The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016.

Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, was published while he was working on his book, Continuous Delivery.

Forsgren talks about how it feels to see the findings from the State of DevOps research so widely used and cited within the technology community. She explains the importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance as well as what she's learned about the importance of culture and how it can make or break an organization.

Humble, Forsgren, and Kim each share their favorite case studies in The DevOps Handbook.

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis.

Forsgren, PhD, is a Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Ed., and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Humble is co-author of Lean Enterprise, the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery, and The DevOps Handbook. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US Federal Government at 18F. As well as serving as DORA’s CTO, Jez teaches at UC Berkeley.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• Projects Jez and Gene worked on together before The DevOps Handbook came out.
• What life is like for Jez as a site reliability engineer at Google and what he’s learned.
• The story behind his DevOps aha moment in 2004, working on a large software project involving 70 developers.
• The architectural properties of his favorite programming language PHP, what it has in common with ASP.NET, and the importance of being able to get fast feedback while building something.
• The anguish that Jez felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, came out, wondering if there was still a need for the book he was working on, which was Continuous Delivery.
• “Testing on the Toilet” and other structures for creating distributed learning across an organization and why this is important to create a genuine learning dynamic.
• What Dr. Forsgren is working on now as Partner of Microsoft Research.
• Some of Dr. Forsgren’s goals as we work together on the State of DevOps research and how it feel to have those findings so widely used and cited within the technology community.
• The importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance and why it probably was so elusive for at least 40 years in the research community.
• What Dr. Forsgren has learned about the importance of culture, how it can make or break an organization, and the importance of great leadership.

RESOURCES

• Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis)
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, Second Edition, by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole Forsgren
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
• The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford
• FlowCon
• Elisabeth Hendrickson on the Idealcast: Part 1, Part 2
• Cloud Run
• Beyond Goldilocks Reliability by Narayan Desai, Google
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard
• DevOps Days
• On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles by Elisabeth Hendrickson at FlowCon San Francisco 2013
• Bret Victor
• Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor
• Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
• Douglas Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos
• 18F
• Pain Is Over, If You Want It at DevOps Enterprise Summit - San Francisco 2015
• Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture by Mike Bland
• Do Developers Discover New Tools On The Toilet? by Emerson Murphy-Hill, Edward Smith, Caitlin Sadowski, Ciera Jaspan, Collin Winter, Matthew Jorde, Andrea Knight, Andrew Trenk and Steve Gross PDF
• Study: DevOps Can Create Competitive Advantage
• DevOps Means Business by Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Jez Humble, Nigel Kersten and Gene Kim
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
• DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) on Google Cloud
• GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public
• Paul Strassmann
• The Idealcast with Dr. Ron Westrum: Part 1, Part 2
• Building the Circle of Faith: How Corporate Culture Builds Trust at Trajectory Conference 2021
• The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
• Maslach Burnout Inventory
• Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2018
• Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019
• Workplace Engagement Panel at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2019
• Expert Panel - Workplace Engagement & Countering Employee Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019
• The Idealcast with Trent Green
• Kelly Shortridge’s tweets about Gitlab S-1

TIMESTAMPS

[05:22] Intro

[05:34] Meet Jez Humble

[10:19] What Jez is working on these days

[15:56] What inform his book, “Continuous Delivery”

[24:02] Assembling the team for the project

[26:30] At what point was PHP an important property

[31:56] The most surprising thing since the DevOps Handbook came out

[35:07] His favorite pattern that went into the DevOps Handbook

[43:40] What DevOps worked on in 2021

[44:46] Meet Dr. Nicole Forsgren

[50:32] What Dr. Forsgren is working on these days

[52:18] What it’s like working at Microsoft Research

[55:58] The response to the state of DevOps findings

[59:18] The most surprising finding since the findings release

[1:05:59] Her favorite pattern that influence performance

[1:08:49] How Dr. Forsgren met Dr. Ron Westrum

[1:11:06] The most important thing she’s learned in this journey

[1:14:46] Her favorite case study in the DevOps Handbook

[1:19:12] Dr. Christina Maslach and work burnout

[1:20:46] More context about the case studies

[1:25:32] The Navy case study

[1:29:04] Outro

In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world.

