About

Andrea Valenti

Senior Director of SRE. Over six years, three mergers, and a couple of divestments, he developed a framework for building engineering organizations that absorb disruption rather than accumulate it. Before technology, he spent three years in psychiatric care in Bologna — which taught him more about teams under pressure than any management book. He plays saxophone badly, builds electronic instruments in his spare time, and lives in Barcelona.

Speaking next at SREday Munich Q2 2026 on the gatekeeping rotation. The recorded conversation with Ivo Velitchkov is on the Media page.

Connect on LinkedIn

The Framework

Fluid Reliability is an experimental framework. It was developed in a specific organizational context over 5+ years and three mergers. Its generalizability is unproven; external validation is open and welcome. If you try it and it fails, the failure mode is as valuable as a success story.

The current public artifact is the Narrative companion. The framework continues to evolve: v8.4 integrates reader-feedback observations on in-flight documentation repair and cross-team ripple effects, alongside Cycle Four — The Stress Test (2026), a chapter on resilience under leadership transitions.

Theoretical Foundation

Author Contribution
Luhmann Systems theory, boundaries
Olivetti Human dignity in work
Argyris Double-loop learning
Rogers Diffusion of innovation
Ohno Toyota Production System
Anderson Kanban method

Industry Context

How to Cite

Valenti, A. (2026). The shape of the water: A narrative journey through Fluid Reliability (Version 8.3). Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://fluid-reliability.levm.eu/download/

@techreport{valenti2026narrative,
  author    = {Valenti, Andrea},
  title     = {The Shape of the Water: A Narrative Journey
               Through Fluid Reliability},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = mar,
  version   = {8.3},
  url       = {https://fluid-reliability.levm.eu/download/},
  license   = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}
}

Version

v8.3 · March 12, 2026

License

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Share, adapt, attribute, non-commercial.