Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Thank you, David and Jessica.

The next speaker is John Smart. I met him in 2016 when he headed up the ways of working at Barclays, an organization founded in the year 1634, which predates the invention of paper cash.

In his role, John had an amazing reputation of doing things in a way very different than the traditional norms inside of an organization that has one of the most highly evolved bureaucracies on the planet, having had centuries to perfect itself.

I mentioned in my opening remarks that his definition of DevOps, of better value, sooner, safer, and happier, is one of my favorite definitions, and I'm so delighted that this phrase has been uttered so many times on the DevOps Enterprise stage, showing just how impactful his work has been on this community.

This is one of the many reasons why I'm so happy that he's on the programming committee of this conference.

"Sooner, Safer and Happier" is also the title of his amazing new book coming out next month. It's a fantastic book, and I think it fills some now obvious gaps in the management literature. And holy cow, I so much admire the quote from Dave Snowden on his book cover.

He is now partner of Business Agility at Deloitte, and I'm so excited to have him share his perspectives on what we now require from both technology and business leaders. Please welcome John Smart.

Jonathan Smart

Frustrated. Tearful. Demoralized. Miserable. Scared. Frightened. Roadblocked. Alone.

Hi, my name's John, and I'm going to talk today about behavior and how it is the biggest lever for better outcomes. Specifically, how leadership behavior is the biggest lever for better value, sooner, safer, and happier.

This talk is aimed at leaders at all levels. This is not about other people as leaders. This is about you as a leader. So this talk is for you, and it's for leaders at all levels. And in this talk, I'm going to share some anti-patterns and patterns for leading for better outcomes.

First of all, let's have a look at what's going on here and what has changed. So unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that the world of work has fundamentally changed.

We've gone from the age of oil and mass production. This is the Ford factory in Detroit. This is around about 1910, 1920. We've come from the age of oil and mass production. This is what organized human endeavor used to be predominantly. It was mass producing identical widgets, identical things. It could be making wheels for the car, making a gas tank, or a petrol tank for the car. It was repetitive work, and it was knowable. If something went wrong, you knew how to fix it.

Now, we've gone from the age of oil and mass production to the age of digital. And in using these words, I'm quoting Carlota Perez, who wrote about the 50 to 60-year repeating cycles of technology-led revolution. In the age of digital, this is like going from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. We have new tools. We have a new means of production. And this work is unique. It is not repetitive. It is knowledge work, and it is unknowable.

When writing software, you don't write the same software 100,000 times on an assembly line. You write it once. The computer runs it 100,000 times. Every time you write software, it's unique. Whenever we create a technology, an information technology product, it's unique. Whenever you install that information technology product, even if it's a big vendor system, that is still a unique environment. The work is fundamentally unknowable, and it involves collaboration.

In the Detroit factory, in Ford, in the early 1900s, more than 50 languages were spoken. The reason that didn't matter was because people were not speaking to each other. They didn't need to have a common language when you're doing the same task day in and day out. Clearly, as you can see in these photos now, collaboration is super important.

The pace of change is getting faster. So this was a survey, 3,300 people were asked the question, what's the difference between a digital environment and a traditional one? The number one answer is the pace of business, its speed, its rate of change. The number two answer was culture, mindset, learning, risk-taking. The number three answer was flexible working, collaboration, and transparency, people collaborating and working together. And the fourth answer was productivity and continuous improvement. So the world has got faster.

In terms of the 14th State of Agile Report, which came out in May 2020, yet again, it finds that culture is the biggest challenge to better ways of working. Four of the top five reasons are behavioral. Reason number one as the biggest challenge is general organizational resistance to change. Reason number two is not enough leadership participation. Number three, organization culture is at odds with Agile values. And inadequate management support and sponsorship at number four. So again, four of the top five impediments to better ways of working are behavioral.

