About
Andrea Valenti
Senior Director of SRE leading 38 engineers across multiple geographies. 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 worked as an educator 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 developed most of this framework between Brussels, Miami, and Mexico City before settling in Barcelona.
Speaking next at SREday Munich Q2 2026 on the gatekeeping rotation. The recorded conversation with Ivo Velitchkov is on the Media page.
Currently in role. Reachable for speaking, peer conversations, and the occasional advisory ask via LinkedIn.
The Framework
Fluid Reliability is an experimental framework, developed across 6 years, three mergers, and 4–6 acquired businesses — now being confronted with realities outside that lineage. If you try it and it fails, the failure mode is the data — the boulder rolling back is information, not a verdict.
The current public artifact is the Narrative companion — the substory of how we learned to take the shape of the water, by adapting to the ever-changing shape of the vessel. 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
The framework synthesises three tiers of prior work: foundation (why and what), learning (how change happens), and implementation (how work flows).
| Author | Work | Year | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luhmann, N. | Social Systems | 1995 | Autopoietic systems; semipermeable boundaries |
| Olivetti, A. | Community factory concept | 1958 | Human dignity in productive work |
| Argyris, C. & Schön, D.A. | Organizational Learning | 1978 | Double-loop learning |
| Rogers, E.M. | Diffusion of Innovations | 2003 | Adoption through legitimacy and peer participation |
| Ohno, T. | Toyota Production System | 1978 | Lean manufacturing; flow over batch |
| Anderson, D.J. | Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change | 2010 | Knowledge-work flow; humane change method |
| Jenkins, H. | Convergence Culture | 2006 | Transmedia communication — basis for the framework’s fractal communication approach |
Industry Context
| Source | Document | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Site Reliability Engineering | 2016 | |
| Skelton & Pais | Team Topologies | 2019 |
| DORA | State of DevOps Report | 2024 |
| DORA | State of DevOps Report (AI edition) | 2025 |
| Fortune / DHR Global | Burnout Study | 2024–2025 |
| METR | Randomised controlled trial on AI tooling speed | 2025 |
How to Cite
Valenti, A. (2026). Fluid Reliability: A Narrative (Version 8.3). Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://www.fluidreliability.io/download/
@techreport{valenti2026narrative,
author = {Valenti, Andrea},
title = {Fluid Reliability: A Narrative},
year = {2026},
month = mar,
version = {8.3},
url = {https://www.fluidreliability.io/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.