Host Intro (Gene Kim)

This is one of the most memorable, fun sessions. Maybe I can just tell you a little bit of the background.

So actually, I think as you were writing the Wiring the Winning Organization book, one of the things that emerged was that this amazing story that Adam told about the MIT sailing team really is the focus of the whole chapter on slowification. And it was such a delight to actually meet Adam, and even better for him to be able to tell this incredible story in high fidelity on the stage two months ago.

So, Adam, I'm so glad you're here. I have a bunch of questions for you, but maybe you could take a minute to describe what you presented on and what it was like to present to, you know, you're a nerd as well, what it was like to tell this story that is not about nerdom, but is very much, I think we both agree, applicable to everything that we do in technology leadership.

Adam Traina

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Gene. This is really awesome to be able to talk with you and everyone who's interested in DevOps and in your whole world.

I think that a story about sailing, or any sport, or anything outside of our jobs is a great way to see how there's a lot of overlap between the themes, and how growth in one area of your life can carry over to another, and how those leadership skills that you're working on at work might actually also be fun in another context, or you can bring some of your passions from home back into the rest of your life too.

Gene Kim

Sounds good. And hopefully, I'm hoping everyone saw your talk. There might be some people here actually weren't able to attend DevOps Enterprise. Could you maybe give us a 90-second summary of this astonishing story of the come-from-behind, sustaining victories that you were held to the stage for?

Adam Traina

Yeah. So the brief synopsis is that the MIT sailing team had been competing in an international sailing race, and we showed up with a group of very smart and capable individuals, but who had never sailed a boat before.

And sailing has multiple races. So we get off the plane and our competition is saying things like, "Oh, you know, we're so worried, we've never sailed together before. We've got some All-Americans. We're pretty good." And our team is like, "Oh, we've never sailed at all."

And so during the races, we employed some of the agile and lean methodologies to teach and learn and iteratively become a better sailing team while we were racing. And by the end of the series, we were winning the event. And so a lot of the journey is the mistakes, and how we learn from them, and use those to build a more competitive team race over race until we came out on top.

Gene Kim

That's incredible. By the way, I'm just so delighted. I know that everyone that reads the Wiring the Winning Organization, I suspect that the most memorable story that they're going to use and recall the most often about slowification, they will use your example.

So in your talk, you talk about what you decided to do from year one to year two, and you said we reframed our approach. Instead of focusing on technical skills, we focused instead on social skills. And you said one of the mottos was, "We return home with more friends than we left."

So when I heard that, I had this strange reaction. I was like, that seems oddly familiar. You said you want people who are smart, humble, collaborative, desire to win, acknowledge mistakes, learn from mistakes, share work, and that's actually going to lead to phenomenal winning performance.

And I think it reminded me of the Project Aristotle project at Google, reminded me of all the work that Dr. Ron Westrum did in terms of organizational typologies, and also resonated with me because these are, this addressed the socio part as the sociotechnical system.

So can you tell me why you believe that these characteristics, these social skills, were the difference makers in your incredible performance? Because it's not what one normally concludes.

Adam Traina

I think that in the first year we proved that technical skill was necessary but insufficient. So in the first year, we showed that we started the race in dead last, and by the end of the series we were winning. And the other teams all had strong, technically skilled sailors, and we showed that we could teach someone to sail well in a short period of time.

But really what stood out in the first year was that some teams with great technical sailors were also not doing very well. And you could hear them across the water. Sound carries very well when they're getting in arguments and disagreeing, and then the boat's going slower and slower as they're trying to figure out what to do.

And we thought that the technical skills aren't really going to make the difference here. What's going to make the difference is a team that works together and builds off each other's strengths instead of ruminating on the failures of the past.

And I think one of the other major parts about building a socially strong organization is that we started the second year just assuming that people were smart and capable, instead of having them have to demonstrate it.

And I think that difference in approach lets people make mistakes and learn faster and feel more confident and comfortable building a team. And so you're just starting in a more agile place, where it's just easier to grow. Just assuming that your colleagues are awesome changes the conversation from a punitive one to a supportive environment.

Gene Kim

Yeah. I actually love this format because I'm actually learning and getting these little things I certainly didn't get from our conversations or your talk. So you're saying that what you observed leaving year one caused you to double down on this assertion that it's going to be the socio parts of the sociotechnical system that are going to be the difference maker, based on your observations.

Adam Traina

Absolutely. It was observations tempered by the framework that Steve Spear had been teaching. But we were very much willing to try it out and say, hey, maybe let's just give it a shot here, see if it's right. See if the observations that are in the framework in the book, and in Steve's class, and in your books was actually something that was going to work. And just making the connection between the storytelling and the reality was very straightforward in that environment, and one that we were able to apply and leverage.

