Despite decades of architectural evolution—from monoliths to microservices to serverless—our software systems remain brittle, expensive to maintain, and resistant to change. The problem isn't our technical skills; it's our reductionist thinking.
This session explores how Deming's systems philosophy and Ackoff's synthesis thinking provide a radical alternative to conventional software architecture. We'll examine why popular architectural patterns—from microservices that create distributed monoliths to layered architectures that hide coupling behind interfaces—often create the very complexity they promise to eliminate.
Participants will learn practical techniques for identifying system-level properties like emergence and feedback loops, and designing architectures that prioritize relationships over components. The session challenges a fundamental assumption in software engineering: that better parts automatically create better systems. Instead, it offers a systems-thinking approach that fundamentally reframes software architecture from an engineering discipline focused on decomposition to a systems discipline focused on synthesis and emergence.