Adoption & Evolution · master area
Chain Evolution
The chain is meant to change. A chain that hasn't changed in two years is either complete (rare) or asleep (common). Chain evolution is itself a chain operation — same shape, same discipline, run on the chain itself.
Owners: PO, Leadership, Tech Lead Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: The chain evolves the way features do, on itself, with the same discipline. Anything else is fashion.
Where it lives in the chain
- After We Build · Adoption — chain evolution — the canon
How to do this
A change to the chain follows the chain:
- Begins as a brief. Same template. Witnessed problem in the team's own working life — "the postmortem template keeps producing feelings, not structural fixes." Named person (the postmortem author), specific moment.
- Scoped, sliced, predicted. "After this change, the next three postmortems produce at least one structural fix each, owned and dated." Same five fields as any feature prediction.
- Runs as a cycle. The team practices the new way for one full cycle. Not "we'll start doing this from now on." One cycle of evidence first.
- Is checked. Did the change produce what we predicted? The signal reading is read at the chain-health review.
- Joins the corpus — or doesn't. A chain change that didn't produce the predicted improvement is archived with its evidence, not silently dropped. The next attempt inherits the lesson.
What good practice looks like
The team notices that briefs are getting written from solution backwards. The fix is not "let's all try to be more careful." The fix is a brief about the brief: "Witness three briefs being written this cycle. Predict that the new template's first-line constraint (person + moment) prevents solution-first drift." Run the cycle. Read the signal. Did the constraint work? Did the team find it onerous? Did the next three briefs land cleaner?
The chain that improves this way earns its evolution. The chain that improves by leadership decree imports fashion.
What this prevents
- Cargo-cult adoption of practices read in a book and dropped on the team without evidence.
- Silent abandonment of practices that aren't working — no record of what was tried, no learning.
- Endless tuning of the chain — every cycle a new template — with no evidence anything is better.
Related crafts
- Chain Maturity Assessment — what triggers evolution
- Artifact Lifecycle — how superseded chain parts are retired