Conway's Corollary

“No system can outlive the competence of the people running it.”

While a system’s design reflects the structure of the organization that created it, its continued operation cannot exceed the competence of the people running it. When that competence declines below a critical threshold, the system will degrade and eventually fail, regardless of its original design.

The late 20th century’s transition from analog to digital systems created a generation uniquely fluent in both worlds. Generation X served as a bridge, carrying forward hands-on mechanical and electrical skills while mastering emerging digital architectures. This dual fluency enabled them to maintain, adapt, and even reinvent systems that spanned both eras.

As this cohort is displaced by automation, AI, and an incoming workforce less trained in foundational operations, the competence base required to sustain many legacy and hybrid systems is eroding. This erosion is exacerbated by the Baby Boomer cohort, many of whom assumed that whoever came next would “just know” how to keep things working; despite not possessing those skills themselves. The result is an accelerating collapse of operational expertise.

If systems were naturally self-sustaining across generations, there would be no need for national campaigns to manufacture competence. The fact that governments, corporations, and education systems have spent decades pushing STEM is an admission that the competence reservoir is running low, and that natural social transmission of these skills has broken down. The STEM push is not a purely altruistic investment in the future, it is in many ways a reaction to a scarcity that Boomers themselves engineered through decades of gatekeeping and extraction. The problem is, STEM is training “creators” of new systems without creating maintainers of old ones; meaning they are addressing the wrong half of the problem.

Without deliberate transfer or preservation of these skills, critical infrastructure risks failure not from external shocks, but from the quiet decay of human capability. This is the practical embodiment of Conway’s Corollary: no matter how robust a system’s original design, it will not survive the loss of the people who know how to make it work.

“A system cannot outlive the competence of the people running it. When generational skill transfer is broken, as when those who never knew how to operate a system assume their successors always will, the system will degrade and fail, no matter how sound its original design.”