Gene Kim

Good morning. Good morning.

Welcome to day two. How was last night? Did everyone have a good time last night? Awesome. Fantastic.

I have to say thank you to everyone for this moment yesterday. I'll show you what I saw from stage. Uh-oh. Well, imagine a picture of 2,000 people wearing unicorn hats, staring at you and applauding. It was such a surprise to me, and it will truly be a memory that I will treasure forever. And so, thanks to my wife and boss, Marguerite Kim, CEO of IT Revolution, who pulled that off. I honestly had no idea what was going on. So thank you to all of you.

So that was a surreal moment, but maybe not as surreal as this. Big, scary unicorn. So I screamed, and it turns out that it was my buddy Eric Ledyard. Not so long ago, he was a recovering SVP at a large bank, and now he's running around in a unicorn outfit. That is a pretty strange world we live in. Seriously, congratulations for kicking butt at ServiceNow. Keep doing what you're doing, Eric. That was truly one of the most peculiar moments in my professional career.

Yesterday, in my introductory remarks, I described some of the goals that we have in the programming that we've created for you. Today, I'd like to just take a little bit of time to talk about specifically why we've created the talks and have them structured the way they are, and specifically around the experience reports, the business technology divide, and the expert talks.

You may have noticed that most of the talks are given in the form of experience reports. And the reason for this is my belief that, as adult learners, there's actually quite a bit of literature that says adult learners learn from hearing how people solve problems. We don't learn from people telling us what to do, especially what they think we should do. Right? And we actually learn less by classroom lectures, where we have classrooms, but more through experiential learning.

And so, what we love, I think what's been very effective, is when people say, "Here's a problem that I had. Here's why it mattered. Here's what I did. Here's the outcomes, and here's the problems that still remain." And that is indeed the experience format that we use for almost all of the talks and the sessions that aren't expert talks.

And so specifically, each one of the speakers are saying: What industry do we compete in? What is my role, and where do I fit in in the giant behemoth organization that I work within? What is the business problem that we set out to solve? Where do we start and why? What did we do, including tools and techniques? What were the outcomes? And here's the challenges that still remain.

And what I find so interesting is that this is actually very close to the scientific method, right? Where we state a hypothesis, we perform experiment, confirm or disprove the hypothesis, and repeat. So I think it's no wonder that this is so effective in terms of disseminating things that work or may not work. So that's why you hear talks given in this specific format.

The other thing I want to mention that has greatly affected the way we construct this conference, I think began all the way back at our first conference at DevOps Enterprise 2014. And what was so astonishing, and that was also a three-day conference, was there was such a universality to the problems that we face in large, complex organizations. Independent of company size, independent of the age of the organization, what industry we compete in, the problems are almost all the same.

And which actually should make sense, right? Because The Phoenix Project, I think, resonated with a great number of people, even though not every company is an automotive parts retailer. But there was a feeling that there was something genuinely exciting and momentous happening, that we were on a similar journey.

But what I did not appreciate until almost a year later was how much this community loves helping each other. And so, yesterday we got to see Heather Mickman from Optum open up day one. And it turns out she was actually the first speaker when she was a senior director of development at Target, presenting with her colleague Ross Clanton. And so yes, that was a phenomenal talk. It was an amazing set of experience reports that they gave over three years.

But the big surprise to me was the fact of what they did afterwards. So I got invited to this event at Target in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I heard it was for their internal executives. What I didn't know was that they had invited a significant number of the DevOps Enterprise speakers, too. It was from Courtney Kissler. She was back at Nordstrom back then. Johnny Wooldridge was from a British retailer. Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jason Cox from Disney.

And so what I found so astonishing was their goal was to replicate the DevOps Enterprise experience, but for their executives, and had been corresponding with their fellow travelers in order to do that. And I thought that was just one of many examples of how this community has been working together, helping each other achieve their goals, often from competing organizations. And I think 15, 20 years ago, that would've been unheard of. And so that's something that I just genuinely admire and appreciate.

And so I want to introduce to you a concept called scenius. Brian Eno is famous for many things. He's a record producer, a visual artist. He helped invent the sound for famous bands like U2, Devo, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and many more. But he's also credited for creating this term scenius.

And Kevin Kelly, who's famous for his work at Wired Magazine, quoted Eno. I'm quoting him: "Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, business, and policy advances. Breakthroughs instead come from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. Major innovation may indeed take a genius, but the genius is in part created by a scenius. It's the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by a scenius, you act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you."

And what I've found so remarkable is that there are specific characteristics of a great scenius. Mutual appreciation: risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety appreciated, friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. Certainly something we see in the DevOps Enterprise community.

Rapid exchange of tools and techniques: as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared, just like we see in every talk here at DevOps Enterprise. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. It's something, certainly we see this in this community.

And third, network effects of success: when a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthroughs erupt, the success is claimed not just by the individual, but the entire scene, and this empowers and propels the scene to further successes. And this is what I love so much about the achievements of this community. And I'm so honored to help chronicle and create the conditions for that within this conference.

