Host Intro (Damon Edwards, John Willis, and Jeff Gallimore)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. It is day two, and we're ready for some more lightning talks.

Damon, did you change your shirt from yesterday?

I did. I washed the clothes, and yeah, I'm not wearing the same thing as I was yesterday.

Oh, it's fresh. There we go.

Locked down, but not that locked down.

Yes. So John, we've got Rosalind Radcliffe and Josh Atwell. What did you find interesting about this pairing?

Yeah, for those who saw her in Vegas, Rosalind's amazing diversity Ignite, it was great. And so she sort of doubled down with the quality, and she's going to be great. And Josh is always amazing, so this will again be a treat for everybody.

Yeah. So here we go, next pair of lightning talks, DevOps Enterprise Virtual Summit.

Rosalind Radcliffe

Hello. My name is Rosalind Radcliffe, and I'm happy to be here again with you to do the lightning talks.

Last year I did one on women in STEM. This year it's all about expanding the aperture to diversity overall.

What is diversity? Diversity encompasses race, gender, ethnic group, age, personality, education, socioeconomic status, and many other factors. Diversity is what makes us different.

Diverse teams perform better. So why diversity? Diverse teams perform better both in the team and in the overall organization. So having this diversity gives you a better understanding of your client, allows you to understand the users of your products because you have a better representation of the world at large. Having that diversity gives you that better understanding.

It drives that innovation and creativity because you have the different thoughts, you have the different perspectives coming from people with different backgrounds, and they drive that creativity. It is easier to hire and retain talent if you have this creative culture within the organization. People want to work for diverse organizations. They want to work in an organization that they feel they're going to belong, and this increases employee engagement, which then improves the overall reputation of the company within the industry. And this helps the company in many different ways. It improves the insights and reduces racism within the company and within the organization by having people work together and see the differences between people, recognize and value the differences between people. And fundamentally, diverse companies have better financial results. So the bottom line says diversity matters.

If diversity matters, what should we do, and how can we deal with it? First, we have to be intentional and inclusive. We have to recognize that diversity matters and be inclusive in our process. Bring people together, working together to deliver value. We need to seek out those different mindsets, those different ways of thinking, bring them together to drive this growth and innovation, to drive the change within the company, and have accountability for this change. You have to change to recognize that you need diversity to bring it into the culture and have accountability for that to ensure it happens.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable for a while. You need to recognize that this diversity does cause discussion. It does cause some amount of conflict, but that is good because it drives the creativity. This expands your talent pool because you can hire from the entire base. You're not limited to the set you're looking at today. Look at different universities. Look at a broader spectrum of people to see who's available, and we need to look at the entire spectrum. We have enough of a problem with the college graduates as it is. We need to figure out how to broaden this aperture to look for all the possible candidates and improve the process.

"It is policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent, and background necessary to fill a given job regardless of race, color, or creed." What year was this written? 1953, 11 years before the Civil Rights Act, by Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM Company.

Being in a company that recognizes that diversity matters from the very beginning drives innovation. And this is a simple list of things that IBM has done, including hiring disabled candidates, making sure we have a diverse population, and that's helped us drive the innovation. We founded the P-TECH program to bring education, STEM education, into high schools in socioeconomically challenged areas across the world to drive STEM.

This culture of diversity and inclusion drives innovation. It has allowed IBM to be what IBM is today. It's allowed us to transform every time we've needed to transform. Now it's your turn.

Thank you.

Josh Atwell

Hi. My name is Josh Atwell, and I'm really excited to be here to talk to you about something I think is incredibly important in supporting our fellow DevOps journey people, and it's addressing shaming.

Now, you may be someone who's said such things like, "That's not DevOps," or, "If you're building a DevOps team, that's not really how DevOps is supposed to work," "You don't understand SRE." And these types of phrases are not really constructive.

I think Jennifer Henry says something really important, in that the definition of DevOps changes continually because it's defined by outcomes and not as methodology. And I think we have to keep that deeply in mind when we look at people's journeys.

But let's ask a question. Why are people shaming other people on their DevOps journey? Is it self-entitlement? Is it simply a lack of empathy and understanding that other people are at different stages? Or is it a desire to help others see the error of their ways?

We have to keep in mind that shame has negative consequences. It closes a person down, and it disconnects them from the community. They become hesitant to share, and they may develop trust issues as a result of that shame. These are all common things, right?

And let's face it, shaming people is not very DevOps-y, right? It's exclusive behavior, and we want inclusivity, right? We want to bring everyone together in order to move everything forward. That's why we're all here at DevOps Enterprise Summit.

We also have to keep in mind that if we're not engaging positively, who is going to be engaging positively? And what messages are they going to send people along their journey? They may not have that person's best interest in mind and may be focused on something completely different.

