In his 1979 book, The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander tells a wonderful story of two barns. The first was extremely long, over 240 feet, and instead of having doors at the end (where you usually find them) they were in the middle on both of the long sides. The second barn was nestled into the side of a hill, had three stories instead of two, and five doors. The barns were unique, completely different, and yet instantly.

You may be wondering, what is the relationship between high-performance organisations and Cloud Native? It’s quite simple, really. Cloud Native is a sociotechnology, meaning it encompasses technical elements, like containers and Kubernetes, social elements, like strategic leadership, and sociotechnology elements, such as microservices.

At Container Solutions, we differentiate between leadership and strategic leadership. Both involve inspiring a group with a vision of the future. Both involve connecting a starting point, A, with an endpoint, B. Both have a transformational effect on the leader and group members. The difference lies in the results, which have to be judged objectively. Whereas the leader makes changes, the strategic leader makes adaptive changes, successfully.

There was a whole kerfuffle on Twitter this weekend because someone posted about 10X engineers. I didn’t give it much thought. However, over the weekend, the noise just didn’t seem to stop, which got me thinking about the olden days and where this idea of a 10X engineer came from.

Dynamic companies (or programmes of work) need a way of rapidly making day to day decisions without seeking consent or approval. One way to do this is with a value hierarchy. A value hierarchy explains the relationship between your values: e.g. at Disney amusement parks they value both fun and safety but safety comes first. (It wouldn’t be much fun if people were getting decapitated on the roller coaster). In fact, it was Roy Disney who said,.