“We rely on heuristics and collections of mental models to work effectively with complex systems whose details simply can’t be kept in our heads. On top of this, a software organization will tend to develop histories and lore—incidents and failures that have been seen in the past and could likely be the cause of what we’re seeing now. This works perfectly fine as long as problems tend to match similar patterns, but for the small percentage of truly novel issues, an organization can find itself struggling to adapt.”
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