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2025

Muri: The Root Cause of Overburden

Part 1 of this series was about recognising waste (Muda) and Part 2 was about how uneven flow (Mura) creates that waste. This final part is about the force that gives rise to both. The Japanese term Muri (無理) roughly translates to "overburden" or "unreasonable load". In the original Toyota Production System, Muri was physical: asking a worker to lift a box that was too heavy. In modern software delivery, it is the invisible pressure we put on the two load-bearing parts of any technology organisation: the people who change the system and the system they are forced to change.

It's not dramatic, it's not loud and it doesn't announce itself with outages. Muri accumulates slowly and becomes the norm. And because of that, it's the most dangerous of the three.

Mura: The Source of Uneven Flow

In part 1, we explored the eight wastes (Muda) as the visible symptoms of inefficiency in software delivery. We saw how waste shows up in unfinished work, handoffs, long waits, rework, and lost talent. Those are the effects we can observe and feel.

Those wastes are almost always the result of Mura (斑), a Japanese term from the Toyota Production System meaning "unevenness" or "inconsistency" in how work flows. It is the "hurry up and wait" cycle: periods of low activity followed by periods of frantic catch-up, that make delivery unpredictable and unsustainable.

  • in Health
  • 8 min read

My health and fitness journey: Part 3

Welcome to the third and final part of this blog series. In Part 1, I outlined a scientific and analytical plan to transform my health and fitness by my 40th birthday. No fads, no guesswork, no pseudo-science — just measurable data, evidence-based methods, and a willingness to test and iterate on myself as the subject. In Part 2, I obsessively tracked and shared 52 weeks of raw data as I executed that plan.

Now it's time to connect the dots — to bring the theory and the data together, and understand not just what worked, but why it did.

Muda: The Eight Wastes of Modern Software Delivery

In manufacturing, Lean thinking revolutionised how products were built by relentlessly eliminating waste. Whilst the "software factory" analogy isn't perfect, the core Lean principle of eliminating waste underpins modern software delivery, from Agile and DevOps to Continuous Delivery and Platform Engineering.

In Japanese, Muda (無駄) means "waste" or "futility" - any activity that consumes resources but creates no value. During the development of the Toyota Production System in the late 1940s through to the 1970s, Taiichi Ohno identified seven types of waste that hinder efficiency and productivity. Over the years, Lean practitioners have adapted these for software and added a widely recognised eighth form of waste - often considered the most critical of all.