They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally, they each share the new lessons they have learned since writing the handbook and the future challenges they think DevOps professionals need to solve for the future. Kim will conclude the series in Part 2, where he interviews the remaining two coauthors, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren. 

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Patrick Debois is considered to be the godfather of the DevOps movement after he coined the term DevOps accidentally in 2008. Through his work, he creates synergies projects and operations by using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. He has worked in several companies such as Atlassian, Zender, and VRT Media Lab. Currently, he is a Labs Researcher at Synk and an independent IT consultant.

John Willis an author and Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat.. He has been an active force in the IT management industry for over 35 years. Willis’ experience includes being the Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, the VP of Solutions for Socketplane, the VP of Training and Services at Opscode. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. 

Patrick DeBois and John Willis are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• The DevOps origin story from coining the term, why it took off, to launching the DevOps Days conference as an offshoot of the velocity conference. 
• How people thought of DevOps when it was first presented (their reactions, their mentalities, and their willingness to adopt it).  
• What has changed in the DevOps world since the first edition of The DevOps Handbook was published.
• How the rise of SaaS companies is altering the DevOps world and participating in its evolution, and how building solid relationships with SaaS vendors and communicating comprehensive feedback to them is integral to DevOps. 
• The significance of speed in changing team dynamics.
• Why resilient companies like Google and Amazon engineer chaos, and why companies like Toyota are happy when production stoppages happen.  
• Why you can’t afford to provide a high variety of products if you also offer high product variation.

RESOURCES

• Get The DevOps Handbook (Second Edition)
• Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
• Solaris Zones wiki
• Agile Conference in Toronto 2008
• Sys Advent article: In Defense of the Modern Day JVM (Java Virtual Machine) by Gene Kim
• Mob programming
• Breaking Traditional IT Paradigms to... (San Francisco 2015)
• Crowdsourcing Technology Governance (Las Vegas 2018)
• Laying Down the Tracks for Technical Change at Comcast (Las Vegas 2020)
• 10+ Deploys Per Day by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond
• 10+ Deploys Per Day 
• How chaos engineering works at Vanguard
• Patrick DeBois tweet mapping out all the failure modes of an online conference. 
• Jesse Robins LinkedIn 
• Jesse Robbins on Twitter
• How A Hotel Company Ran $30B of Revenue In Containers (Las Vegas 2020) by Dwayne Holmes
• Google Cloud Certified Fellow Program 
• Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
• Love Letter To Conferences (And What Makes Some Truly Amazing) by Gene Kim
• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
• Profound podcast by John Willis
• Ben Rockwood on Twitter
• Luke Kanies on LinkedIn
• DevOps 2020 - The Next Decade (London 2020)
• Beyond the Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps by Gene Kim and John Willis
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
• The Convergence Of DevOps
• Operations as a Strategic Weapon by John Willis
• Iterative Enterprise SRE Transformation (US 2021)

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Intro 

[01:18] What’s new and improved in the second edition of the DevOps handbook 

[03:56] Meet Patrick DeBois

[10:35] How faster technology made ideas like DevOps possible

[18:11] The myths and inefficiencies of team autonomy

[20:04] What the first DevOps days were like

[27:59] Different opinions between the dev community and ops community

[30:49] Mob programming and the future of collaboration

[39:31] Two surprising things Patrick learned about DevOps

[47:20] Patrick DeBois’ favorite DevOps patterns 

[51:28] How fear of not delivering on time can mask technical errors

[59:45] What Patrick DeBois is working on these days

[1:04:38] What was expanded in the second edition of the DevOps handbook

[1:06:30] How Gene Kim entered the DevOps world. 

[1:07:38] Meet John Willis

[1:10:42] Why the DevOps movement took off

[1:16:00] Mastering production disasters

[1:23:32] The birth of the DevOps Days conference

[1:37:37] Feelings of belonging and connection in a conference

[1:41:29] A few clarifications

[1:49:32] Two of the greatest DevOps open spaces

[1:52:40] The difference between variety and variation (the cost of knowledge work). 

[2:07:12] Why you should want more stoppages in your production line

[2:10:16] John Willis’ two favorite DevOps case studies

[2:18:55] Outro

In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, the top officer in the Navy. Before that, Admiral Richardson served as director of the US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion program.

