We are just back from The Value Flywheel Effect book launch at DevOps Enterprise Summit organised by IT Revolution with Gene Kim and crew.
Learning Sprint
The first thing I did was a learning sprint. I did an hour on creating a cloud strategy with Wardley mapping, which I thought was interesting. I used Ben Mosior's Wardley map canvas from LearnWardleyMaps.com. And it was great taking people through that. Once people start connecting the elements of the value chain, they can start to ask why is that over there and not over here? Then you're into a nice conversation.
People can get very micro at the start. And you say just pick one and keep moving. Just keep pushing through, because you can always add more later. You are getting people to move quickly. And you are giving people a couple of steers. But the first 20 minutes is complete confusion. What are we doing here? And then once you draw the map out, people go 'Ah right!'. And then when you start to plot movement and inertia, that's when people get really excited. And it becomes crystal clear.
Creating the Value Flywheel Effect Talk
I deliberated on what to do for my talk because I wanted to do something different. So I decided on 'Creating the Value Flywheel Effect' looking at how came up with this stuff. So I did an intro to the book. And then I told the story through maps, similar to our Map Camp talk.
I started with one of the drawings we had done five or six years ago. Which was a scribbled messy drawing of a map. And I contrasted with the map in the book to show the evolution of the map. So it was a nice mechanism to tell the story. It's important to remember that the map is not important. It's the communication! And the interactions. The maps are always wrong at the start. People try to go out of their way to create the perfect map. But that's not the point of the exercise.
The Value Flywheel Effect Book Signing
There was a huge queue and I was there for two hours signing 200 books. Propelo sponsored our book signing and they were great.
It was fantastic to see Dominica DeGrandis' comments on LinkedIn. She wrote the book: 'Making Work Visible'. It is a brilliant book about visualising flow. She has a couple of posts about our book: 'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And she popped up a maps from her LinkedIn called 'Mapping Psychological Safety'. It was the name of the post on her blog: DDeGrandis.com. And she said that it had never occurred to her to map psychological safety. I thought that was insightful. Psychological safety is usually the base or foundation of the map.
It's built into the flywheel. You need an environment where it's safe to challenge. And having safety to challenge requires psychological safety. It's cool that it's resonating with people and they're starting to zero in on those sorts of things.
Hi folks,. Welcome to this edition of Serverless Craic with Dave Anderson, Author/Contributor at The Serverless Edge and Technical Fellow at Bazaarvoice
Mark McCann:
Mark McCann. Architect at Globalisation Partners and Author/Contributor at The Serverless Edge.
Mike O'Reilly:
Michael O'Reilly, Architect with globalisation partners and Contributor with The Serverless Edge.
Dave Anderson:
We are just back from the DevOps Enterprise Summit organised by IT revolution with Gene Kim and crew. We had a great week doing our book launch. It was brilliant this year, experiencing it in real life. There were about 1000 people at it. You couldn't make it. But did you enjoy watching online?
Mark McCann:
It was great to see the buzz. And seeing the content coming out of it. And also seeing the picture of you getting handed the first copy of the book! It made it very real!
Mike O'Reilly:
I was very jealous!
Dave Anderson:
I wasn't expecting that. It was on the first moring. I went over to IT Revolution's stand to say hello. And they said 'here's your book!'. I was in shock for the whole of the first day because they had a shelf full of IT Revolution books in chronological order. Like DevOps, Enterprise Handbook, Accelerate, Team Topologies and all the Mark Schwartz and Dominica DeGrandis books. And It's well deserved after a long, hard slog of writing, curating The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. It was mad to see our book sitting alongside all of those books. I'm still in shock, to be honest. and editing. It is a team win. And it was nice to see the real thing!
Mike O'Reilly:
Let me ask you this. Did you see anyone else with the book? I think it'd be really surreal. It's okay geting to handle it. But watching someone else read it would be more terrifying!
Dave Anderson:
It's strange watching people walk up, look at the stand and reach out to lift it. And start flicking through it. You feel like going up to them to say: 'What do you think of that?'. And they had loads of stickers. So you start to see a few stickers around.
Mark McCann:
The laptop stickers are great. You have got to have the swag!
Dave Anderson:
It was great craic. And it was interesting to get feedback. The first thing I did was a learning sprint. It's like an 'open space' where you have a break out. And it was for an hour. There were five authors doing learning sprints all at the same time. So you could pick which one to go into. I did it twice. And I did an hour on creating a cloud strategy with Wardley mapping, which I thought was interesting. I used Ben Mosior's Wardley map canvas from LearnWardleyMaps.com. And it was great taking people through that.
Mike O'Reilly:
Was it a digital thing? Or did you have to draw it up on a whiteboard?
Dave Anderson:
I printed them out on A4 and A3. So a normal size and a big one. And I had a lot of sharpies as well to let people scribble. And I taped them to a flip chart. The hard thing is thinking about who the customer is. And what do they need? You are encouraging people along the steps in order to spend time doing the actual mapping.
Mark McCann:
Once people start connecting the elements of the value chain, they can start to ask why is that over there and not over here? Then you're into a nice conversation. Once they get beyond the terminology, notation and syntax, they are asking interesting, challenging questions. The canvas is a great way to get people thinking quickly. They start gaining insights and seeing what they may not have before using the canvas or map.
Dave Anderson:
And you can give them tips. People deliberate over who is the exact customer. Or the actual customer and their needs. People can get very micro at the start. And you say just pick one and keep moving. Just keep pushing through, because you can always add more later. You are getting people to move quickly. And you are giving people a couple of steers. But the first 20 minutes is complete confusion. What are we doing here? And then once you draw the map out, people go 'Ah right!'. And then when you start to plot movement and inertia, that's when people get really excited. And it becomes crystal clear.
