My reading was that there were two paths the author highlights:
1) Increase deployment capacity (which I'm reading as frequency, and I fully agree with)
2) Increase change capacity per deployment by making it less likely that a set of changes will fail through tests, monitoring, structural, and team changes
#2 is very much geared to "ship more changes in one deployment" which is where my disagreement lies. I think you should still do all those things, but that increasing the size of the bundle is explicitly an anti-goal.
I think you're better off, as a rule of thumb, making fewer changes per deployment if you want to reduce risk.
That's indeed how I wrote it, but I could have worded it better. Very much agree that the insights in The Goal go far beyond the scope of The Phoenix Project.
I think unfortunately the conclusion here is a bit backwards; de-risking deployments by improving testing and organisational properties is important, but is not the only approach that works.
The author notes that there appears to be a fixed number of changes per deployment and that it is hard to increase - I think the 'Reversie Thinkie' here (as the author puts it) is actually to decrease the number of changes per deployment.
The reason those meetings exist is because of risk! The more changes in a deployment, the higher the risk that one of them is going to introduce a bug or operational issue. By deploying small changes often, you get deliver value much sooner and fail smaller.
Combine this with techniques such as canarying and gradual rollout, and you enter a world where deployments are no longer flipping a switch and either breaking or not breaking - you get to turn outages into degradations.
This approach is corroborated by the DORA research[0], and covered well in Accelerate[1]. It also features centrally in The Phoenix Project[2] and its spiritual ancestor, The Goal[3].
Sure, a bullet the same size or smaller will 'fit' in a given barrel, but a depending on its weight and dimensions it will, at best perform equally, and at worst destroy the barrel.
But a bullet isn't the whole story; the rest of the cartridge has to fit snugly for the action of the gun to lock properly. Again, best case - the gun doesn't fire. Worst case, the action blows up.
This is a pretty simplified overview, but unfortunately the assertion above is a (pretty absurd) myth. Sorry :(
1) Increase deployment capacity (which I'm reading as frequency, and I fully agree with)
2) Increase change capacity per deployment by making it less likely that a set of changes will fail through tests, monitoring, structural, and team changes
#2 is very much geared to "ship more changes in one deployment" which is where my disagreement lies. I think you should still do all those things, but that increasing the size of the bundle is explicitly an anti-goal.
I think you're better off, as a rule of thumb, making fewer changes per deployment if you want to reduce risk.
But -- that is my particular reading of it.