Leaders Better Wiring Their Organization To Win

In my book, Wiring the Winning Organization, which I co-authored with Dr. Steve Spear, we focused on the need for leaders to wire their organization well.  It turns out that DevOps is just one way leaders enable people to do their work easily and well.

Here are three more amazing talks at the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in Vegas, August 20-22, that highlight some surprising other ways that leaders do this!

In the book, I wrote about how when my father had a stroke and was transferred to the neurology care ward. On the first morning, he was seen by various specialists during the daily rounds, which included neurologists, nurses, case managers, etc. They couldn’t decide whether to put him on blood thinners because the brain MRI images wouldn’t be available until later in the day.

When I heard this, I showed them a picture I had taken of the brain scans while shoulder-surfing the neurologist the previous evening (so I could send it to some of my doctor friends). I showed the doctors the photos on my phone, who studied the pictures and decided to prescribe blood thinners that day.

For years, I’ve been mystified by how and why this happened — despite all the technology and computers in the room, and all the investment in technologies across the healthcare system, why couldn’t the clinicians view the MRI images while they were with the patient?

David Wright, CEO, Disruptive Innovations: This unanswered question is why I was so delighted to meet David Wright, who specializes in helping hospitals deal with these types of problems.  He has seen similar scenarios play out countless times due to technical and organizational issues in healthcare — where people don’t have the information they need, when they need it, and where they need it. It is caused by a combination of Layer 3 organizational problems and Layer 2 technical problems.

In his presentation, David will describe what often goes wrong in hospital information systems, which prevent radiologists from doing their work and clinicians from getting access to them, which can drastically impact patient outcomes.  I so much appreciated the deep technical and organizational expertise needed to fix problems like this, which has lessons relevant to any large, complex organization — especially those that have grown by acquisitions.

Manuel Pais, co-author Team Topologies; Dr. Laura Weis, Head of Future of Work at Satalia: The book Team Topologies has helped so many leaders better understand how to wire their organizations, reducing cognitive load as one of the main objectives. Manuel and Laura will explore why and how cognitive load affects team health and performance.

Dr. Laura Weis will share the science and research behind these novel insights into team cognitive load, and Manuel Pais will share practical examples and approaches based on Team Topologies for leaders to keep team cognitive load in check, to create healthier, more engaged teams that deliver sustainable business results with adequate support and workplace environment.

Steve Smith, Head of Growth, Equal Experts: Internal software platforms have become a widely- adopted way to increase developer productivity and improve flow, often by liberating teams from having to manage and worry about the complexity of the underlying technology. Steve will share some startling, funny, and unfortunately, all too familiar problems that emerge when platform efforts go wrong.

I’ve seen many platform talks, but this one is very different. He provides concrete scenarios with a fantastic set of diagnostics for subtle problems and gives very practical advice on how to address the problems.

These are just some of the amazing talks that show how leaders are helping their organizations win — see you in Vegas in 25 days! More program details here!

Thanks to the incredible programming committee! Jason Cox, Cornelia Davis, Damon Edwards, Jeff Gallimore, Ben Grinnell FBCS, Tapabrata “Topo” Pal, Scott Prugh, Jonathan Smart, Amy Willard, Christina Yakomin

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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