Onion inspirations!

May be it is due to the time spent daily to cut vegetables at home. Onion grabs special attention due to the special effects it creates. Makes even the tough ones like yours truly shed tears. I am not going into the science of this, but there are few learnings from onion processing!

Let us take the big onions first. I can't think of a better example to understand layered architecture than what onion provides as food for thought. Either you peel one layer after another or cut across to get a cross sectional view, one can witness all the great architectural attributes - each layer on top of underlying ones displaying wrapper pattern, perfect and snug fit with each layer adopting to quirks of underlying layers, bulb like structure that has a central control point at the top. May be there are more similarities and learnings to infer / apply, but I will stop here for brevity and leave the rest to reader's imagination.

Let us move on to small onions now. They are no less though they are smaller in size. But this gives the flexibility to understand mergers and acquisitions concept i.e. 2 (or sometimes even 3) smaller entities are subsumed into a bigger whole with the same wrapper concept in perfect unison and blend. Best part is, the internal entities retain their shape and structure though it is not visible to the external world. What a marvellous example for natural display of many (mostly 2) in a box and for identity management.

Now let us delve on the learnings that can be infered from rotten onions. One may notice that onions have tremendous resilience to contain the rotten mess to only one layer and not let it affect neighbouring layer. Imagine if the same independence can be achieved in systems architecture or in org structure - art of co-existing with other non performing departments in close proximity and still not get influenced by them retaining one's health in the pink.

Another wonderful thing about onion bulb structure is - each layer encompasses other in a full fledged fashion. There is no skip level concept at work here. I've not seen that yet. Yet, each layer is visible till the top. There is hierarchy, yet there are no hierarchical problems like suppressing downstream layers! Every layer unites at the top showcasing equality.

Onions themselves are pungent; but rotten onions really smell like a lot of trouble. They have the ability to attract attention and cry for help to be discarded away. That way they do their self appraisal in the most honest fashion! It is very easy to throw the bottom performing ( 5 to 10% ) ones out. Remaining rotten ones are very good at hiding their inefficiencies and get others to hide it as mentioned above.

In whatever way we look at it, onions are a great source of inspiration for offering guidance to thinking in many domains. In this blog post, I have attempted to scratch the surface on onion's contribution to system architecture, organization structure and performance management. But the possibilities IMO are endless. More later. Have fun till then.

Ha hahahaha

Ra