So in this talk, we're going to look at some common anti-patterns and patterns. I like this language around anti-patterns and patterns because there is no one size fits all. For emergent work, there's no such thing as best practice. However, there are approaches which will give you a tailwind, and there are approaches which will give you a headwind. The anti-patterns will give you a headwind. They will make it harder for you to be more successful. The patterns will give you a tailwind, and they will make it easier, on the whole. Your mileage may vary.

So if we look at these anti-patterns, I'm going to talk about first one, do as I say, not as I do. The second one is psychologically unsafe. The third one is a deterministic mindset. And then the corresponding patterns are leaders go first, psychological safety, and an emergent mindset. So I'm going to look at each of these in turn.

Before we do that, let's just look at what and who is a leader. What does that word really mean? Now, I found this quite fascinating. I looked into the origins of the word lead, and it comes from Old English and Proto-Germanic, and it means to guide and to travel. So it means to guide on a journey, and I really like the fact that that's the origins of the word lead. It's not sending someone off packing on a journey. Tell me when you get there, send me a postcard. It's guiding on a journey. It's going on the same journey as other people. So I really love that the origins of the word are around guiding on a journey and accompanying.

Interestingly, there is nothing about the origins of the word lead to do with command or commit or order. When you look at the origins of the word command, the origins come from two words, commit and mandate. It's a fundamentally different word. So I think it's really interesting to look at the difference between commanding and leading.

So if we were to take a commander on the left, commander is a position. It's for a few. If you're in that position, you can be a commander. You can be the commander in chief. You give orders. The obeying of the order is mandatory. There is extrinsic motivation. What that means is motivation to comply is outside of yourself. You feel that you have to do it because it's mandatory. And what that means is you don't have the inbuilt desire to see that through, and you may do things which you feel are unethical because you've been ordered to do it. And power is positional.

However, if you look at a leader, leader is about a behavior and a mindset. Anybody can be a leader, and there are leaders at all levels. And a leader listens. Listens to people actively, inspires people with the mission and the vision, collectively bringing together the vision, and informs and keeps people informed as to the journey. Following is voluntary, and motivation is intrinsic. Because I am voluntarily following somebody, because they are inspiring, keeping me up to date, and they're listening to me, I'm choosing to follow that person, so therefore, I have internal motivation, and I'm far more likely to have a successful outcome when I'm doing it because I'm choosing to do it. And power is given by followers. Power is not innate.

Commander and leader are not mutually exclusive. A commander can be a leader, and a leader sometimes, for example, when in danger or in chaos, may dip into being a commander. However, in modern ways of working, in the pivot from the age of oil and mass production, where it was very much around managers and workers, and very much around being a commander, being a foreman or a worker, taking the orders. Now, people need to be more of a leader and less of a commander.

And in terms of the goal, the goal here around outcomes, it's not about Agile, Lean, or DevOps. The goal is not Agile, Lean, or DevOps for their own sake. They are a means to an end. They're not the end. The goal is delivering better value, sooner, safer, happier. The goal is delivering improved outcomes where Agile, Lean, and DevOps are bodies of knowledge to improve the outcomes.

So if we take a quick look at better, value, sooner, safer, happier. Better is quality, and this is building quality in, not knowingly passing a quality issue down the line. Value is the reason you're in business. It's the organized human endeavor. It's why you're doing what you're doing. It could be revenue. It could be market share. It could be diversity. It could be carbon emissions. Sooner is lead time, throughput, and flow efficiency. It's time to learning, time to de-risk, time to monetize. It's throughput, the number of items of value. It's trying to get the most value in the shortest amount of time. And flow efficiency is the amount of time that work is being worked on versus work is waiting. For me, flow efficiency is one of the most important measures, and it's probably one of the least measured measures in organizations. Safer is continuous compliance. It's Agile, not fragile. It's InfoSec. It's data privacy. It's governance, risk, and control. It's making sure that everything is safe and that customers will trust you with their data and their information. And then happier is happier colleagues, customers, citizens, and climate because it is not at any cost to society or to the planet in terms of improving outcomes.