In part one of this two-part conversation, Kim and Admiral Richardson explore how the Department of Defense and the armed services can lead the way to respond effectively to the digital disruption agenda. Admiral Richardson discusses how he operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. He also presents his theories on how we need to balance compliance and creativity. And finally, he presents some amazing examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes, those layers of controls and supervision that may have crept in over the decades.

Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world.

Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers. 

Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.  

Visit Steve Spear's Website

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• Why high-velocity learning was so important to Admiral Richardson when he was the Chief of Naval Operations.
• How Admiral Richardson operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy.
• His views on the need to balance compliance and creativity.
• Specific advice on what leaders must do when the balance tilts too much toward compliance and has taken away people’s ability to unleash their full creative potential.
• Examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes.
• Why radical delegations are so important.
• How Admiral Richardson came to believe that creating leadership communities and connections are essential.
• Where software competencies must show up in modern organizations.

RESOURCES

• Dr. Steve Spear’s episodes on The Idealcast Part 1, summit presentations, and Part 2.
• The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear.
• The Boeing Company
• Exelon
• BWX Technologies, Inc.
• Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7
• Tao Te Ching - Chapter 17
• Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1
• A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 1
• A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 2
• The Air Force's Digital Journey in 12 Parsecs or Less at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2020
• Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
• Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program
• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• Fingerspitzengefühl
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim
• 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe
• The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance by Dr. Andre Martin
• The Key to High Performance: What the Data Says by Dr. Nicole Forsgren
• Dr. Andre Martin’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation: “The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance” by Dr. Andre Martin, VP People Development, Google
• Adrian Cockcroft on the Future of the Cloud
• Patton
• George S. Patton slapping incidents
• The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal, Chris Fussell, David Silverman and Tantum Collins
• Navy Leader Development Framework
• Tombstone

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Intro

[01:54] Meet Admiral John Richardson

[04:00] Responding effectively to the digital disruption agenda

[07:05] Admiral Richardson in his own words and his Act 2

[08:27] Meet Steve Spear

[09:29] How Steve’s work caught Admiral Richardson’s attention

[11:46] Admiral Richardson’s efforts to create a learning dynamic

[19:18] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority

[27:01] What he does with leader who’s afraid of the concept

[28:48] Contrasts between learning culture and compliance culture

[37:37] Fingerspitzengefühl

[41:03] Steve’s thoughts on compliance vs creativity

[43:47] Leadership development and compliance control

[48:38] Addressing near misses

[56:29] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 in Europe

[57:52] Scar tissue processes

[1:01:22] Finding a balance with leaders

[1:09:43] The story behind general Eisenhower and General Patton

[1:14:02] The three layers of creativity

[1:27:23] How technology changed a sense of community

[1:33:30] Admiral Richardson’s working relationships in the Navy

[1:42:19] Where the software capabilities need to show up

[1:48:02] Navy Leader Development Framework Version 3.0

[1:51:22] Outro

In the final episode of the first season of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations, to synthesize and reflect upon some of the major themes from the entire season. 

In Gene’s continued quest to understand why organizations behave the way they do, Fredrick helps connect the dots and points to new areas that deserve more study. They discuss the nature of knowledge work, including how software creation requires so much more conversation and joint cognitive work, and the challenges this presents. They also dive into the bodies of knowledge that are required as we push more decision making and value creation to the edges of the organization. 

Then, Gene and Fredrick revisit the concept of integration and why it’s so much more important now than 50 years ago. And finally, they discuss why “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?” are two very powerful questions and what they actually reveal about people and the work they’re performing. And why this is all so important as we try to create organizations that maximize learning for everyone.

BIO:

Jeffrey Fredrick is an internationally recognized expert in software development with over 25 years’ experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide. His experience includes roles as Vice President of Product Management, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Evangelist. He has also worked as an independent consultant on topics including corporate strategy, product management, marketing, and interaction design. Jeffrey is based in London and is currently Managing Director of TIM, an Acuris Company. He also runs the London Organisational Learning Meetup and is a CTO mentor through CTO Craft.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jtf 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

Website: https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• The nature of knowledge work and how it requires more conversation and joint cognitive work and the challenges it presents
• The body of knowledge required in decision making and value creation for the organization
• Concepts of integration and why it’s important now
• What the questions, “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?,” reveal about people and their work
• How Dr. Thomas Kuhns’s work pertains to management models

