You may have “read me” over the past few years bang on and on about how urgently we need to audit and then reduce HumanDebt™ and I feel we’re starting to see the proof of how, if we want to do that, we must all urgently learn from the DevOps movement as it encouragingly is the only worthwhile cultural transformation method we can rely on.
When I first came to the realisation that HumanDebt existed, I could tell pretty quickly that it existed everywhere really and I can assure you that once you “see it you won’t be able to unsee it” either, it is, in differing degrees, ubiquitous.
While much more painful, visible and debilitating in large, slow-moving antiquated organisations, it starts sipping into the cultural fabric of any shop of any size and in any industry as soon as the first few people-related balls are being dropped. No one is immune, even the likes of small and nimble scale-ups can start amassing it fast should they grow “wrong” and let’s face it, the SRE team at Google and the Netflix recent scandals are examples that even the most people-focused of organisations can start building this debt too.
So, if it isn’t about size or industry what do the places that have the least of this HumanDebt have in common? Agility.
If you read the “People Before Tech” book, you know my stance is that agility in general and DevOps, in particular, are “God’s gift” to workplace transformation as they drive home the need for people to be at the centre. They are, ultimately all about culture and mindset beyond a set of processes or practices. When they are at the core of the enterprise they intrinsically change everything.
I believe this so deeply that, I’ll let you in on a little secret (and I can only hope my editor hasn’t actually slipped some NDA-type clause in our contract) – I just started writing my third book to detail precisely the role of Agile, DevOps culture and so on in this workplace transformation. It’s called “Tech-Led Culture” and should come out next year. If you’re reading this and can think of examples of shops where the correlation is evident and the more agility became the norm the better the culture then please drop me a line so I include them in the research.
When 2019’s Accelerate report placed Psychological Safety as the entry point and the sine qua non condition of any ability to sustainably perform in software delivery, they historically staked the claim to culture. They inexorably linked technology to emotions and behaviours.
It also served to thankfully remove vast amounts of resistance to the human work that the tech leadership used to have when they were too overcome by imposter syndrome to courageously admit they know much more about what makes people and teams happy than all of HR put together. The diagrams showing how it is the only way to succeed in technology are genuinely iconic and have opened the door for every CTO or COO worth their salt to learn about Psychological Safety and then -hopefully- do something -practical and meaningful- about it.
Irrespective of how right I would have been or how clearly myself or others would have enunciated that we can never have high-performing teams -in particular in the realm of technology that needs to be fast enough to be agile and DevOps-y- unless we have Psychological Safety and team wellbeing, and irrespective how utterly common sense it is to know there has to be fearlessness to collaborate and experiment, it would all be fairly academic and uninteresting had it not been for two pivotal moments – Google’s Project Aristotle findings and the Accelerate report the replicated them-.
This year’s Accelerate focuses on security but it also has a hefty section on culture and while it probably shows burnout and what could be pandemic-caused disengagement- with nearly no top top-performing teams- it also shows the wider adoption of the DevOps philosophy itself – which is evident in this encouraging visual- which is marvellous to see. It is therefore relatively safe to assume that we now have more and more enterprises in the middle of the adoption curve so likely, surely, less and less old HumanDebt in these places because let’s be honest, there is no way to even attempt DevOps without fundamental changes in attitudes, value systems and willingness to engage.
So personally I found the Accelerate report to be very encouraging this year. The sheer volume of companies that have truly adopted DevOps is a joy to witness because it means implicitly that they have less blame, less politics, and less lack of focus on humans. Do they have less HumanDebt than others too? Perhaps not, it’s hard to tell, but they certainly aren’t creating more as you won’t find them agonising over autonomy, mired in command and control or ignoring feedback loops. They couldn’t do DevOps if they did.
In a sense, it is deeply ironic that technology should lead culture in lieu of the reverse. That, out of a need for speed that translated into agility we actually created the context for true flexibility, autonomy and resilience and that ultimately, it was this context that allowed fearlessness, passion and genuine collaboration to come through. It feels surreal that, what some believe is just process, is instead the dynamo behind creating this shared state of mind and shared thirst for knowledge and experimentation that disallow us from fear and toxicity but here we -thankfully- are and long may it continue. The future is indeed Agile and DevOps Culture led – flexible, open, safe and with much less HumanDebt to stop us from doing our best work.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.
“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link