Gene: You use the Cynefin model to frame a picture of everything from known knowns to unknown unknowns. What about this model is essential to the necessary mindset shift and business success in the digital age? Jon: I find Cynefin, a sense-making model, to be a great frame of reference for optimizing the approach to the work, to the domain of the work. Cynefin articulates five domains. Within the Clear domain, there are known-knowns. There is best practice.The relationship between cause and … [Read more...]
Leading through Better Value Sooner Safer Happier
Gene Kim Interviews Jonathan Smart, author of Sooner Safer Happier (Part 1) Gene Kim: Why Better Value Sooner Safer Happier? What about those five words is so revolutionary. Jonathan Smart: The world of work has fundamentally changed. We are living through a tipping point in the latest of a succession of technology-led revolutions, which have a socio-economic impact. We’ve gone from the Age of Oil and Mass Production to the Age of Digital. Like going from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, we … [Read more...]
Happier Employees Equal Better Business Outcomes
Two Simple Questions for Better Business Outcomes Two questions I ask during 1-on-1s might strike people as a bit unusual, but they directly lead to better business outcomes: Are you happy? Are you able to do work that you’re proud of? Why? A core reason is that I care about the people I work with, and I want good things for them. I want them to be happy! When I learn there are obstacles to their happiness, we generally have a productive conversation about what can be changed. My conceit is … [Read more...]
24 Key Capabilities to Drive Improvement in Software Delivery
This post is adapted from an excerpt of Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Our research, based on four years of the State of DevOps Report, has uncovered 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance in a statistically significant way. The book Accelerate details these findings. This post provides you with a handy list of these capabilities. We have classified these capabilities into five categories. Within each category, the … [Read more...]
The Five Ideals of DevOps
In The Phoenix Project, we introduced the Three Ways underpinning DevOps. In my follow-up book, The Unicorn Project, I revisit Parts Unlimited and describe my learnings through the Five Ideals. The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus These are five topics that I’ve constantly gravitated toward over the last decade, and I continually seek to … [Read more...]
Common DevOps Myths
Adapted from The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis. Myth—DevOps is Only for Startups While DevOps practices have been pioneered by the web-scale, Internet “unicorn” companies such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Etsy, each of these organizations has, at some point in their history, risked going out of business because of the problems associated with more traditional “horse” organizations: highly dangerous code releases that were prone to catastrophic … [Read more...]
The Idealcast: Dispatch from the Scenius with Elisabeth Hendrickson
We’re so excited that The Idealcast, IT Revolution’s and Gene Kim’s first podcast, has been met with such a warm and enthusiastic response. This week we’re releasing our fourth episode, the second in our Dispatch from the Scenius series, featuring Elisabeth Hendrickson’s two foundational DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations on feedback loops. You’ve likely heard Gene talk about the scenius before, a term coined by Brian Eno that refers to the collective intelligence of a whole operation or … [Read more...]
Gene Kim interviews Agile Conversations authors Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick
Gene: Are we really that bad at talking to one another, and why do you think that is? Squirrel & Jeffrey: Actually, we are really skillful at having conversations! We are proficient at concealing our real thoughts, saving face for ourselves and others, and avoiding awkward questions. Unfortunately this defensive approach undermines learning and cooperation, and so produces results quite different than what we intend. This combination of effortless behavior and the wrong outcomes is … [Read more...]
Love Letter to Conferences (And What Makes Some Truly Amazing)
TL;DR: I share everything I’ve learned about what makes my favorite conference experiences so great and meaningful, and try to understand which elements are universal, applying to both physical and virtual events, and which ones can be changed. I share the experiences of having run an incredible three-day virtual event for 50 people, and share why I’m now incredibly confident that we’ll be able to replicate the magic of the best conferences at the upcoming Virtual DevOps Enterprise Summit—our … [Read more...]
Announcing my new podcast, The Idealcast with Gene Kim
Hello, everyone — I’m so pleased to announce the launch of my podcast, The Idealcast! On The Idealcast, I interview people I admire and have learned the most from, on topics I’m most passionate about — and you can learn with me. Each episode is typically around 90 minutes, where I ask some of the best experts in our community things I’ve wondered about for years. I am currently on a quest to understand the relationship between leadership, how organizations work, and how they can either create … [Read more...]