RESOURCES

• Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick
• Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Dr. Thomas Kuhn
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Dr. Steve Spear’s episode on The Idealcast
• Dr. Steve Spear’s 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit Talk
• Michael Nygard’s episode on The Idealcast
• MIT’s Beer Game
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The DevOps Enterprise Journal
• Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Command in War by Martin van Creveld
• Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day by Timothy Fitz
• Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart

TIMESTAMPS

[00:11] Intro

[03:13] Meet Jeffrey Fredrick

[03:54] Why conversations are important

[08:03] Why conversations are more important now than 100 years ago

[11:02] The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

[13:08] Integration

[16:33] The need for better integration now

[20:18] What is information hiding and why it’s important

[26:32] The pace of change moves the trade-off

[31:41] Two important questions to ask

[42:17] The system of fast and slow

[48:25] Selection bias

[51:07] Thank you from Gene

[52:13] Jeffrey’s significant a-ha moment

[59:45] Injecting change

[1:06:24] Structure and dynamics

[1:12:44] Command in War

[1:23:39] Complaining about a feature factory

[1:25:40] Standardized work and integrating feedback

[1:22:21] Two elements of information flow

[1:36:49] Insights on peer programming

[1:43:54] Learning more and learning earlier

[1:45:55] Is there something missing?

[1:48:50] Contacting Jeffrey Fredrick

[1:49:55] Outro

This episode of The Idealcast features the second part of Gene Kim’s interview with Team of Teams coauthor and CrossLead CEO David Silverman and CrossLead Head of R&D Jessica Reif. 

In this episode, they take up the topic of how internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other, helping allocate scarce resources to where they're needed most, which enables the further unlocking of capacities.

They discuss challenges around the cost of change and the new skills that mid-level leaders need in order to survive and thrive in an era where being functionally excellent in one’s own silo is not enough.

They further talk about the similarities between special operations and agile, especially comparing and contrasting terms that further concretize concepts the agile and DevOps community have held for years but struggled to name. And finally, they discuss where we go from here.

BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

Jess Reif                                                                                       

Jessica Reif is the Director of Research & development for CrossLead Inc, where she leverages the latest management research to develop new approaches to increasing business agility for CrossLead’s clients. She leads CrossLead’s education efforts and has developed training programs that have been delivered to over 20,000 leaders. Previously, Jessica served as a Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• How internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other and allocate scarce resources to where they are needed most
• Concept and terms found within the agile and special operations communities
• What happens when the cost of change is intolerably high
• New skills that midlevel need to survive and thrive to help organizations win

RESOURCES

• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Beyond the Goal: Eliyahu Goldratt Speaks on the Theory of Constraints (Your Coach In A Box) by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Beyond The Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution Of DevOps by Gene Kim and John Willis
• Peter Skillman’s Ted Talk: Marshmallow Design Challenge
• Tom Wujec’s Ted Talk: Build a Tower, Build a Team
• The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy by Mark Schwartz
• Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart
• IT Revolution’s virtual library
• The Great Man Theory
• Transformational Leadership and DevOps - Dr. Steve Mayner
• Learning to be a Transformational Leader - Dr. Steve Mayner
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
• Paradigm shift
• Isaac Newton by James Gleick

TIMESTAMPS

[00:08] Intro

[01:55] What parallels Jessica Rief sees in the technology domain

[08:56] What Steve Spear’s story means to David Silverman

[14:47] Empowerment is not inherently a good thing

[20:35] The Core, Chronic Conflict and the Marshmallow Challenge

[28:28] Leaders, get comfortable with the unknown and trust somebody

[37:39] Micromanagement in the technology space

[41:11] IT Revolution’s new books and virtual library

[42:39] Advice to micromanagers

[46:34] Auditing your time appropriate to your level of leadership

[48:28] Solving problems closer to the edge

[53:20] The role of mid-level management

[58:47] What skillsets are important to winning

[1:07:22] Leadership theories

[1:08:47] How Team of Teams has affected daily work

[1:18:32] How to contact Jessica and David

[1:19:40] Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm shift

[1:23:22] Newton’s three laws of motions

[1:25:35] Outro

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim shares David Silverman’s 2020 presentation from DevOps Enterprise Summit London - Virtual. In a continuation of Episode 11, the Team of Teams coauthor and CEO of CrossLead talks about the key concepts from Team of Teams, and provides even more context for so many of the topics covered in last week’s episode. 

