Gene Kim

Fantastic. All right, so this next talk will be Dr. Steven Spear and me.

The goal of this talk is to share what we learned while writing Wiring the Winning Organization. Let's see here. So over the last three-plus years... Come join me, Steve. I'm going to introduce you. Get you that.

Fantastic. So, over the last three and a half years, I've had the privilege of working with Dr. Steven Spear on this quest that we've been on, trying to answer: why do organizations work in the way they do, both in the ideal and not ideal? And to answer the question of what is in common between Agile, DevOps, Lean, the Toyota Production System, and so much more.

And it has been an exhilarating, wild ride. So I thought it'd be fun in this session to describe our top learnings. I'm going to go for eight minutes, set the stage, share with you what my big aha moments were, and then I'll turn it over to Steve.

So really, the key was that there's this magic, whether it's in manufacturing... So let me introduce Steve. Steve is probably most famous for writing the most downloaded Harvard Business Review article of all time, called "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System." And that was based on his doctoral dissertation that he did at the Harvard Business School.

After that, he moved beyond just the high repetition of manufacturing to engine design at Pratt & Whitney, to helping build the safety culture at Alcoa, and so much more.

Our observation was, regardless of whether you talk about software or these other environments, there's this incredible magic of winning organizations that are somehow able to fully liberate people's creativity and problem-solving capabilities. And this is as opposed to those organizations that somehow constrain, or even extinguish entirely, that same problem-solving creativity.

That really comes down to: to what extent are leaders able to make it possible for their people to do their work easily and well? And this is what went into the book Wiring the Winning Organization, coming out in 2023.

One of the things I didn't mention was that I was so delighted that the foreword was actually written by Admiral John Richardson, who spoke earlier this morning.

So what were our top learnings?

One of the learnings was that all these things that we talked about, these different tools, whether it's the Toyota Production System, Team Topologies, DevOps, these are all incomplete expressions of a far greater whole. And we can explain what they do and why they work in three ways.

Without a doubt, this project has been the most intellectually challenging project I've ever worked on, but also the most rewarding. In fact, there was a point about a year ago where I felt that Steve and I were stuck. This is during the summer, and I felt like we just couldn't come up with a model that was truly simple, that demonstrated the principles that we were writing about.

I told my boss, my wife, Marguerite, that I was going to go on a walk on the beach, and I wasn't going to come back until it was clear in my head. And so, six miles later, I was convinced that I wasn't smart enough to understand what Steve was trying to explain to me, or I didn't understand software well enough.

And in this quest of trying to come up with a simple scenario, I learned that I didn't understand movie theater operations or restaurant operations. And it's a very interesting feeling to feel like you're not smart enough to finish a project that you started.

That's what led to building a scenario that was an extension of a scenario that we had written earlier to explore what coordination cost looks like around moving and painting. And so that led to the moving-a-couch vignette, where Steve and Gene try to move a couch. That's really a metaphor for joint problem solving.

Regardless of domain, eventually, at some point, you have people who often need to work together. That requires communication and coordination. And that led to the second metaphor of Steve and Gene trying to move and paint a house to support the spouses, and hopelessly screwing it up, right?

And that became a metaphor of: how do you integrate the work of multiple functional silos toward common purpose? Really, the aha moment is, if Steve and Gene can screw up such a simple system, just imagine how spectacularly you can screw up a far more complex system, with more functional specialties, with more complexity, with more hazard, and so forth. That was certainly one aha moment.

The second one is about the three mechanisms. One is slowification, the second is simplification, and the third is amplification. And I'm never going to get through my slides, but I will end on time.

One of the things that I learned working with Steve is that you have to have time scheduled for planning and practice so that you're not doing the most dangerous work in production, in performance, where you can't do work where you have high stakes and be able to fail, learn, and improve.

So whenever you look at things in our space, when you take a look at the most reliable, secure, operable sites on the planet, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Vanguard, what looks like something that they've just figured out, it turns out they were investing far beforehand in terms of planning and practice.

So that turns out it's based on the work of Kahneman and Klein. This is what won Dr. Kahneman the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2002, I think. And it's really the notion that there's fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking is where we use our biases, habits, and routines. But those are created during these more slow-thinking processes, where that can be deliberative, creative, and contemplative.