Gene Kim

That's awesome. And by the way, you know what this reminds me of? I think it was Dr. Andy Grove, CEO at Intel for so many years, famous for his thing about Only the Paranoid Survive. He had this famous adage that he spread within Intel that said he'll take a B team of B-team players that trust themselves versus a bunch of prima donna A-team players. And it just seems oddly familiar to me. Phenomenal.

So also, there was a slide that you presented where you talked about the problems with information flow that you encountered, and you had this incredible diagram that showed the flow of information going from the front of the boat to the back of the boat, and then the flow of directions and orders going back in the reciprocal direction. And again, that seemed oddly familiar to me, this insight that the information that had to be transmitted in the layer three social circuitry wasn't sufficient to get information to where it needed to go, like language issues, noise from the wind, et cetera.

Can you talk about that concept and how it manifested in the many ways it manifested in both year one and year two?

Adam Traina

I think that one of the intrinsic natures of a sailing environment is that things are changing. The environment's changing all the time, and it really rewards your adaptability and your ability to respond.

And when the world's changing around you, you don't have a whole lot of time to sit back, come up with a strategy, explain the strategy to everyone, and then re-execute. You really need to have execution on the edge, because the information that's coming to the doers, the people hauling sails and trimming, is already an immediate closed loop.

So if you can get that responsiveness really high, then your whole boat's going to go faster. And if you're waiting for someone to tell you that it's okay to do the thing, then you're going to respond slower than everyone else. So by empowering and training, and making those visual cues and situational cues obvious to our teammates, they could act autonomously and in the right direction to move the whole boat forward.

But I think what's important there is that we started with the slow communication, where everyone would give information back to me, and then I'd give instructions back to them. And the reason that was important to start with is because we had to make the connections between what people were doing and how it helped our team go faster. Our objective is, you know, it's a race, so you wanted the boat to go faster.

And if you just jump straight to the autonomous behavior, then people want to go faster, but they're not sure how it's connected back to the goal of making the boat go faster. So it was important actually to go through the evolution of the architecture instead of just jumping straight to distributed system, so that people understood how their individual actions were actually contributing to the team as a whole.

Gene Kim

Yeah. I'm going to ask you this question in your head just in case. I would love, can you give some concrete examples of where moving decision rights led to some surprising things that one might find surprising?

And maybe while you think about that, it just reminds me of, I think it was David Marquet who said, instead of pushing information to where the decisions are made, push the information, that's where the... yeah, I'll get that right. Anyway, back to you, Adam. What examples do you find delightful, surprising, in terms of what's this led to?

Adam Traina

Well, I think the boat's 40 or 50 feet long, and there's sails in the back and there's sails in the front. And when you're trying to talk to someone who's 40 feet away and literally has a different perspective on what the situation is, the communication gets a little garbled.

So you can't hear them because it's windy, but also they're getting the information probably a good five seconds before you, and they have their eyes right in front of it. And so one of the major reorganizations, we made a bow captain who was in charge of the sails at the front of the boat. And that person's hands are literally able to untangle and untwist the sails as they get caught in other equipment.

And for small problems, you can just put your hands on it and fix it. And if it's a big problem, like things are really wrapped up, then you have to get help from the stern to change the angle of the boat so there's less power on the sail.

So one of the common things that happened with almost every team that I trained in the beginning is the sail goes up, and it comes up in this hourglass shape because it's twisted in the middle. And when the bow team recognizes that, they say, "Oh, there's a twist. I can pull down. I don't need to wait for anyone. Just pull down on the corners and the twist will work its way out the top."

And in the back, you can't even see it because it's in back of a sail, so you don't even know what's happening. And if their technique doesn't work, then they can escalate and say, "Hey, we've got an hourglass. We need you to take the boat away from the wind so we can get it out."

And so at that point, if the immediate fix doesn't work, the immediate fix works if you're quick and you recognize it and you do it right away, and so it's much faster. But if you have to do the long fix, you're still better than sailing along without having the sail working for you.

So that's one example of a particular escalation system that we learned our way into. Because in the beginning, you just have lots of confusion, and the back turns the boat and the front pulls, and you spend a lot of extra work trying to get things right. And if you don't coordinate it, then you have to pull it down and put it back up again. So by right-sizing the fixes as you go, you can improve your speed.

Gene Kim

Flipping awesome. This is great. By the way, this reminds me that one of the things we'll have to do early next year is do an extended interview, 60, 90 minutes, at the Idealcast podcast. So we'll pick that up next year.