David talks about the genesis of the joint special operations command, which was created after the failure of the daring Iran hostage rescue in 1979, and how it found itself in 2003 in Afghanistan and Iraq, tactically winning but strategically losing, unable to find terrorist leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He describes the principles that they drew upon, which will be familiar to almost everyone in the DevOps community, the practices that it led to, the amazing outcomes that resulted, as well as the leadership skills needed in this new world. 

BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

• Key concepts from the book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
• The genesis of the joint special operations command
• How the principles, practices, outcomes and leaderships relate to the DevOps community

RESOURCES

• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• Cynefin framework

TIMESTAMPS

[00:08] Intro

[01:56] Meet David Silverman

[04:05] The inception of US special operations

[07:35] Best practices associated with management

[10:59] Cynefin framework

[11:53] Complexity environment

[14:32] How to senior business leadership can communicate effectively and persuasively

[15:59] Back to fundamentals

[19:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual

[21:33] Think as a living organism

[23:19] Model of radical transparency

[24:02] How to make it work inside your organizations

[31:24] How to define great leadership

[33:53] David’s request for examples

[34:22] Coming up in the next episode

[35:42] Outro

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Team of Team’s coauthor and CEO of Crosslead, David Silverman, and Director of Research and Development at CrossLead, Jessica Reif, for a two-part interview. 

In Team of Teams, David and his coauthors explained how the Joint Special Forces Task Force in Iraq was struggling to achieve its mission, and how they turned it into a success. Their experience led to a deep and critical rethinking of almost everything in US military services and in the commercial industry. Now at CrossLead, David works with Jessica Reif to continue researching and codifying these practices into their management framework.

In Part 1 of the interview, Gene and his guests discuss the structure and dynamics of the transformation described in Team of Teams and how these leadership characteristics are needed today in the new ways of working. This leadership framework reinforces the concepts of common purpose, shared consciousness, empowerment, and trust within organizations to help teams work together more effectively in complex environments, particularly when they have to continuously adapt to change. Stay tuned for Part 2.

BIO:

David Silverman

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and former Navy SEAL, David Silverman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrossLead, Inc. Founded in 2016, CrossLead is a technology company whose leadership and management framework is used by leaders and companies around the globe.  

In 2015, David co-authored the New York Times bestselling leadership and management book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. As a thought leader on culture change, high-performing teams, and leadership, he is a frequent guest speaker for business leaders and conferences around the globe.

After his 13-year career as a Navy SEAL, David and a group of like-minded friends sought to reinvent the way the world does business in today’s dynamic environment. Based on their collective service in the world’s premier Special Operations Units, they devised a holistic leadership and management framework called CrossLead. Today, CrossLead is a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Implemented in some of the world’s most successful organizations, CrossLead drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity, improvement in employee engagement, and more predictable business results. 

Prior to CrossLead, David co-founded the McChrystal Group where he served as CEO for five years. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served as a Navy SEAL from 1998-2011. He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) Class 221 in 1999 as the Honor Man. David deployed six times around the world, including combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia where he received three Bronze Stars and numerous other commendations. 

David serves on the advisory board of the Headstrong Project and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. David lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Hollis, and their two children. He maintains an active lifestyle as a waterman and runner.  

Twitter: @dksilverman

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silverman-648035a/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

Jess Reif                                                                                       

Jessica Reif is the Director of Research & development for CrossLead Inc, where she leverages the latest management research to develop new approaches to increasing business agility for CrossLead’s clients. She leads CrossLead’s education efforts and has developed training programs that have been delivered to over 20,000 leaders. Previously, Jessica served as a Product Delivery Manager for applied machine learning and engineering teams at Oracle Data Cloud, where her role was to facilitate agile development among a team-of-teams. Jessica holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, baking, and hiking. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jess_Reif

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-reif/

Website: https://www.crosslead.com/

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

• The philosophy and thinking behind the book, Team of Teams
• The organization and management required to support the large group of personnel involved in the mission described in the book
• The dramatic changes in the transformations mentioned in the book and how and why it worked
• The structure and dynamics before and after the transformation
• What leadership characteristics are needed in this new way of working
• Ops Intelligence Update Call
• What was required to increase the temp of operations

