Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Explore our extensive library of experience reports.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
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.
Weekly discussion around “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” with author John Willis.
VIRTUAL — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
Venue: Fontainebleau — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
August 3, 2021
So, you’re in an organization, running up against bureaucratic impediments when you try to do what you’re pretty sure is the right thing. Perhaps you’re leading a digital transformation and your company’s bureaucracy is resisting change, fighting to lock in ways of doing things that belong to the days before the Paleolithic era. You’re up against a vast leviathan of a bureaucracy. What should you do?
Like many business and technology authors, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff based on my limited research—stuff that seemed more or less to work with a sample size of one—and try to write it in a way that sounds compelling. I already know that putting it into a book is going to give it more authority, plus you’ll have cognitive dissonance if you paid to read it, so you’ll tend to believe what I say. Since I want to help you succeed, I’m going to let you in on my secrets and idiosyncratic behaviors that were probably effective. I think, maybe. There, that’s my disclaimer, in case your bureaucracy fails to bust.
I think the plays in this playbook are sensible and will make a good starting point for your own experiments. If you’re sitting with your head in your hands, overwhelmed by metaphysical pathos, and can’t figure out what to do next, try some of these tricks. But if, say, play B13: Hunt Monkeys doesn’t solve your problems, don’t think you’re some exception to a technique that’s been working for every master bureaucracy buster in the world. The most important thing I have to teach you is the importance of banging your head against the wall, repeatedly, until the wall starts to move. It worked for me.
Next, I suggest keeping a sense of humor, even when the stakes are high. Even Moby Dick has some funny chapters. Can you think of a single comedian who has had their digital transformation derailed by stubborn bureaucrats? No, you can’t. My suggestion throughout this book has been that you stop doing the metaphysical pathos thing. The bureaucrats in your way are probably trying earnestly to do their jobs. The crazy stuff that’s blocking you was put there for very good reasons. You have to show that (1) those reasons are no longer important, or (2) that there are better ways to satisfy those reasons, or (3) that while those reasons are good, there are more important considerations that override them.
Ultimately, fixing bureaucracy has to come down to those three things. Yes, you can make a little progress riding in with noisy urgency around “bureaucracy busting.” You can also get some things done with just your charisma and some impressive-sounding certifications after your name. But in an organization where people really do care about results, about mission accomplishment, you’ll eventually stumble if you aren’t replacing the bureaucracy with something even better.
Everyone knows it’s important to surround yourself with good people. So, I’ll introduce you to three of my assistants who can help with your bureaucracy-surmounting efforts: the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Please take them as seriously as they merit. For an encore, I’m going to show you how to forge your own bureaucracy, making good use of spherical cows and unobtanium, minus the metaphysical pathos. Have fun.
Next: The Way of the Monkey
Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.
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