When developing your software products, be it coding, testing, user experience, product management, or all the other elements required to solve a customer need, do you understand what the rest of the people do to make that happen? What about the other people in your organisation, maybe working on different products or even other legs of the customer journey like sales, customer service, billing, and operations? Do you see how you fit into the big picture, and what your contribution is to the company vision and strategy? I suspect most of us neither have the time nor the opportunity to get a wider view, focusing on our little part of the bigger system instead and making the best of that.

We know that a system is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts, but how can we make sure that the sum is positive? That is hard when we cannot see the forest for the trees.

Let us employ systems thinking to give us a holistic perspective, by adding synthesis to our analysis skills so that we can explore and understand emergence. We all know reductionism well, working on parts in isolation but holism is required to provide important insights and knowledge to handle the complexity in domains we normally work in – especially where people are involved. Only then can we build sustainable and adaptive software systems.

This is an introduction to systems thinking and its importance when dealing with complexity.

About Trond

Senior IT Consultant and sociotechnical practitioner.

Trond is an IT architect and open sociotechnical systems practitioner with extensive experience working with large, complex, and business-critical systems in industries such as telecom, media, TV, and the public sector. His main interests are service-orientation, domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, and open sociotechnical systems. His mantra: Great solutions emerge from collaborative sense-making and design.

Software teams often reach for Kubernetes or similar prepackaged answers as default solutions to complex problems. But Kubernetes isn’t a strategy—it’s a tool. Using it prematurely can bury your team in unnecessary complexity and unwanted consequences. These ‘default’ answers reflect a deeper issue: we don’t understand the problem we're solving.

Through real-world examples, we’ll discuss how to think critically about the way decisions are being made in your company. We’ll introduce concepts like participation theater—when people perform the rituals of decision-making without making real decisions—alongside problem restatement as a tool to uncover the real challenge at hand. We’ll also examine different types of decisions (reactive vs. proactive, reversible vs. irreversible) and why recognizing them early changes how you should approach them.

This talk is a call to slow down to speed up your decision-making. Whether you're an engineer, architect, or tech lead, this session will challenge you to pause before reaching for Kubernetes (or other technologies) and instead ask: what problem am I really trying to solve?

About Gien

Gien Verschatse is an experienced consultant and software engineer that specialises in domain modelling and software architecture. She has experience in many domains such as the biotech industry, where she

specialised in DNA building. She's fluent in both object-oriented and functional programming, mostly in .NET. As a Domain-Driven Design practitioner, she always looks to bridge the gaps between experts, users, and engineers.Gien is studying Computer Science at the OU in the Netherlands. As a side interest, she's researching the science of decision-making strategies, to help teams improve how they make technical and organisational decisions. She shares her knowledge by speaking at international conferences.And when she is not doing all that, you'll find her on the sofa, reading a book and sipping coffee.

When it comes to giving software teams the autonomy to make their own decisions, trust can be a delicate thing. This is particularly true when those decisions can have a wider impact on other teams and the overall system. If organizations are shifting towards decentralized decision-making, how do they replace the safety net of authority with trust through practices that put accountability closer to where the work happens?

In this session, we'll explore the paradox between centralized and decentralized decision-making. We'll discuss how a centralized approach aims to prevent mistakes but can also block teams from developing business-centric solutions, while a decentralized approach can lead to more sustainable decisions and empowered teams.

This will be an interactive, 1-2-all session. Andrea and Kenny will each present for ten minutes on their practices and experiences, followed by a ten-minute dialogue. The session will then open up to everyone for a broader conversation. We'll use a Miro board for sense-making exercises to help us model and explore these ideas together.