So now we're going to move on to the anti-patterns, and we're going to take a look at each of the three in turn.

Early on in my career, I was a project manager, and the boss I had at the time was someone who did not take bad news well. He was very much shoot the messenger. And as time went on, I found myself burying bad news of whether it was about timescale or cost overruns time and time again, to the extent it got so bad that there was one piece of information I couldn't share with him prior to the project review board. I felt I had to shield myself from his anger by telling him the news in the public forum.

It's a culture that's not just disempowering but also massively negatively impactful to the work you do as well. So you end up in a position where you as an individual aren't comfortable, the team are unhappy, and ultimately in a client environment, the client can sense that the customer cannot be satisfied if the colleagues aren't satisfied. Where do you end up? You end up with a negative spiral and the team disbanded. The entire piece of work collapsed, not through the individual lack of capability of any of the team members, but rather because the team itself imploded.

The first anti-pattern is do as I say, not as I do. This is where a leader sits around a table with their arms crossed saying, "Go on then, transform. I dare you." And I've seen this multiple times at organizations where a leader, or a commander maybe more accurately, or a leadership team, are expecting their own area, their own followers, they're expecting them to change how they work, and they're expecting them to change how they behave. However, they're not exhibiting that behavior. They're not role modeling. They're not walking the talk. And that is very clear to people, that lack of authenticity. So this is an anti-pattern to expect other people to change and then for you as a leader to not change yourself. So as we'll see in the patterns, there's a need to lean in and exhibit courage and vulnerability.

To quote Frederic Laloux, who is the author of "Reinventing Organizations," "The level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed the level of consciousness of its leader." So what tends to happen is if you have a leader at a certain level in an organization who is a leader rather than a commander, a transformational leader, and they're supporting their team and adopting better ways of working, as per this picture, you'll have a bubble of better ways of working surrounded by a sea of previous traditional ways of working. So it is really, really important that it's the most senior leadership team possible is embracing better ways of working so that that bubble covers more of the organization rather than just a part of it.

Anti-pattern number two is psychologically unsafe. This is a culture of fear. So we saw at the beginning, Deepwater Horizon, just one month before that tragic accident, before that disaster, more than half of the workers surveyed said there was a fear of reprisal for reporting an unsafe situation. We also saw the Space Shuttle disasters. In both of those cases, 17 years apart, engineers knew there was an issue, tried to escalate that issue, and failed and were quashed. And in the second case, were actually told to stop escalating this issue having tried six times. So there was no listening, and it was a psychologically unsafe environment, and their findings said that the same culture had continued between the two disasters.

Another case in point is Boeing. So looking at the US House Committee 737 Max preliminary report from March 2020, what it says in there from an internal Boeing 2016 survey is that 39% of employees surveyed perceived undue pressure. 29% of the employees surveyed were concerned about the consequences of reporting that undue pressure. So there was fear. There was a culture of fear. There was a culture of concealment, according to the report, and there was a disturbing picture of cultural issues, according to the US House committee. And those pressures came through cost and schedule, unfortunately, at the expense of safety so it seems.

Anti-pattern number three is a deterministic mindset. So deterministic mindset is treating the world like it is fixed and knowable. This is back to the age of oil and mass production. This is a thinking error. This is trying to treat the age of digital and complex adaptive systems and emergent work like it is predictable. It is a think big, start big, learn slow approach. It doesn't work. It is misapplying a way of working to the current environment. And it's the continuation of milestones and RAG status along with the culture of fear.

And nobody expects the agile imposition. Unfortunately, the agile imposition with a traditional mindset is fairly common. And it shouldn't be. So this is a deterministic mindset of inflicting agile ways of working, agile, lean or DevOps upon an organization in a command and control, commander, top-down, traditional mindset. Clearly, that is an anti-pattern. Unfortunately, a far too common anti-pattern.

