This will be a simple landing spot to view any recorded content I’ve put together. Beware! I’m not a terribly polished speaker, but I do like to challenge base assumptions and look at our IT challenges from different perspectives.

• In this video, I try to take a quick look at why defending our IT real estate can be such a challenge and make a few suggestions as to how externalized control planes can help us handle that complexity. I hope to also help explain how HashiCorp is very well positioned to make a big impact in this space. https://youtu.be/ia_djFnqR70

Interestingly, my middle son really struggles to remember to take his allergy drops.  I know, right?!  You would think that someone with the irritating condition of dealing with physical reactions to something like pollen would be interested in following through with his treatment, and yet without the constant push from his parents, it seems Justin prefers his symptoms over being responsible for his own treatment.  So, we control him.  We ask, yank him out of bed to get it done, and otherwise focus mental energy and effort on ensuring he does what is best for him.

Sigh.  The struggle is real, people!  I’m beginning to wonder if our efforts to control him are killing his will to be responsible.  If he knows we are there to make it happen, does he really need to concern himself with it at all?  Haven’t I established that I will take responsibility for his treatment, therefore he is off the hook?  What is the proper balance of control vs. responsibility?

In our companies, we see similar challenges with regards to control killing the sense of responsibility.  When we centralize a team around, let’s say, networking, what gets communicated to the rest of the organization is that ‘you are no longer responsible for anything related to the network.’  So, let’s peel that apart a bit because such organizational structure can help or have detrimental effects on our digital transformation efforts.

Let’s start by breaking down the development life-cycle.  When we have a great software idea as a start up, developers build it, test it, and get it to customers to prove whether we can make a difference in the lives of our users.  When we grow, we add some help for the developers – a software quality team!  This team is chartered with the responsibility to test the developer’s code to ensure it measures up, meets customer requirements, and generally won’t break under pressure.  So, what did we communicate to the developers?  We probably communicated that maybe we don’t trust them, and they are no longer responsible for testing, and are much less responsible for quality.  There is a quality team in charge of that!  So, developers focus more heavily on delivering code on time and under budget as those are the primary measures they now care about.

How might this play out in a real-world enterprise?  Well, we might find that the development team gets recognized/awarded for getting to ‘code complete’ on time.  Then, the QA team finds bugs and drives the development team to fix those problems, but eventually the code makes it to production.  However, something slipped through.  Some bug causes the application to melt down in production, customers are impacted, pain ensues for the enterprise.  So, the developers work through the weekend to fix the bug and get our company back to running well … and we award them a second time!  So, here’s the challenge: who was responsible for the outage?  Well, that depends on your point of view.  Shouldn’t QA have prevented the break down through their testing?  Why didn’t development know this was a possibility?  What about the performance teams?  Was it networking that didn’t provide a clean pre-production environment for the test team to use?  Was it patching of operating systems from Operations?  Well, all of those things are controlled by other teams, so – no one is responsible.  Or, we were all responsible?  Who controls and ‘owns’ all of this?

Thus, we run headlong into DevOps.  Developer Operations is not a tool chain.  It is also not a team.  It is a chain of responsibility.  It is a development team owning their code through to production.  It is a culture that says that ‘the buck stops here.’  It is taking responsibility as no one controls your destiny but you.

Well, that’s all happy path, but what about networking, Michael?  What about security, etc.?  Again, the buck stops here.  The utility of networking should be presented through the platform (automate it), and if it is not, then the development team needs to really get into software based networking, but to sacrifice my responsibility is to be controlled by another.  I’ve worked with many companies that create DevOps teams who’s primary drive is to ‘control’ the automation that development teams leverage to get to production.  Not just the tools, but all of the automation.  DevOps, in this scenario, owns the build pipeline.  This removes the ‘responsibility’ from the development team to ensure production rolls properly.  It should no longer be a part of the dev team’s lexicon because it is no longer ‘my fault’ if something dumb happened and my software deploys improperly to production.  That’s the devops team’s fault, because they have control!

