My Chat With Gene Kim

I wanted to share some fun quotes from my chat with Gene Kim on my podcast. There were so many insights in this chat that it was hard to keep track.

On independence of action and the "checklist project". The image of this project/situation have been stuck in my head ever since:

The phrase I learned working with Dr. Steven Spear, you know, famous for his work in the Toyota production system, was the word independence of action. One of my favorite examples in the book is the checkbox project, right. Imagine an organization where the top initiative is for this telco is get a checkbox presented to the 20 million customers so they can opt into a $5 a month service to get movies, check email, et cetera. It has across 20 different teams, across four different customer channels, it requires CEO minus one level support, daily war room meetings, $28 million dollars. The worst of it is that most people give it a 20 percent chance of success because the last two times they tried, it failed. No one can do work independently of each other. Everything is so coupled together. 

On the early DevOps Enterprise Summit focus on non-unicorns, and how "we're all the same now." I love the mix of scales here—from a couple decades, to a couple hundred years:

It's interesting in the early years we had a rule, like no unicorns allowed no tech giants. Yet over the years, I mean, I think it's kind of a revelation, a creeping realization, has been like, we're all, we're all the same now, right? I mean, if you talk to someone at Spotify or LinkedIn or Shopify or an Amazon, they have the same socio- technical problems as, anybody else. you know, large, complex organizations like Barclays have been around since 1695 or UK HMRC, the revenue custom service that's been around since the year 1200. I think the older the organization is, the more they have sort of like these calcified legacies where it's like genuinely hard to engineer out of.

On sociotechnical maestros.

So, you know, Dr. Ron Westrum, famous for his work on culture-- we leveraged his work so much in the state of DevOps research with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble--but he also introduced me to the term, the socio technical maestro. And it's like five things, high energy, high standards, great in the large, great in the small, and they love walking the floor. I'm like, when I heard that, I'm like, " Oh, I get it." It immediately sort of explained kind of the people I admire versus the people that I admire less. So I think there's a kind of a norm they set. Like high energy, high standards, right? A need to go see for themselves and desire to enable people to do their work easily well. To me, that's like a [00:12:00] big element for me that I didn't, until he mentioned it, I didn't, I never really saw it. It just sort of popped it into focus. You know you need that in large organizations and small. Not just at the very top, but, you know, at every layer in the organization. And I think what that does is it, is this constant quest for greatness and meeting a high standard leads to this need to have a lower cost of change.

Check out the full episode here. It was jam-packed 30m. Editing it was a joy as I got to hear every word (a couple times).