So now on to the patterns.

Okay, so working on a piece of work that we decided to work on it together, which meant that we had to find that time together, and we sat down and brainstormed it. And there was a real feeling of understanding that I knew the detail, but being able to position it together meant that we delivered a higher quality piece of work in what turned out to be, between us, a shorter period of time, which was a much more valuable experience for me, for my leader, and for the organization I was working for.

I remember being on a team as a leader where I was pretty demoralized for a while, and a new leader stepped in during this time. And before that, every time I had mentioned that I was not happy, there was a lot of talk that, "If you need to go, we hate to lose you, but we understand." This new leader stepped in, and without having all the background and the context, all he noticed was that I was a good worker and I was an effective leader. And when he finally found out that I was somebody who was looking to possibly leave the group, he went out of his way to create a position where I could actually have an impact where I was, because he really proved to me that he did not want to lose me as a team member, and he really made me feel as if I was an impact on the organization. I really appreciated that.

So in more recent work, I've benefited from having an empowering, visionary leader, who seeks to allow colleagues and teams to thrive, who actively seeks to serve the needs of team members, is adaptive, and is someone who actively shows an interest in both the individual, their happiness, their wellbeing, almost their employee net promoter score, and in response, gains a willing, enthused, capable, connected, empowered colleague.

As I've progressed through my career, I've got a better idea of what good leadership looks like, I think. And one of my more recent bosses was incredibly supportive. He made me feel I could discuss absolutely anything with him. And I think one of the ways he did this was every single one-to-one he started with, "How can I help you?" He just said that, "How can I help you?" Once we got some lovely pleasantries out the way, he said, "How can I help you?" And that powerful statement made me realize that actually, between he and I, we could solve whatever pressing points were there, and that he was there to really bounce ideas off and support me and really help me move forward. I respected him, so I did come to him with problems, and he did give me different perspectives. But at the end of the day, he indicated by his behaviors and his words that the decision was mine. And really, I grew under his leadership so much more than I have under many of my other bosses. It really was. It made me feel great, supported, and I've taken a lot of his practices into my leadership practice as well.

So pattern number one is leaders go first. So this is role modeling the desired behavior. This is exhibiting courage and vulnerability, because for new ways of working, it is difficult. It is fearful. It's about needing to redevelop mastery. There's a need to unlearn and relearn, and that is uncomfortable, and that is difficult. So it does require courage, and it does require exhibiting vulnerability. And it is so important for you as a leader to role model that for people who are following you. You'll get things wrong, and that's part of this journey. In an emergent domain, in the age of digital, there's a need for experimentation. There is a need to feel safe to fail. So it's super important to role model the desired behaviors.

Pattern number two is psychological safety. Google, with Project Aristotle, studied what makes teams amazing. And the number one factor for high-performing teams was psychological safety. What that means is the ability for people to say, "I don't know. I'm not sure," or, "Yeah, I'll jump in and I'll give it a go, but I might fail." That was a bigger determinant for high-performing teams than who was on the team.

Amy Edmondson has written a book called "The Fearless Organization" on this, and Amy's advice to increase psychological safety is a three-step process. First of all, set the stage. People will be conditioned to not bringing up bad news. So make it clear that it's not about personal blame, that it is about the system of work. Second, invite participation. Actively seek feedback, because again, people will not want to deliver bad news if they've been shot in the past, or if the messenger has been shot and the bad news has been buried. So invite participation. And then number three is to respond well. So active feedback to the feedback and to people opening up, thanking people for their feedback and being seen to take action on that feedback.

So this is really important. Again, where work is emergent, there is a need to experiment, and therefore there is a need to fail. There is a need for intelligent failure. There's a need for experimentation, and it isn't really failing. You don't really fail an experiment, you learn from it, and it's about maximizing learning.