Just one little side note. I think there's also a very strong similarity between the notion of scenius and what Dr. Thomas Kuhn wrote in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is the book that introduced the notion of paradigm shifts, inflection points. It describes that whenever a scientific revolution occurs, it looks like it was created by one person, whether it's Copernicus or Newton or Einstein. But it turns out that if you zoom in, there were actually many people working in the field, sometimes in competition, sometimes in cooperation. But in a moment, it's like a phase shift. Everyone went from believing one way, and then we shifted how we view the world.

So given one minute left. Skip. Ah.

So I will make this claim. For those of you who saw Dr. McKerson's talk over the years, he introduced us to the work of Dr. Carlota Perez. And she writes about the five ages of revolutions, each caused by the rapid and significant diminishing of cost of mode of production, and each one of them resulted in a new mode of management. So it's factory systems, subcontracting, Taylorism, Fordism, and I think the big question is what is next?

As we enter the age of software and digital, the question is what replaces our current modes of management? And my belief is, based on the work of this community and the work of experts that we brought in, it is really dynamic learning organizations.

And so it is without doubt for-- I have no doubt, I have moral certainty, that the people who are pioneering the practices that in 20, 30 years they will all take for granted are being pioneered here. It is the creation of these modern management modes done at industrial scale. So I think that's really the mission ahead of us in this community, and I applaud you all for that.

So with that, I'm going to invite out my buddy, Jeff Gallimore, to help take us into day two. Thank you.

Jeff Gallimore

Like the sun and the moon, all the best things come in twos. What would I do? Thanks, Gene.

Who had a great day one? Okay. Who's ready for a great day two? Okay, so more people are ready for a great day two than had a great day one. That's cool. We're on the upswing here.

There we go. Okay, who had a great time at the unicorn party last night? All right. Thank you to CloudBees again for sponsoring that. A lot of us got copies of The Unicorn Project. Now, I just qualified that. Some of you didn't have as great a time as you probably could've because you stood in a long line and you didn't get a book. We actually ran out of books and of time.

We had ordered a lot of books, thinking we were actually over-ordering. We ordered then even more books thinking that we were over-ordering still, and we still ran out. So Marguerite Kim, who's the CEO of IT Revolution, is working hard today to figure out how we can get some more books here so that the people who didn't get a book last night that stood in line can get a book before you all leave today. So stay tuned for that. Thank you.

So here was another great thing about the event last night. This is a picture that I took from the very back of the room. No donuts. Everybody was croissanting last night. It was wonderful.

Okay. Get those session evaluations in. Remember, sharing is caring. We've got the session slides available from yesterday on Dropbox and GitHub. Here are the links. They're also posted in Slack.

We have the networking time again today. Today is the last time that we're going to do this networking time with the Speakers' Corner, the Lean Coffee, and the Birds of a Feather. So if you didn't participate in particularly the Lean Coffee yesterday, do that today. The speakers, again, will be available up in the mezzanine, Chelsea Mezzanine, and then the Birds of a Feather is in the Belmont Corridor, which is to the right of the expo hall.

Great. We also have another opportunity tonight. Who's either seen or done a lightning talk? These are a blast. If you haven't seen these, these are amazing. They are 20 slides, five minutes, auto-advancing every 15 seconds. It's one of the hardest talk formats to deliver because you have no control over the slides and the advancing and the timing of that.

Sonatype is sponsoring that tonight. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be right here in the Chelsea. And then right after lightning talks, we're going to have book signings. So we're going to have a bunch of authors spread around Chelsea and out in the foyer who are going to be signing their books. It will be great.

Make sure you get a copy of that. Thanks to founding sponsor IT Revolution, our Platinum Plus sponsors, our Platinum Classic sponsors, our Gold sponsors, our Silver sponsors. Make sure that you learn about them and how they can help us in our journeys next door in the expo hall.

And while you're doing that, play the unicorn game. We had some winners yesterday. There were some really aggressive people who went right after finding all 23 unicorns and I think finished up in the morning. It was crazy and awesome at the same time. Get into the unicorn game, play that.

And then also on the back of your badges, there's the sponsor passport. As you're talking to our sponsors, get your badge stamped and then sign it, very important, and drop it off at the IT Revolution booth outside the expo hall. Remember, sponsors add sparkle.

And if you didn't get enough unicorns already, we still have the Unicorn Project offer. Here are the steps: order on barnesandnoble.com, bring your receipt to the IT Revolution or the merchandise booth outside the expo hall. And remember, the offer expires at noon tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, the 22 books, you don't have to carry them home. We will ship them to you. Yes. Yes, you can pre-order those. In fact, that's the only way that you can get them, other than Marguerite's heroics will be for today and tomorrow, I hope.

All right. Get ready for a great day two. Back to you, Gene.

Gene Kim

Thank you, Jeff.