Casus Belli Engineering
6 hours ago
- #Software Organization Dynamics
- #Scapegoating
- #Casus Belli Engineering
- In professional environments, lasting impressions are crucial and failures in a system can cause stakeholders to lose confidence, viewing the system as monolithic and suspect if any part fails.
- Organizations under stress may resort to scapegoating, selecting a victim to assign guilt and restore social cohesion, a mechanism observed by René Girard.
- Casus Belli Engineering is the strategic use of perceived failure to replace working systems with preferred alternatives, fabricating crises to gain organizational power.
- Software organizations often follow a scapegoating pattern: selecting a plausible target (like a dependency or framework), ritually condemning it, and replacing it with the accuser's preferred alternative.
- The Agile movement exemplifies industrial-scale scapegoating, where 'Waterfall' processes were used as a casus belli to promote Agile frameworks, despite iterative development ideas being pre-existing.
- Casus Belli Development exploits cognitive biases like availability and confirmation bias, leading to the dismantling of proven foundations and unresolved root causes.
- Resistance requires insisting on root cause analysis, separating failure from foundation, and evaluating alternatives on intrinsic merit rather than as saviors from a 'failed' predecessor.
- Recognizing the scapegoat mechanism involves seeing the crisis, scapegoat, spurious causation, and preferred alternative, allowing a choice between participating in the ritual or refusing it through engineering discipline.