Mike O'Reilly:
Simon Wardley always says even if you're talking to someone in a different language, you can still have a conversation with them around the map. In your workshop did anybody have a eureka moment? In aworkshops, when you go through it, it clicks with people. And you can see them have that eureka moment.
Dave Anderson:
I had a value chain done out. And the group talked about moving stuff over to the right to create space for innovation. And I asked what their innovation would be? Would it be something in ML and bring in some ML capability? And I said you need to decide if your ML capability is in custom. Or do you want to bring it into Product. I explained that it could be in Custom if your engineers decide they don't want to use something like SageMaker. And they want to build their own thing. You could spend two years building your own ML platform. And you may not be able to bring in SageMaker unless you get your cloud ops done. And one guy started to laugh. He said that he had just spent the last month trying to talk a team out of rewriting SageMaker. And I asked what kind of company are you? He said that we're not a cloud company. So it was resonating with the audience. Especially the inertia points, the movement, and the order in which you do things. So it was a good validation. And if you've got a board member at the top of your map, what does the board member care about? And what things enable that, which at the bottom of the map? Where's the value line? What do you need to explain to the executive leadership. And what's is important but you don't need to go into the nuts and bolts of cloud ops. All the talks are on GitHub at github.com/devopsenterprise/2022/LasVegas. All the slides are there. But I deliberated on what to do for my talk because I wanted to do something different. So I decided on 'Creating the Value Flywheel Effect' looking at how came up with this stuff. So I did an intro to the book. And then I told the story through maps, similar to our Map Camp talk. I started with one of the drawings we had done five or six years ago. Which was a scribbled messy drawing of a map. And I contrasted with the map in the book to show the evolution of the map. So it was a nice mechanism to tell the story.
Mark McCann:
Some think that this stuff comes out fully formed. But it never does. There is lots of variation and challenge. We always challenge each other. And we revisit, rub stuff out and draw it again. When we validate certain things we always go back to the map. We talk a lot about creating an environment that invites challenge. We're not perfect. Give it a go. Have a bias for action. Stick it on the wall and see what reonates. And see what sticks and what feedback you get. Just keep reiterating.
Mike O'Reilly:
It's not the map. it's the communication! And the interactions. The maps are always wrong at the start. People try to go out of their way to create the perfect map. But that's not the point of the exercise.
Dave Anderson:
We don't have a lot of photographs of those maps because they were never that important. You drewm the map by scribbling something. But then you came away with the outcome. The map is how you got there. There are loads of important maps that we didn't take photographs of.
Mark McCann:
We don't have the evidence! We turned it into PowerPoint slides or workshops. An artefact came out of it, but the map was done away with.
Dave Anderson:
It was very rare for us to do a tidy map. The output was a workshop.
Mike O'Reilly:
How many times did we work on maps, but it wan't maps we communicated. It was the actual outcomes and the outcomes of the conversations. It's such a good way of taking a complex subject, having a good conversation around it, and then arriving at an outcome or a set of next best actions.
Dave Anderson:
The maps don't really matter. It's the mapping activity and the conversation that is important. So I was like a broken record repeating that. Wednesday was crazy. I did the talk, the learning sprint, and I watched a bunch of lightning talks. And there was the book signing in the main theatre. They had 10 lightning talks lasting five minute each with the book signing straight afterwards. There were 4 different book signings. So you hope to see people queue up because you don't want to end up standing on your own. But there was a huge queue and I was there for two hours signing 200 books. People were really nice and they were really excited. And lots of other speakers queued up as well. Propelo sponsored our book signing and they were great.
Mark McCann:
I think you added a mapping touch to each of the books.
Dave Anderson:
I scribbled a map out as part of the signature.
Mark McCann:
So now the book is in the wild with 200 plus people! So we're starting to get feedback from people who weren't in the early previews. It was fantastic to see Dominica DeGrandis' comments on LinkedIn.
Dave Anderson:
Dominica DeGrandis is brilliant. She
wrote the book:
'Making Work Visible'. It is a brilliant book about visualising flow. She has a couple of posts about our
book:
'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And she popped up a maps from her LinkedIn called'Mapping Psychological Safety'. It was the name of the post on her blog: DDeGrandis.com. And she said that it had never occurred to her to map psychological safety. I thought that was insightful. We would map stuff like that all the time. There's no boundaries to what we map. Psychological safety is usually the base or foundation of the map. Mapping, safety or challenge are things that are quite hard to see. But they are the most important thing for everything that comes above it. The thing at the very top, which is the need, is usually the least important because it is the end product.
Mark McCann:
She made a comment asking why psycholgcal safety is in Commodity. And we believe it should be table stakes and it should be what all companies have. But then the lower components are trust and 'safe to fail' environment.
Dave Anderson:
Commodity doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's table stakes. So it is more important.
Mike O'Reilly:
It's built into the flywheel. You need an environment where it's safe to challenge. And having safety to challenge requires psychological safety. It's cool that it's resonating with people and they're starting to zero in on those sorts of things.
Mark McCann:
Have you gotten over the internal fear of 'I hope it's not terrible. What are they gonna say?'.
Dave Anderson:
No. Just because one or two people read it quickly doesn't mean anything! I'll keep being paranoid for DevOps Enterpise Summit was a great event. Look up the slides another while! on GitHub.com/devopsenterprise/2022/lasvegas. All the videos are on videos.itrevolution.com. You don't have to register. But if you do it's free and they don't annoy you. So it's well worth registering to see the videos. There are some incredible videos there. Jason Cox from Disney was brilliant. He did an SRE talk. Jonathan Smart is always brilliant too. So that's the craic. Look us up on TheServerlessEdge.com for our blog. Follow us on Twitter@ServerlessEdge. And subscribe to Serverless Craic on YouTube. Thanks very much.