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WeAreDevelopers LIVE • Oct 20, 2023

Cracking Cholera’s Code: Victorian Insights for Today’s Technologist

Simon Copsey

In 1854, acting on flawed cholera theories resulted in disastrous interventions. Discover how validating assumptions prevents your engineering team from building expensive software that merely digitizes broken processes.

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#1 about 6 min

The 1854 London cholera outbreak and the miasma theory

Prevalent assumptions that disease spread through bad smells led authorities to deploy misguided disease prevention strategies.

#2 about 7 min

Mapping cause and effect logic of historically flawed decisions

Deploying the current reality tree pattern reveals exactly how acting on incorrect core assumptions actively worsened the crisis.

#3 about 3 min

Changing behaviors requires exposing and targeting the underlying beliefs

True organizational behavior change cannot occur through temporary compliance but requires completely replacing incorrect core beliefs.

#4 about 6 min

Using cause and effect logic to validate core assumptions

Visualizing symptoms against their assumed root causes reveals distinct logical gaps that expose misdiagnosed problems.

#5 about 8 min

Using physical observation to invalidate prevailing public health theories

Mapping geographic outbreak data highlighted clear survival anomalies that successfully disproved the widely accepted airborne contagion hypothesis.

#6 about 13 min

Applying cause and effect mapping to modern business processes

Building a custom travel booking software to automate approvals only digitizes a deeply flawed organizational workflow built on distrust.

#7 about 5 min

Why technology should not solidify processes containing unchecked assumptions

Implementing software solidifies existing operational behaviors permanently and makes it extremely difficult to reverse incorrect management assumptions.

#8 about 4 min

Overcoming institutional resistance to new evidence and changing beliefs

Entrenched beliefs held by institutional leaders actively delay critical organizational improvements and require persistent evidence testing to dismantle.

#9 about 3 min

Asking why to uncover the root of organizational problems

Consistently questioning the reasoning behind requirements allows technologists to bypass superficial feature requests and resolve actual business issues.

#10 about 5 min

Recognizing systemic disconnects between leadership decisions and frontline realities

Specialized knowledge and extreme separation from operational implementation data frequently lead highly intelligent stakeholders to make severely flawed decisions.

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