Now, Ben Haynes had commented recently that we are really early. We're in the cave-painting age of digital, right? So we are really, really early in DevOps. Even though we're 10 years forward, most organizations are still trying to get a handle on it, right? And some haven't even started yet, right? Because not everyone has been disrupted, modernization hasn't been critical, although with recent world activities, it has become more critical, and the risk of inaction for most people has been really, really low.

It's also important to keep in mind that the first steps are really the hardest in adopting a new methodology or framework for working. Everybody has worked in specific ways, a certain way, a very long time, and those first steps in learning anything is difficult.

Also, while it's wonderful hearing all the great outcomes of organizations adopting DevOps, there's a lot of unknowns, and that destination feels really, really far away, and there's a lot of work to be had in order to get there.

So keep in mind that everyone's situation is different. The applications that they build vary. The customer expectations vary. The platforms and the services that they're able to consume are different. The personnel that they have are different.

So when talking with people about DevOps, make sure you align your language to the outcomes to avoid the shaming. Demonstrate empathy, because that creates a common point of view and helps people move forward in the conversation.

So as such, here's an example. If we think about development as a race car, they want to go fast, and they want to be able to iterate and get that lap fast every single time. Now, in order to do that, they need a stable racetrack, right?

So your developers are in a race car. Your operations side and your infrastructure folks, or maybe your cloud operations people, they're involved with making sure that the application, the race car, has somewhere to drive that is stable and has structure underneath that is supported. Your DevOps engineering team may be specifically tasked with creating the surface that the developers are working, right? They're going to optimize that surface through the implementation of tools so that that track can move as quickly as possible. They're also the pit crew.

And then you have the SRE team who are making sure that that developer can race that race quickly and safely, because without stability, that speed can be a liability and can be very dangerous. So using a common context and using this as an example, you can see how there's really no right or wrong answer. Everybody is actually working together to come to the exact same outcome.

So think about that when you're looking at another person's journey. It's also really important to maintain pragmatism. I think we get lost in that in our excitement to move things forward. But when we look at the journey of other people, we need to be pragmatic about what their outcomes are and the challenges that they're facing, right, instead of telling them that they have to rewrite everything.

So practice empathy, be respectful and mindful of constraints, and be a journey guide, helping people through the steps of their journey. And remember the rule of opinions: everybody's entitled to one, but it doesn't necessarily want to be heard by everyone.

With that, thank you, and enjoy the DevOps Enterprise Summit.

Closing Remarks (Gene Kim)

I hope you had an amazing day two, and we have an incredible program for you tomorrow as well. We have Jon Smart presenting his incredible insights on how leadership has changed, and this is explored in his amazing new book, Sooner Safer Happier.

Paul McMahon and Kim Dempsey will speak from Coats, an organization founded in the year 1755. And I'll share an amazing panel I did with Dr. Carlotta Perez, who Sam Guckenheimer mentioned earlier in his remarks today, and also with Dr. Mik Kersten on the upcoming age of software and Dr. Carlotta Perez's incredible optimistic view of the future. And Peter Moore will teach us about the three horizons and zone management, both of which were featured prominently in The Unicorn Project. And Peter Fassbender and Carsten Spiess will share their amazing experience report of a Horizon 3 digital initiative at Siemens Healthineers.

So as with yesterday, I'm looking forward to seeing all of you tonight during all of the fantastic networking sessions. So I will see you there and catch you for more amazing programming tomorrow. Thank you.

Closing Remarks (Jeff Gallimore)

Another great day of the DevOps Enterprise Summit is in the books. Please, please, please get your session feedback in for the sessions that you attended. Feedback is a gift and sharing is caring. We really want to hear from you.

We have the session slides and the videos available. The videos of the keynote talks for today and yesterday are available now. The videos of all the breakout talks for all three days are also available. The slides are available for download on Dropbox and GitHub.

And just like yesterday, we have another happy hour. To get the info for that, navigate to Network in the top-level menu and connect with attendees, sponsors, and authors. We have more IT Revolution authors hosting Ask Me Anything sessions. Some of our sponsors are hosting tables at the happy hour, and then we also have a general happy hour.

I mentioned that the IT Revolution authors are hosting Ask Me Anything sessions. Check out the general channel in Slack to figure out which authors those are. And just like yesterday, we've got a lesson that we can learn from donuts and croissants. When you're having your discussions tonight and you're engaging with other attendees in conversation, don't be closed off like a donut. Be open to new participation and new conversation like a croissant. So the lesson I leave you with is: don't be a donut. Have a lot of fun at the happy hour, and I'll see you soon.