And if leaders don't create the time to allow for slow thinking, we are in a hopeless situation. That's in software, but that's also in every other work domain as well.

It turns out there's actually no word in English that we could find that really describes this concept of slowing down to speed up, of stop sawing to sharpen the saw. And ChatGPT is so good at language, and it's just amazing. I asked for 80 different words. None of them were satisfactory. The best word that it could come up with, we thought there would be a German word for it, and it's Verlangsamung. And it just didn't fit on the book cover, so we chose not to use that.

Simplification, I just want to share this. In simplification, one of the mechanisms that we use a lot in software is around modularization. In the ideal, everyone's working on solving important problems all the time, in parallel. And they can do this because everyone has what they need in the right format at the right time, and they're interacting with the right people.

In our world, I think one of the most famous examples was Amazon. Life was pretty easy when you're in Amazon in 1998. They only had two categories: books and music. And life got a little bit more complicated by 2002, where they had not two categories, but 32 product categories. And they got to a point where they had scores of teams who had to communicate and coordinate, where no one could get work done.

Dr. Werner Vogels described this kind of absurd situation in 2005, where the digital teams were required to provide a physical shipping address to buy a Kindle or a video, right? Which was so absurd, but there was no way around this. They had to go to 80 different teams, asking to kind of work around this. But they said, "You know what? We didn't budget for it," and they were stuck.

What's astonishing is that things ground to a halt. And this is what led to the Amazon API, billion-dollar re-architecture. I've used, in past presentations, this diagram to show what complexity and highly coupled architectures look like. This turns into this, which is not so good, that eventually turns into this.

So I want to share this learning with you, that really a better metaphor might be gears. You are in a very bad situation where, in order to do what you need to get done, you have to communicate and coordinate with scores of other teams. You can't move your piece without all the other team members agreeing to move their piece, right?

And so this is where I have to communicate, coordinate, schedule together, prioritize together, worse yet, deploy together. And so by decoupling, this is what allows independence of action.

Independence of action can be traced back to another Nobel Prize winner, which is Dr. Merton, Dr. Fisher, and Black around option theory, where essentially what earned them the Nobel Prize was their observation that decoupling decisions tomorrow from conditions today creates incredible latitude of action.

The link here is that by decoupling things spatially, as opposed to time, you create independence of action that otherwise wouldn't have existed. And to summarize, it's not just gears. Imagine if each one of these were roulette wheels, right? The ability to spin these wheels independently, win money independently, creates amazing fortune.

Dr. Carliss Baldwin described how, in the IBM System/360 project in the 1960s, it enabled 25 times more value creation. And she wrote, when there is 25 times more value creation for users, there's so much value that the entire economy will rearrange itself to accommodate this venture. Capitalists will deploy capital just to get a piece of the surplus.

And so I think that was certainly a way to think about what has been done in the software space that is equally applicable in every other domain as well.

So, Steve, I'm going to turn it over to you for your top learnings.

Dr. Steven J. Spear

All right. Yeah. Thank you.

No slides, no clicker, Gene. Thank you. You can have that. Thank you.

Before I start about my top learning, I just want to say that I've had a 20-some-odd-year privilege of being on the faculty at MIT. And what I'm really delighted is that immediately after us, a former student, Adam Tirona, who's one of the many students from whom I've learned a ton, will be speaking about a case that's actually in the book. So I'm delighted to pre-intro him.

And then tomorrow I've got another colleague, Maria Mensink, also from whom I've learned a ton, both when she was a student, when she was at Intel, and now that we're working together. She'll be doing a presentation, I think, around one o'clock. And I encourage you to listen to both of them, because they're going to be talking about personal experiences where the three mechanisms we describe in the book came into very powerful play in their own lives.

So, in terms of lessons learned, I'd say the one that really rises to the top is: focus on the individual.

And in particular, I'm speaking to those who have moved up through various expressions of technical competency and now find themselves in positions as leaders, where they're responsible for creating conditions in which other people do their work. Focus on the individual.

To kind of make that point, since it was lessons learned from the book, I thought I'd draw upon stuff we actually put in the book. So, on page four, down in a footnote, I recollect an experience I had. I was driving along the Hudson River in Manhattan, looked up at the Navy, Air and Space Museum, and sitting on top of the aircraft carrier was an SR-71, a Blackbird.

