the station / sector 06
Change coupling
How to tell where you areCount the humans required for your smallest useful change to reach production — approvers, coordinators, and anyone who must merely be told. If that number is above two, the cost is not the meeting; it is that nobody makes small changes any more, so every change is large.
How much has to move together, and how many people have to be in the room.
Coupling is the axis that quietly sets the size of the average change, and change size drives almost everything else: review quality, bisectability, rollback scope, blast radius. Teams rarely decide to make big changes. They decide that shipping is expensive, and big changes are the rational response to a fixed cost per shipment.
Both halves matter, and they are different problems. Code coupling is fixed with interfaces and tests. Human coupling is fixed by removing approvals, which is harder because each one was added after something went wrong.