
The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions (2016) - mpweiher
https://academic.oup.com/icc/article/25/5/709/2198460/The-mirroring-hypothesis-theory-evidence-and
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yodon
Their "mirroring" terminology sounds much vaguer and less useful than the
original "Conway's Law" framing:

"Organizations build architectures that mimic the communications structures of
the organization" aka "if you have three teams you'll get a three-pass
compiler"[0]

Their "mirroring" concept blurs two fundamental questions into one jumbled
mess: (a) is the organizational structure well adapted to the technical
requirements of the domain and (b) are the technical requirements of the
domain actually the most important requirements to adapt to for the domain.

If you don't disentangle those questions, you don't know if the orgs that
don't seem to be mirroring are failing to structure correctly or if you're
failing to understand why they structured correctly the way they did.

By way of example, lots of highly successful sales-driven organizations and/or
lean startups might well argue sales organizational needs trump technical
organizational needs, and they could well be right. Focusing on the paper's
definition of mirroring prevents you from drawing any of the important
conclusions around whether orgs are failing to structure correctly or are
structuring correctly around a different and potentially testably more
valuable optimization metric.

And yes, I'm a bit frustrated as the same interview time and analysis time
could have allowed the authors to disentangle those forces at least somewhat
and give a simply better answer to both the original question and more, simply
at the cost of a better framed research question.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

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DonbunEf7
Indeed, my thoughts were along your lines.

Communication is key to Conway's Law. The different ways that folks
communicate, and the bandwidth of the communication channels that they use,
and the time taken to converge on shared meaning during a conversation (e.g.
agreeing what some jargon means mid-conversation) all affect the communication
patterns which arise, which in turn affects what gets built.

