalation, and better post-mortems under load.