So on intelligent failure, these pictures, this is SpaceX. This is a Falcon 9 rocket deliberately being destroyed in order to test the launch escape process for the Crew Dragon capsule. And this, I think, is a great example of intelligent failure. This is deliberately destroying a craft to test its safety. And this is what we should be having more of, more intelligent failure. And as a leader, celebrating intelligent failure with a limited impact radius and safe to fail. One organization I know has a failure wall. In the past, we've run awards and we've celebrated intelligent failure through awards.

And pattern number three is an emergent mindset. So again, back to repetitive work versus unique work. There's a need for experimentation. There's a need for learning. There's a need for failing. And so an emergent mindset doesn't try to predict the future. Now, that doesn't mean there's no planning. It doesn't mean there's no roadmap. It doesn't mean there's no fixed dates, because there are. There is a roadmap. There is a vision. However, it's not a fixed solution in 24 months' time. It's an outcome hypothesis. It's an articulation of the future. It's a hypothesis that people can get behind. So for example, it could be we want the most delighted customers, compared to our competitors. We want to be the number one firm for what it is that we do.

So you have your outcome hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis and you break it down. You have a nested breadcrumb trail of outcome hypotheses, and you experiment. You amplify the experiments that work, and you dampen the experiments that don't work, and you celebrate learning. And this is with empowerment, with multidisciplinary teams who are empowered to experiment, to try to maximize their outcomes. And this is where happiness goes up. Because people have got a very clear purpose. There's high alignment, there's high autonomy, and this is where there's so much more purpose and satisfaction in work.

And there's this tweet, which I really like, from Emily Campbell, which is, "What if we called them supporting lines instead of reporting lines? Imagine replacing lines like 'These are my direct reports' with 'These are the people I directly support.'" And I love that. I really, really like the sentiment behind that. And this is about being more of a servant leader.

The leader part is there is a need to coalesce around the vision, around the mission, around the outcome hypothesis. That's the leader part. And the leader part is also, in terms of guiding on the journey, it's encouraging people to experiment. It's encouraging people to adopt new ways of work. It's encouraging improvement. And I highly recommend looking at "The Toyota Improvement Kata" and "The Toyota Coaching Kata" in terms of building improvement into daily work, where improvement is as important or more important than daily work.

The servant part is being there to support the teams and being there to help clear the impediments and the blockers and literally running up to the team saying, "Dear team, how can I help?" Being there for the teams, with the supporting lines.

So to recap, if you want better value sooner, safer, and happier, there is a need to focus on a few things. The first one is to go first, to guide on the journey, to lead, to role model, to have courage and vulnerability.

The second one is to foster psychological safety. People need to be able to experiment. I've seen one part of an organization where it was a mandate around ways of working. There was no psychological safety. There was a culture of fear, and people did the bare minimum they needed to do in order to comply to the commander's orders. And not surprisingly, the outcomes didn't shift. They didn't actually get any better.

And third is around leveraging emergence. Don't try to force everything into a Gantt chart with milestones and a fixed plan and a fixed solution, fixed at the point of knowing the least. Instead, emergence can help you to add more value more quickly. Maintain optionality for as long as you possibly can. Run experiments, because we don't know what we don't know.

Inspired. Reassured. Empowering. Trusted. Confident. Rewarded. Nurturing. Excited.

So you just heard there how people feel when they have good leaders leading them for better outcomes. And personally, I believe that leadership is how you leave people feeling.

So here's the help that I'm looking for. I'd like to hear shared stories of anti-patterns and patterns. So what have you seen in your organization or other organizations which generally haven't worked and generally have worked? What you've seen, but also your own experiences as well. And I'm also interested in case studies, as I know Gene is as well. So we'd love to hear case studies of where perhaps at an organization, part of an organization or the whole organization, there's a case study here of where leaders have adopted better behaviors leading to better outcomes. And hopefully as well, these will be talks for next year at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Thank you.