In software and organisational development you will often find some laws and paradigms. Here is a collection of different laws for your reading pleasure. These are neither physical laws nor laws in a legal sense. They are observed patterns, experienced by renowned experts in their field, written down to give you an idea about the biases you might suffer from.
Ashby's Law
The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.
You need variety to cope with variety.
Brooke's Law
Adding more people to a late software project makes it later.
Don't do it.
Conway's Law
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Should be the base of your organizational design.
Goodheart's Law
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Measure to learn, not to achieve.
Larman's Law
(1)
Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.
(2)
As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo.
(3)
As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as “purist”, “theoretical”, “revolutionary”, "religion", and “needing pragmatic customization for local concerns” — which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo.
(4)
As a corollary to (1), if after changing the change some managers and single-specialists are still displaced, they become “coaches/trainers” for the change, frequently reinforcing (2) and (3), and creating the false impression ‘the change has been done’, deluding senior management and future change attempts, after which they become industry consultants.
(5)
(in large established orgs) Culture follows structure. And in tiny young orgs, structure follows culture.
Beware of the conservative and self-healing powers of organisations in a change.
Gall's Law
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working, simple system.
Always build something simple first.