I had the great pleasure of attending the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas Virtual last week. All the presentations were pre-recorded and the speakers were often in the ongoing chat channels along with the audience, answering questions and posting additional tidbits about their talks. In fact, I think I might have enjoyed this conference more in the virtual format. But then I do miss seeing human beings in the flesh.
I share many common interests with the DevOps community through my interest in flow and continuous improvement. There were topics throughout the three days (and extended beyond the conference time, as the videos were available to watch later) that could be applied anywhere, which is why I was participating. Looking through my notes, here are some items that sparked interest and joy for me:
Maya Leibman and Ross Clanton from American Airlines talked about their journey in applying DevOps in their environment. They described the idea of “delivery transformation” being about delivering value faster - that sounds like the goal of all improvement efforts. And to get there, they talked about driving excellence in delivery, operations, people and technology.
I also liked their version of “values” like those of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. They value Action & doing over analysis & meetings; Collaboration over silos; Clarity of mission over trying to do everything; Empowerment over putting our personal stamp on every effort; Getting it out over getting it perfect; “Who can do this” over hierarchy; and Finishing over starting. (The idea of “start finishing; stop starting is a familiar theme here - and everywhere that too much work-in-process kills flow.)
Dr. Steven Spear gave a rapid-fire talk about “why organizations struggle to do what they need to do” that had a lot of interesting insights. The idea he described is that while organizations exist to deliver value (services, products, etc) to their customers, they often end up getting in their own way. But why? He had a lot of fun with the idea, but the essential challenge seems to be that the organization itself doesn’t know how it does things - everything is hidden. Managers struggle to “see” the work. Individuals struggle to “see” other work. And everything feels arbitrary - inputs, outputs, measures, etc. We need better problem solving at speed. Damon Edwards of Rundeck talked about “the system as imagined” and “the system as found” that connected for me with Dr. Spear’s discussion.
Psychological Safety (see Dr Amy Edmondson) came up several ways throughout the conference. People spoke about it explicitly in several talks, including one that was all about psychological safety. More often it was mentioned tangentially, or people heard something in a speaker and piped up in the chat channels. Every time I hear about this concept, I wonder how I can help improve that feeling of safety - not quite freedom to do anything, but freedom from fear of mistakes; the desire to learn from everything; that the team / organization really has your best interest in mind. Another description of psychological safety was, “a safe team is one that feels like family AND can move mountains together.”
My ears perked up at the idea of “impression management” that Duena Blomstrom and Ffion Jones from PeopleNotTech discussed in connection with psychological safety. It is one of the symptoms of a low safety environment - people are worried about how they will appear (to their superiors) more than they are interested in resolving issues or improving the system.
Old school knowledge management ideas came up several ways - the idea of tacit knowledge in particular. Thomas Limoncelli talked about making it easier to record ideas to get more “tacit” to “explicit” knowledge. The KM community has seen this challenge over and over again. I liked how Limoncelli talked about important context can be in understanding what is happening. He talked about the idea of “high context” and “low context” cultures, and that the more things can be made “low context” the better (at least for DevOps). The general idea is that in a high context culture, a person from outside the culture would be completely lost without the embedded relationships and experience. And in a low context cultures newcomers have things spelled out clearly and explicitly.
Shorter items
Scenius. A term from Brian Eno to describe “communal genius” - the genius that comes about from people working together to develop new ideas and concepts, or the “intelligence of the whole.” More info in a Wired article and a Synthopia article on the topic.
“Queues don’t learn” - I loved this quote from the CrossLead, Inc folks. When anything is sitting waiting, nothing is happening - a no learning can happen. I bet that when work is in a queue that it is losing knowledge.
From Jonathan Smart, “Leadership behavior is the biggest lever for better value - sooner, safer, happier.” (He has a new book coming out of that title.)
“Leadership is how you leave people feeling.” also from Jonathan Smart.
Somewhere in the conversation with several people at Fannie Mae: “Fastest way to save money? Turning things off.” and “Fastest way to waste money? Doing things twice.”
Jill Mead talked about challenges they faced at US Bank in the “governance” arena. I particularly liked the dose of reality that work naturally grows more and more complicated over time. And without active pruning, it becomes unbearable. “The past has ways of debilitating the future.”
Some fun related to writing things down: The Blank Screen (or Page) Syndrome - the difficulty some people writing from the blank screen.
Customer centricity doesn’t mean saying “yes” to every request. It means understanding the customer well enough to understand what would really solve their problem.
From one aspect, I wasn’t able to participate as fully as I might have if I were there in person. But from another aspect, I think I was able to interact with more people than I would have, thanks to the very active chat during each of the talks that I did attend. There were also opportunities for smaller breakouts and deeper conversations that I did not pursue due to working from my basement (and the shifted time zones).
But overall, this was a great event. Plenty of good ideas. And more books in my queue.