So one of the things that I think is really astonishing about your story is the notion that you paused in the middle of a race. Can you just talk through to what extent that was true, and really what gave you confidence to do that, when it just seems so absurd that once you're in performance, this is actually the worst time when speed matters to actually stop racing?

Adam Traina

Yeah. I mean, everyone's heard of tech debt, and you sort of have to fix that decision a lot.

And we were sailing along, and we'd been trying to get progressively faster in pre-deployment, and in one of our pre-deployments, the sail kind of blew and started to set itself and wrapped around some of the other equipment. And we were still going fast in one direction, but totally pinned and unable to maneuver out of that direction. So it had cut off all of our future options, and we were totally stuck. And while we were going fast, we were just stuck and couldn't ever make a change.

And in our world, it's an agile environment. The world's changing around you all the time. While things are good for now, you just can't stay still.

And I think we could have tried to fix it as we went, but it just seemed like that was going to be so painful and keep us pinned for so long that it was going to be worth it, just better to stop the boat, give ourselves a calm minute to fix the issue, and then get going again with a refresh.

I don't think we would have done that if we hadn't learned about the Toyota Production System from Steve, where they stopped the line to fix and swarm issues, and were really, really aggressive about eliminating tech debt or problems as they emerge. And I think that, again, that was an example where we wanted to try something that we had just learned for the first time in our current, driven by having seen some other folks do it in a different context. And it really worked out for us.

Gene Kim

Yeah. And sometimes we hear things that we just want to confirm our own beliefs. So I really want to ask you just straight out, on a scale of one to 10, to what degree do you actually believe that pausing production, even race conditions, is often the right thing to do?

One is like, "Oh, no, no, it really isn't. I'm just speaking one example that is just to prove one part of the story, but in other cases it's not valid," to 10 like, "No, no, no, this is actually part of the management system in the layer three social circuitry of what it takes to create great performance."

Adam Traina

Yeah. Well, I think that the foundation of that performance system is a joy of improving and going faster.

And some of your changes require lots of coordinated effort. And I think that the more coordinated and the larger the change, the more likely it is that you're going to have to stop and do it carefully. When there are small changes that are going to make marginal improvements, then yeah, have at it.

But I think as soon as they start to have changes that involve the coordination of multiple teams or multiple groups, then you probably need to think about slowing it down and taking it offline, or checking it before you deploy it. Or, if in our case, we're willing to deploy it live, but we still had to get together and make sure there was going to be a coordinated effort before we have one team get ahead of another.

Gene Kim

Oh, so good. So good.

So one of the things that I was hoping that you do in your presentation, that I'm so excited that hopefully you'll be able to share now, is tell us what you've been working on. Because one of the things that you spoke a lot about the sailing story, but it turns out you are in the technology field, you are working in AI.

So tell us about what you've been doing since you left the MIT LGO program. And I'm hoping that you'll actually share what you're working on now, and what specific interactions would be very helpful to you in your own journey.

Adam Traina

Yeah. So I still love this idea of being very adaptive to the world's changing demands. And so I'm trying to design, I'm building AI and planning algorithms that let you adapt production processes as the world changes around you.

So things like, I need a new feature for my programming platform, or my physical factory now needs to produce a new part, or I'm redesigning the way that I do my work. And what I'm doing is taking a lot of the methods that you would see in Team Topologies and Wiring the Winning Organization and trying to make it a little bit more algorithmic and a little bit more software-driven so that you can repeatedly gain these bottleneck-relieving insights.

So I guess I'm still in the building phase of this. We have a couple clients, and if people are interested in experimenting in how to rapidly design and configure and plan large-scale production systems, then that's what I'm interested in partnering on.

Gene Kim

Right. And specifically, you're looking for people who are in this domain doing X, Y, and Z. Can you be a little bit more specific, so we know exactly the type of person that would be most useful for you to be interacting with?

Adam Traina

Yeah. I guess if you want to work with me, then I'm interested in folks who love planning algorithms. And if you're interested in the product, then people who are designing factories, or hospitals, or seaports, or airports, or large networks that move a lot of things through in the supply chain and logistics areas.

Gene Kim

Super. Super. Adam, thank you so much.

It is my genuine hope, in fact it's my prediction, that people talk about that we need to make a short-term investment for a longer-term gain. I think it actually harms us, not just as leaders, but as society, that we actually don't have a word for it, which is the reason why we actually made up a word, slowification, just because we found that there was no word in English to actually capture this concept.

And my fondest hope and my prediction is that when people need to explain what slowification is, they're going to point to your story.

So, Adam, continued success to you. I'm looking forward to our future interactions and a longer interview for sure to come in 2024.

Adam Traina

Thanks for having me. This has been great.

Gene Kim

All right, thank you, Adam. Catch you soon. All right.