RESOURCES

• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team by Charles Duhigg
• Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend
• Wharton’s Carton: CEOs Have Real Vision Problems by Howard R. Gold
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• DevOps culture: Westrum organizational culture
• Psychological safety
• Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz
• How Can Leaders Overcome the Blurry Vision Bias? Identifying an Antidote to the Paradox of Vision Communication by Andrew M. Carton and Brian J. Lucas
• Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis

TIMESTAMPS

[00:08] Intro

[03:26] Meet David Silverman

[05:50] Meet Jessica Rief

[06:59] Writing down his experiences to teach

[12:58] Who are David’s students and what he was teaching

[14:05] Applying these techniques to COVID-19

[17:54] Comparing David’s experience to General Stanley McChrystal’s experience

[23:30] Remembering Defense Information Systems Agency CTO Dawn Meyerriecks’ org chart

[25:30] Getting out of own way

[28:31] Top differences in what David was trying to achieve

[33:46] Compare and contrast the leadership characteristics

[37:24] Jess reflecting on changes required at various levels of leaderships

[39:58] A look at structural changes or lack thereof

[47:50] The chessmaster vs the gardner

[49:18] Changing the middle management

[56:28] DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual

[58:04] The frozen middle

[1:00:06] Advice to define the work

[1:06:10] Ops Intelligence Update Call

[1:15:29] Create concrete manifestation of the vision

[1:23:30] The dynamics of having the Ops Intelligence Update Call

[1:26:03] The need for middle management to augment the process

[1:30:55] Gene’s favorite part of Team of Teams

[1:34:43] Creating these relationships in a large scale

[1:39:55] Successful execution drives strategy

[1:41:51] How to reach David and Jessica

[1:43:06] Outro

On this continuation of Gene Kim’s interview with Michael Nygard, Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, they discuss his reflections on Admiral Rickover's work with the US Naval Reactor Core and how it may or may not resonate with the principles we hold so near and dear in the DevOps community. They also tease apart the learnings from the architecture of the Toyota Production System and their ability to drive down the cost of change. 

They also discuss how we can tell when there are genuinely too many “musical notes” or when those extra notes allow for better and simpler systems that are easier to build and maintain and can even make other systems around them simpler too? And how so many of the lessons and sensibilities came from working with Rich Hickey, the creator of the Clojure programming language. 

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

• Twitter: @mtnygard
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/
• Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/

You’ll Learn About:

• Admiral Rickover’s work with the Naval Nuclear Reactor Core
• Building great architecture for generality.
• Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction.
• Toyota Production System’s ability to drive down the cost of change through architecture
• Clojure programming language
• Cynefin framework
• How to know if a code is simpler or more complex

RESOURCES

• Cynefin framework
• Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz
• "Why software development is an engineering discipline," presentation by Glenn Vanderburg at O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference
• "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation," presentation by John Allspaw
• "Architecture Without an End State," presentation by Michael T. Nygard at YOW! 2012
• "Spec-ulation Keynote," presentation by Rich Hickey
• re-frame (re-frame is the magnificent UI framework which both Mike and I love using and hold in the highest regard — by no means should the "too many notes" comment be construed that re-frame has too many notes!)
• "Fabulous Fortunes, Fewer Failures, and Faster Fixes from Functional Fundamentals," presentation by Scott Havens at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2019
• "Clojure for Java Programmers Part 1," presentation by Rich Hickey at NYC Java Study Group
• Simple Made Easy presentation by Rich Hickey at Strange Loop 2011
• Love Letter To Clojure (Part 1) by Gene Kim
• The Idealcast, Episode 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear
• LambdaCast podcast hosted by David Koontz

TIMESTAMPS

[00:09] Intro

[02:19] Mike’s reflections on Steve Spear, Admiral Rickover and the US Naval reactor core

