Michele Brissoni

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Technical Leadership Summit. Since this year everything is virtual for Europe, let's jump into my virtual office.

Now, as we make our way to the meeting room, let me give you a quick intro. I'm Michele Brissoni, CEO of BriX Consulting, and at BriX we are all about behavioral engineering for digital excellence.

Picture this: one day, I am knee-deep working with my friends in Ferrari F1 when I thought, why can't our IT folks step up their game like those pros in F1? And that is where our journey kicks off.

Before starting, let me move on to the other side of the screen. Also, let me do some magic to remove the background.

I start to discuss what the Software Craftsmanship Dojo is. It isn't training. It is instead a behavioral engineering platform that evolves your organization toward digital excellence. The uniqueness of the Dojo is its ability to inject the proper technical capabilities inside your organization, evaluating with a data-driven model based on the latest social and behavioral psychology discoveries when is the right time to do it.

In addition to this technical and social synergy, the program is enhanced with the latest neuroscience discoveries, allowing you to fine-tune it with the right amount of cognitive load.

We know well how it is the actual situation in the digital labor force: high disengagement and a high level of burnout, as shown from the latest report from Gallup.

Why did I start the Dojo? Jump back in time to 2010. I was facing a big challenge in my career. On one side, I had a bank monolith application that was at the end of its life. On the other side, one team that wasn't at the technical mastery to tackle this challenge.

When I started, I had a clear picture of what I was shooting for. The target was the level of mastery of my friends, engineers in Ferrari Formula One.

To achieve the goal, I split the complexity of the challenge in three phases: phase one, knowledge; phase two, practice; phase three, support.

Phase one was implemented via bootcamp, specifically designed to upskill the knowledge of the team. Phase two was designed leveraging my expertise as a judo and jiu-jitsu trainer and my mastery in a real dojo for martial arts with the emerging concept of coding dojos. In the last phase, I applied coaching as a support tool to empower the team with a smooth and seamless evolution over the technical mastery required for refactoring the monolith application.

The final result was the achievement of technical excellence, but outside the team, there was still persisting some social friction.

In the last 14 years, I kept evolving the initial seed of the Dojo. I went through multiple corporations and startups, greenfield projects, and gigantic monoliths to refactor.

To start with, the Dojo is now paired with a leadership tool to drive digital excellence. We understood that technical excellence without the right board support cannot produce the social evolution needed. Coupling the Dojo with OKR empowers the leadership team and the board to move the needle of the digital transformation over the evolution and excellence that is the right fit for the business model of the company.

The Dojo serves also as your HR partner. It is de facto your in-house talent forge, a community of technical excellence that is continuously upskilling and reskilling your employees toward digital excellence. It is also your quality gate to filter your new hires to fit the required technical mastery necessary to have in your organization.

With its latest curriculum, the Dojo is capable of rewiring the behavior of your employees in the proper way. It uses behavioral and neuroscience principles to have a smooth transition of behavior from dysfunctional to functional.

The Dojo is fully data-driven. We have cataloged more than 150 key behaviors and integrated it with the latest models like DORA, Flow Framework, and Team Topologies, so that every decision is based on data.

The lesson learned is simple: behavioral engineering is the approach that provides you the data to navigate the challenges of your digital evolution.