# Conway's Law - How universal is it? By:: [[Steven Denman]] 2023-06-13 Conway's Law, or the mirroring hypothesis, states, "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." The typical application of the law is to software architecture, with groups like MIT finding evidence for such a law existing in the relationship between the level of modularity in design and how tightly the organization is coupled. At a basic level, when things are not communicated, there is a fundamental system issue, but this suggests a more subtle impact on the system's structure. I encourage some reflection at this point: to what extent do we see this law realized in other applications? To what extent does the communication structure affect other aspects of the system function beyond architecture? Some areas to ponder: - Team structure - is the organization of individual teams more profound in its potential benefit than just the benefits of proper "spans and layers" and like-minded work grouped? These become the locus and nodes of organizational communication. - Meeting culture - does an organization with a less formal meeting culture have more general difficulty remaining focused on a few objectives? - Societal programs - if whole sections of a community are not discussing their needs in the "highways" of communication, will the system not automatically optimize elsewhere? #### Related Items [[Systems Thinking]] [[Business]] [[Organization]] [[Structure]] [[Relationships]] [[Society]] [[Meetings]]