[04:33] Admiral Rickover’s 1962 memo

[08:13] Cynefin framework

[12:40] Applying to software engineering

[16:06] Gene tells Mike a Steve Spear’s story

[18:58] 10+ deploys a day everyday at Flickr

[19:43] Back to the story

[24:34] Why the story is important

[27:35] When notes are useful

[35:05] Too many notes vs. too few notes

[40:00] DevOps Enterprise Summit Vegas Virtual

[41:35] How to know if a code is simpler or more complex

[47:23] A lively exchange of ideas

[51:31] The opposing argument

[54:20] Implementing items of interests

[55:21] Back to the payment processing example

[56:07] Case 3

[1:03:03] The challenge with Option 2

[1:08:19] Pure function

[1:10:19] Rich Hickey and Clojure

[1:15:01] Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” presentation

[1:16:37] Exploring those ideas work at the macro scale

[1:22:31] Immutability concept

[1:23:58] The importance of senior leaders’ understanding of these issues

[1:26:53] Outro

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim provides original commentary on Michael Nygard’s 2016 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative

DevOps has been and continues to be part of a larger shift in organizational structure, system architecture, infrastructure, and process design. In order to be successful, each of these must change together to achieve a high tempo. In this presentation, Nygard talks about maneuverability and how to get teams, and teams of teams, working toward a common objective. And he provides principles and patterns for how large organizations can overcome the pitfalls they so often face.

In this presentation, Nygard provides several real-life examples of failed and successful transformation efforts through a lens of tempo, maneuver warfare, and initiative.

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

• Twitter: @mtnygard
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/
• Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/

You’ll Learn About:

• John Boyd’s energy maneuverability theory and maneuver warfare
• Architect elevator
• Edge of Instability
• Disposable infrastructure
• Horizontal and vertical integrity

RESOURCES

• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard
• Architect Elevator by Gregor Hohpe
• Gregor Hohpe’s presentation at SummerSOC 2019
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual

TIMESTAMPS

[00:07] Intro

[01:20] Mike Nygard’s speech

[02:29] A story of despair and hope

[03:55] Gene explains the joke

[04:15] Back to Mike’s story

[09:17] Military concept: manoeuvrability

[14:12] Architect Elevator

[16:50] Edge of Instability

[17:55] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020

[19:32] War of attrition

[20:47] Disposable infrastructure

[22:59] Studying tempo

[24:57] Horizontal and vertical integrity

[28:52] What is the intent

[32:44] Gene’s last observations

[36:46] Outro

In the latest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim is joined by Michael Nygard, a senior vice president at Sabre and author of the bestselling Release It! Nygard has helped businesses and technology leaders in their transformation journeys over his long career and was even one of the inspirations behind The Unicorn Project’s protagonist, Maxine.

In their discussion, Kim and Nygard explore how we can enable thousands or even tens of thousands of engineers to work together toward common objectives, including the structure and dynamics required to achieve it. They also examine what truly great architecture looks like and the continuing importance and relevance of Conway’s Law.

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

• Twitter: @mtnygard
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/
• Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/

You’ll Learn About:

• How to build great architecture for large teams.
• The real implications of Conway’s Law.
• Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction.
• Real-life stories of technology leaders’ transformation journeys.
• Decentralized economic decision making.
• The fear cycle and predictability.
• The after effects of the Yegge memo.
• A great definition of what great architecture is. 
• Leadership and the relationship between the business’ architecture and the technology architecture of the business.

RESOURCES

• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard
• Clojure programming language
• Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) operating system
• Totality Corporation
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
• MCDP1: Warfighting
• Conway's law
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• The Fear Cycle by Michael T. Nygard
• State of DevOps Report
• DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020
• Coherence Penalty for Humans by Michael T. Nygard
• Michael Nygard on Cognicast podcast

TIMESTAMPS

[00:07] Intro

[02:12] Meet Mike Nygard

[04:36] What is TPF operating system?

[05:40] Finding the perspective to write Release It!

[11:07] Totality Corporation

[13:54] Moving large teams towards common objective

[18:37] Decentralized economic decision making

[19:52] The Principles of Product Development Flow

[23:38] Tale of two outages

[27:27] Distance incentive supply

[32:00] Architecture is one top predictors of performance

[35:05] Other attributes of good architecture

[39:19] The Fear Cycle

[43:40] An amazing finding in State of DevOps Report

[45:02] Amazon replatforming example

[50:35] The universal takeaways

[53:07] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020

[54:55] Characteristics of reorganizations and structural changes

[1:00:00] Self-contained systems

[1:02:40] Mike’s definition of architecture

[1:07:13] Coherence Penalty for Humans

[1:10:10] Leadership’s responsibility to the architecture