Martin Hähnel

Systems As Imagined vs. Systems As Found

So as I said above: Just "unfuck the networks" is a naive notion. It's a systems as imagined vs. systems as found "fallacy": A distinction made by Richard Cook that I've found very helpful to explain what is missing from people's arguments who are about ideas and propose solutions mainly based on (new or reframed) ideas only: A system found is a freaking mess. And so is the dark forest that is the publicly visible internet.

I'm quoting myself here as I wanted to have specific post I can point to going forward. Here's what Richard Cook had to say about this (I put a timestamp in there to the place where he starts talking about this):

It is a little rambly (if entertaining!), but it basically comes down to[1]:

Systems as imagined are state diagrams and layouts of rack panels, floor diagrams, and all sorts of this. These are systems as imagined. It's the way we make stuff and they are static and deterministic. Systems as found look more like this [... shows and describes a few pictures of messy rat kings of cables and servers and what looks like a control room and people working in them to maintain them...] Systems as found are dynamic and stochastic; they are not deterministic. […A]s one of the people in this room said, "we're always doing some sort of maintenance". The maintenance interval [of a system as found] is essentially zero.

I think this is a wonderful and rich distinction that can be used in all kind of systems.

  1. This is a lightly edited version of what the youtube transcript says in the portion of the talk I'm interested here. It's not exactly a direct quote. ↩︎