This is incredibly simple yet incredibly powerful, and something that everyone who becomes proficient at delivering things of value learns eventually, but is rarely taught so succinctly.

By the way, for the programming case, this is a big part of the reason functional programming is so powerful. Avoiding shared state allows you to write your outline of smaller and smaller pieces, then write each piece as a stateless function, then pipe your data through a graph of these functions.

With other programming paradigms, you can't just knock out all the little pieces without thinking about the other pieces because the state is all tangled up. Which slows you down.

It's surprising how very simple the individual components can be, even for very complex systems, when following this approach.