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

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.

- **Speakers:** Simon Copsey
- **Event:** WeAreDevelopers LIVE
- **Published:** October 20, 2023
- **Duration:** 53:30
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/772-cracking-cholera-s-code-victorian-insights-for-today-s-technologist

## Summary

Through the historical lens of the 1854 London cholera outbreak, this session explores the critical relationship between organizational beliefs and problem-solving. By examining how the misguided miasma theory led to disastrous interventions, the talk illustrates a fundamental concept: beliefs drive behaviors. When actions are predicated on unvalidated assumptions, even well-intentioned solutions can exacerbate the core problem. John Snow’s eventual breakthrough serves as a masterclass in challenging entrenched paradigms by identifying observations that prevailing theories cannot explain. To practically apply these lessons, the presentation introduces cause-and-effect diagramming, specifically drawing on the Current Reality Tree from the Theory of Constraints. This analytical methodology tests whether assumptions logically connect to observations without missing links. By mapping symptoms to root causes, technology leaders can rapidly validate or invalidate their understanding of a business problem before attempting to solve it, ensuring teams tackle the actual disease rather than just localized pain points. For modern technologists, engineering teams, and consultants, the historical parallel serves a vital warning about digitizing bureaucracy. Using a hypothetical internal travel booking application as a case study, the discussion reveals how building software to accommodate bureaucratic sign-offs only cements systemic inefficiencies rooted in a lack of managerial trust. Because technology solidifies processes, digitizing a flawed workflow builds a rigid, expensive infrastructure that performs the wrong tasks with greater efficiency. Ultimately, successful digital transformation requires identifying and upgrading flawed organizational beliefs prior to writing any software.

**Keywords:** cause-and-effect thinking, current reality tree, theory of constraints, organizational beliefs, miasma theory, systems thinking, root cause analysis, technology consulting, software process digitization, management assumptions, change management, diagnostic problem-solving, process optimization, technical strategy

## Chapters

1. **The 1854 London cholera outbreak and the miasma theory** (00:02) — Prevalent assumptions that disease spread through bad smells led authorities to deploy misguided disease prevention strategies.
1. **Mapping cause and effect logic of historically flawed decisions** (05:20) — Deploying the current reality tree pattern reveals exactly how acting on incorrect core assumptions actively worsened the crisis.
1. **Changing behaviors requires exposing and targeting the underlying beliefs** (11:26) — True organizational behavior change cannot occur through temporary compliance but requires completely replacing incorrect core beliefs.
1. **Using cause and effect logic to validate core assumptions** (13:40) — Visualizing symptoms against their assumed root causes reveals distinct logical gaps that expose misdiagnosed problems.
1. **Using physical observation to invalidate prevailing public health theories** (18:48) — Mapping geographic outbreak data highlighted clear survival anomalies that successfully disproved the widely accepted airborne contagion hypothesis.
1. **Applying cause and effect mapping to modern business processes** (26:16) — Building a custom travel booking software to automate approvals only digitizes a deeply flawed organizational workflow built on distrust.
1. **Why technology should not solidify processes containing unchecked assumptions** (38:30) — Implementing software solidifies existing operational behaviors permanently and makes it extremely difficult to reverse incorrect management assumptions.
1. **Overcoming institutional resistance to new evidence and changing beliefs** (42:51) — Entrenched beliefs held by institutional leaders actively delay critical organizational improvements and require persistent evidence testing to dismantle.
1. **Asking why to uncover the root of organizational problems** (46:48) — Consistently questioning the reasoning behind requirements allows technologists to bypass superficial feature requests and resolve actual business issues.
1. **Recognizing systemic disconnects between leadership decisions and frontline realities** (48:51) — Specialized knowledge and extreme separation from operational implementation data frequently lead highly intelligent stakeholders to make severely flawed decisions.

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