Michael Lissack
systems, content hierarchies, interactive elements—while a novice sees only a unified interface. The notion of what kind of building blocks and how many reveals itself in the kinds of plans we adopt. A stable environment permits more precise and detailed plans, because the stability means that we don't need to keep changing the building blocks. A rapidly changing environment favors modular plans, those that look at the situation activity by activity and not the whole at once, because these permit rapid improvisation. Each module calls for its own building blocks and you don't need to deal with the requirements of the other modules. This modular approach has become the dominant paradigm in soft- ware development, with microservices architecture replacing monolithic systems precisely because it enables components to be developed, de- ployed, and recombined independently. Companies like Amazon and Netflix have restructured their entire technical organizations around this principle, breaking down previously integrated systems into inde- pendently functioning services that can be recombined to create new capabilities. In contrast, the old, resource-limited environment favored integrated plans, which involve the building blocks of experts—full of combined prior knowledge—because using such building blocks (and not the nov- ice's need for new searches) will be more efficient. With building blocks in place, the unexpected can be exploited. A good example of this occurred at Japan Railways (JR) East, the largest rail carrier in the world. JR East never anticipated that constructing a new bullet-train line through the mountains north of Tokyo would lead it to a new and very profitable business—in beverages. The new train line required many tun- nels. In the tunnel through Mount Tanigawa, water began to cause prob- lems, and JR East engineers drew up plans to drain it away. But inside the tunnel, construction crews had found a use for the water—they were actu- ally drinking it. A maintenance worker, whose job was to check the safety of the tunneling equipment, thought it tasted so good that he proposed
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