Interesting learning resources - April 2025
A lot of these links are related to learning and collaboration, I blame excellent resources shared by Donna Benjamin, Cat Hicks
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Bot Bowl : Bot Bowl is an annual artificial intelligence competition centred around the tabletop game Blood Bowl (from the past). Hard for AI to beat because of the type of game and the fact that is not such a popular game.
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Learning about mental models of risk from the Challenger Disaster · Infrastructure: Volume 2, Issue 1 (April 2025) John Flournoy - How mental models of risk held by engineers and managers in the lead-up to the Challenger disaster were different and what the effect of that delta. This reminds me of another paper on risk about mining and a power plant that we discussed online, but what is it???
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project - Donella Meadows. This is about the hierarchy of leverage points within a system, suggesting where interventions can be most effective for change. Not new, but good to do another reading as I get better (I hope ) at systems.
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Relationships between knowledge inertia, organizational learning and organization innovation - ScienceDirect - Shu-hsien Liao, Wu-Chen Fei, Chih-Tang Liu. This study examines the relationship between knowledge inertia, organizational learning, and organizational innovation in different types of organizations.
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Collaboration, Coordination, and Cooperation Among Organizations: Establishing the Distinctive Meanings of These Terms Through a Systematic Literature Review Journal of Management Vol. 46 No. 6, July 2020 965 –1001 - Xavier Castañer, Nuno Oliveira. A review the definitions of collaboration, coordination, and cooperation in management literature, I have not finished reading this but a scan suggest that it would be a good idea if I had more time to work on developing Bytesize Architecture Sessions further.
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A Cumulative Culture Theory of Developer Problem-Solving - Dr Cat Hicks. I had the pleasure of hosting Dr Cat Hicks talking about this paper at Virtual DDD and I think her research is something we need to use when thinking about software teams. One of the big ideas of the paper is that we need to start thinking about software development proficiency as shaped by collective learning and cultural transmission, rather than solely individual talent. This is an intuition I’ve held for a long time and it’s great to see research validating it.
- Collaborative Drift & Debt: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatments - Elise Keith - Eerily related to the link above but on collaboration. This lengthy post talks about how teams establish working norms and the problems that arise when individual approaches diverge (collaborative drift). The author argues that unaddressed drift accumulates into collaborative debt. Thanks to Donna Benjamin for pointing me to this article.