🕹️ What can we control?

There are some things we can control:

• Products have a robust field update mechanism.
• Automated testing is in place.
• We have automated deployments.
• We have processes to quickly and confidently make and release hardware changes.

And some things we can't control:

• A customer asking for a new feature we did not anticipate.
• Bugs showing up in the field.
• Security problems in a dependency.
• Cloud vendor infrastructure problems.
• Supply chain issues (have we forgotten COVID already)?

But if we do the first list, then we are prepared to handle the second. However, we tend to focus most of our energy on the 2nd list (onerous contracts with vendors, extensive manual testing of the "final" release, etc.) and think we are controlling the situation, when in reality we are not -- it's just an illusion. Really, it is change that we fear, as change is associated with a lack of control. But it is change that gives us control.