A design language that survived 30 development teams
More than 30 development teams ended up using the system as the default starting point, not because they were told to, but because it had become the easier path.
Hybrid Consultancy
Solve the right problem before you invest in the solution.
After fifteen years of production software, one lesson stands out: expensive projects rarely fail on the technology. They fail at the start, when a team solves the wrong problem well.
A Discovery costs a fraction of the project, the way an architect’s design costs a fraction of the house, and it shows what the build will really cost. It is a project of its own: fixed scope, fixed price, and the result is yours. If you hire us for the project that follows, we credit the price of the Discovery against it.
Monday and Tuesday
We work with you and your team: the people who own the problem, the people who live with it, and what you already have.
Wednesday and Thursday
We work through what we found: the options, what can be reused and what it would take.
Friday
The result: the problem you are actually solving, a clear scope, a solid estimate and a go/no‑go recommendation.
What a skipped Discovery costs
An e-commerce team wanted emails that take customers straight to a review. Their own platform was modular enough to build that in-house. Instead, the team moved email and reviews to outside providers.
About three times the cost, €24,000–32,000 more, and less control over its own system. A one-week Discovery would have shown that the solution was already in the house.
Special code.talks offers
Get started by booking a call, or reach out to us during the conference.
What we build
Everything we buildex·ap·ta·tion
The repurposing of a trait.
Graphics cards rendered video games long before they trained neural networks.
More about the word →The Cynefin framework →Complexity glossary →
Most of what an organisation needs is already there. Before you buy or build something new, we help you see it and put it to new use.
What is Exaptation
Exaptation is Lasse Alexandros Diercks, and a potential network that spans from grief consultants to guitar amp builders.
Two literacies in one room.
Most consultancies know software well, or organisations well. Rarely both, almost never in the same head. Exaptation is built from fifteen years of production software work, brought together with anthro-complexity: the natural-science tradition (evolutionary biology, complexity theory, the work of Dave Snowden and others) that explains why optimised systems become brittle the moment the ground starts to shift.
The combination is the leverage. Software stops being a thing to deliver and starts being treated as a substrate to cultivate; organisations stop being modelled as machines and start being treated as the living systems they already are.