This is not to imply that supporting organizations are not tremendously helpful in enabling development teams to move quickly.  At my company, we have a team called the ‘Toolsmiths.’  This team is responsible for keeping the most useful tools ready and waiting for our business/developers to leverage, but they do not ‘own/control’ the outcome or automation.  For example, they will ‘own’ the availability of our continuous delivery software and engine, but not the automation that the teams create within that tool.  In this way, we communicate to the dev teams that they are responsible for the production outcome, but don’t worry about being responsible for the infrastructure that delivers that function.  This is a boon for the teams, but does not strip them of the core responsibility that they should have.  The same is true of infrastructure in general.  We look to automate and ‘cloudify’ everything that we can so that the dev teams are not responsible for running the cloud, but are able to take advantage of it, and stay laser focused on bearing the responsibility for the production of new business value.

So, what I am poking at is that we should really pay attention to:

1. The power of psychology.  Establishing teams that ‘control’ the development machine leads to reduced responsibility from that team.  The more you control, the more you have to control.
2. The power of language.  The difference between ‘toolsmiths’ and ‘devops’ may seem minor, but it communicates the purpose of the organization, and reinforces who does DevOps.  (Optimally, we want every single development team to own their own ‘DevOps’)
3. Wherever you give up responsibility, you will be controlled.  For the betterment of the business, leaders occasionally need to exert control in order to keep the wheels turning or prevent large scale failure, but look to lift the control and put responsibility back where it belongs as soon as you can.

A big part of our hopes in this effort of transformation is to empower individuals to unleash their creativity in solving our company’s biggest challenges, and to improve the lives of those around us.  That hoped for outcome is only made real when freed people take responsibility for the outcomes they produce.  My son, for example, will finally be free of my nagging when (and if?) he assumes responsibility for his allergy treatments, or he moves out (leaves my ‘company’).

If I were to ask you to hold two fingers about an inch apart in front of your face and asked you what was between them, what would you say? Would you say ‘about an inch of air?’ Well, that would be accurate, but it also would be a gross simplification. If we were to look more closely, pretty much everything is in that space. Under microscopic observation, we have dust (earth), bacteria (life), water vapor, and more. The more we zoom in, the greater the diversity of existence. It is practically limitless. Mathematically, the distance between those two fingers can be said to be infinite as well. If you were to divide the distance in half … forever … the fingers never meet. There is still distance there. This is all before we go inside the cells, or even atomic-level observation.

Of course, to have any ability to deal with our world, we simplify. Its so much easier to say that’s an inch of air, rather than a near infinite slice of existence. Physicists, for example, are forced to drop the infinite concept so that math actually works. Turns out, if you try to predict where an object will turn up in the infinite expanse of space, the math would boil down to x=infinity/infinity. Hardly a useful result when we try to predict outcomes.

Let’s turn to people. If the physical world around us is at least complex enough that we can’t possibly fathom the extent of it, how much more complex are you? Your physical makeup is defined at the cellular level via DNA, but is modified by hormones during your mother’s pregnancy. Medical sciences are still discovering how a mother’s activities (exercise, diet, drugs/medicine) also effect her child’s physical development in utero. The point is, that your amazing reality is shaped before you can even remember it, by genetics and environment… but it doesn’t stop there. Once your brain develops enough to begin to comprehend and retain memories of your environment, you start to overlay your experiences which will modify how you perceive and interpret your reality, and then we add a major level of complexity when your emotions become involved changing your level of rationality.

So, to simplify (as we always do), your physical reality is near limitless, while your experiences trend to the limitless, which drives variance in terms of the way you interpret your world, which is modified again by your near limitless range of emotions. Even siblings who grew up in the same house, with the same parents, and very similar DNA (relatively speaking) will come out with infinitely different interpretations of their reality. Extend this, then, to society. Billions of limitless people interacting in near limitless ways. Extend this to societal challenges. How many factors effect the cost of healthcare, for example? Dozens? Dozens and dozens? To name a few: insurance negotiations, government regulation and taxes, facilities, salaries, culture, disposable income, demand, epidemics, scarcity, innovation, hours in the day, environment, population, cost of education, and many, many others. Again, as humans we tend to simplify by offering up one word solutions, but in reality these complex systems are way more difficult to understand than your first thoughts (which are influenced by your last experience at the hospital, your insurance provider, the emotions you feel around an individual loss or miracle save, etc). The way you see this issue is like looking through a tiny keyhole at the massive world of helping people stay healthy.