So I called my Uncle Larry, who had worked on that. And I said, "Hey, I saw that SR-71 Blackbird. I know you worked on that when you were a junior engineer."

And he said, "You know, that was the best engineering experience I ever had."

My first reaction to that was, that's insane. He had had a career in engineering. That work he was doing, maybe when he was in his twenties, he was designing not even the locking system, if this was a car as a metaphor. It was like the little lever on the locking system. I'm trying to understand, how could that have been the best?

It took years of reflection. It finally dawned on me the reason it was the best engineering experience he had ever had is that he was part of this enormous whole of technical and engineering talent that created something as magnificent as the SR-71. That his ability to connect to this very large system was what made it the best experience. Right? So that's proof point one.

Second reference here is on page three, right before the Uncle Larry reference, where we write: on July 20th, 1969, masses crowded into Times Square, Central Park, Trafalgar Square, the city centers of the Soviet Union, North and South Vietnam, Hong Kong, and other places around the world. They gathered to watch Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin start their descent to the lunar surface.

All told, 650 million people shared that experience, watching and listening in theaters, taverns, airport and train terminals, and at home, in wonder and awe, as Armstrong stepped onto the moon and declared, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

What's the point? Those people weren't even part of the project, but they wanted to connect to it in this visceral way and feel like they were part of accomplishing something gigantic, something far beyond what any one of them could have accomplished on his or her own.

Third proof point: each day, people badge in, swipe and scan and sign and log in, or otherwise just walk into their places of work. From that common beginning, the differences in their experiences are vast. For some, work is marked by drudgery or even danger. Their days are filled with frustration amid the regular confusion of figuring out what to do, when and how to do it, and even why it needs to be done.

Too often, they're left cynical about what's going on around them, and exhausted from trying to get meaningful things accomplished. However, some people experience the opposite. They're well equipped and capable of succeeding at what they've been tasked to do. They're respected and appreciated for doing their work well, and they leave the workplace knowing they've added value for others and to their own lives.

Why focus on the individual? Because that difference in experience that individuals have between the drudgery, the disappointment, the danger, versus the exhilaration, the exaltation of being a part of something much larger. That's the difference that leaders can create.

And as a leader, you don't need reports and metrics that are lagged and aggregated, and then discussed in meetings, and then clarified and filtered and distilled in pre-meetings on the pre-meeting for the pre-meeting of the actual meeting, which then has a follow-up meeting to have a new report about that.

What do you need to do? You need to go into the workspace, look at the individual, and ask the question: what experience is she or he having today?

And I'll end my reading out of the book with that mention of the individual experience. That's a direct draw on lessons I learned from one of my mentors, Paul O'Neill, who was the CEO at Alcoa when it transitioned from a very dangerous place to work because of high-risk, high-hazard processes, to a very safe, productive place to work despite the same high-risk, high-hazard industrial processes.

And when we asked Paul, "How did you manage such a sprawling enterprise? The dozens of plants, the many, many different countries, the tens of thousands of employees?"

Paul's answer was simple. He said, "I asked a few questions every day." And they're all around focusing on the individual.

So since focusing on the individual is at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book, I figure this is a key lesson. So I write in the acknowledgements, what was Paul's homework for us?

Find people for whom you are responsible and ask them, "Are you treated with dignity and respect?" If the answer is no, as a leader, you have work to do.

"Are you given whatever you need to succeed? And does this bring value to your life? And are you recognized for what you do by someone whose opinion matters?"

And then Paul concluded his advice: conditions that generate a no to any of these merit correction.

So anyway, there's a lot of good stuff in this book, I think. Recommend it. You decide for yourself. You're getting a copy later.

But if there's one thing, if you find yourself in a leadership position, don't be overwhelmed by the sprawl, the span of the technology, the sprawling span of the organization. Focus on the individuals. Ask Paul's question: are you set up to succeed? Does it add value to your life? Do you feel appreciated?

And if the answer to any of that is no, you've got work to do.

Gene, thank you. It's been a great journey.

Gene Kim

Awesome.

And so Steve and I will be doing a book signing tonight. Everyone will be getting this special edition that required some heroics to get here. And I'm so proud that we're done with the book, thank goodness.

Dr. Steven J. Spear

Yes. Thank you very much. All right, thanks, Gene. Be well.