Conway's Turtles and Rabbits

Turtles and Rabbits is an organizational pattern that deals with the challenges of Conway's Law presented in the Conway's Law section in Chapter 3, The Context of the New Engineering Game. A disruptive idea for a new product, that is, a fundamental change in the base architecture (refer to the Base Architecture topic), typically leads to resistance from an organization, perhaps because parts of the organization become superfluous to the development or production of the new product.

It takes effort and, in particular, time to overcome this resistance, with the additional risk that the development of the new product is not effective or powerful. The established organization is like a turtle: consistent, stable, and slow. This is useful, because the established business must go on. However, a turtle organization is not the best at creating disruptive new products. Turtle organizations are resistant to fundamental changes in the basic architecture....