Essays and articles on engineering leadership, sociotechnical architecture, and AI adoption.https://vanessaformicola.com/enhttps://www.infoq.com/articles/culture-trends-2026/https://www.infoq.com/articles/culture-trends-2026/Four trend contributions to InfoQ's annual report: AI transformation frameworks and maturity, ethical and safe AI as an engineering practice, the natural selection of ways of working, and the existential crisis facing the pre-AI developer and manager.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIleadershipsociotechnicalhttps://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/social-decision-records-team-ownership/https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/social-decision-records-team-ownership/A companion piece to the VirtualDDD podcast conversation — on how hidden coupling hides in plain sight, how the language a team uses shapes the architecture it builds, and what it takes to lead people through an architecture transformation.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTsociotechnicalarchitecturehttps://www.infoq.com/minibooks/architecture-lenses-2025/https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/architecture-lenses-2025/The annual InfoQ architecture trends magazine — my Holistic Engineering article opens the issue, framing the year's themes around sociotechnical thinking and organic problem solving.Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTarchitecturesociotechnicalhttps://www.infoq.com/articles/holistic-engineering-organic-problem-solving-complex-systems/https://www.infoq.com/articles/holistic-engineering-organic-problem-solving-complex-systems/Why treating engineering as a purely technical discipline creates invisible failure modes — and how expanding your model to include the organisational and social systems changes everything.Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTsociotechnicalarchitectureleadershiphttps://teamtopologies.com/news-blogs-newsletters/social-decision-records-and-team-apis-documenting-human-interactions-for-better-collaborationhttps://teamtopologies.com/news-blogs-newsletters/social-decision-records-and-team-apis-documenting-human-interactions-for-better-collaborationA collaboration with Matthew Skelton on extending Social Decision Records and Team APIs as complementary practices for capturing the human side of team boundaries and interactions.Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTsociotechnicalarchitectureleadershiphttps://medium.com/@vanessamformicola/social-decision-records-adrs-for-human-interactions-e6bb3ffe30efhttps://medium.com/@vanessamformicola/social-decision-records-adrs-for-human-interactions-e6bb3ffe30efTeams document their technical decisions and forget the human ones — commitments made between teams, personnel loans, organisational change. Social Decision Records borrow the structure of ADRs to capture the human and managerial aspects of a decision instead.Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMTsociotechnicalleadership