The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim

expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.

“Sensei Hickey would say, ‘Think of four strands of yarn that hang independently—that’s a simple system. Now take those same four strands of yarn and braid them together. Now you’ve complected them.’ Both configurations of yarn could fulfill the same engineering goal, but one is dramatically easier to change than the other. In the simple system, you can change one string independently without having to touch the others. Which is very good.”

“The opposite of the Third Ideal is someone who values process compliance and TWWADI,” he says with a big smile. “You know, ‘The Way We’ve Always Done It.’ It’s the huge library of rules and regulations, processes and procedures, approvals and stage gates, with new rules being added all the time to prevent the latest disaster from happening again.

“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the problem,’ not ‘who.’