Why am I even discussing this, and how does it affect our businesses? As we structure teams, we either discount variance in people (and the world) to the point that we cause problems where unpredictable results or conflict cause us big trouble, or worse, we don’t allow/account for variance at all and miss market changes. What does that look like? Well, many startups fail due to unmanaged outcomes. Counter to this, we see many enterprises over-govern teams to the point they cease to innovate. Neither is terribly healthy or happy in terms of results. The first results in too much chaos, and the second produces no flexibility, missed opportunities, and really unhappy people. Our hope is to capitalize on possibilities by providing enough process to focus variance to our advantage. So, how do we capitalize on ‘infinity’ while achieving results?

At my company, the core tenets we adhere to are to A) Do the right thing, B) do what works, and C) always be kind. While these may look very ‘fluffy’ at first, they do allow us to control for wild variance that would lead to unproductive outcomes, but still provide flexibility within these confines. In the book The CIO’s Delimna, one CIO implemented a culture of ‘play with fences.’ The concept is to define a problem domain, the borders of that domain, and then simply unleash talented people to attack that problem domain within those constraints. In a similar fashion, the three tenets above help us establish good fences within which our teams can operate creatively but productively.

The constraint of ‘doing the right thing,’ for example, limits our efforts to solutions that progress towards the ‘right’ problem solution. Not every solution to a customer problem, for example, is the ‘right thing’. We could be building something that sounds great, but no customer would ever operate that way or do what we want them to do.  The idea may be great, but have nothing to do with our company.  Is it a ‘good’ long term business model? Is it ‘right?’ Many of the companies I have worked with have invested millions on long 2 year horizons only to find that at the end of the rainbow, the solution is not ‘right’ anymore … and maybe wasn’t right from the beginning.  If the answer is ‘this is not the right problem or solution’, then let’s redirect those efforts.  Time to pivot.

The constraint of ‘doing what works’ also limits our infinite possible solutions by focusing on what we can actually accomplish given our assets and capabilities, but also looks to get us to an outcome as quickly as possible to drive validated learnings through real results. Generally, we try to deal with the infinite number of possibilities in doing what works as market and our environment changes daily in unpredictable ways, by taking the shortest route to delivery to test our theories and adjust. Doing what works implies constant measurement to determine if what we are building is, in fact, working. Additionally, what we have done in the past may have worked then, but may not be working today. We never stop asking if the right thing that we built is working.

Finally, being kind also imposes limitations to our infinite routes to changing the world. A) It focuses our efforts on empathy with our users (both internal and external), and B) drives us towards ethical outcomes. There are additional benefits including better solutions. For example, let’s assume we are building search capability for our website. We need to consider who we are serving as we build software. If our customer is a mother of 3, her motivations, fears, hopes and dreams will dictate what we need built. Her desires for improving the lives of her children, her work, etc., will give insight to search terms we can anticipate in an effort to serve her better and with kindness. By contrast, if she is single, no children, and working as a developer or IT decision-maker, her motivations are quite different, and the search terms for our site may be very technical or detailed in nature.  Regardless where our user is in her life, empathy informs our ability to build the right thing that works for her. This principle also impacts how our teams operate. We want to bring strong opinions to the table, but we must hold them with an ‘open hand’ willing to let them go when the team must pivot or decide between contrary approaches.

While we can dig into these things in much more detail, what fascinates me here is how they help us unleash the infinite to solve problems that themselves have infinite variance. Even within the fences of these guidelines, we have tremendous flexibility to exercise individual creative energy to challenge convention, offer new approaches, and maybe even change the world.

It is really unfortunate that no one knows how to raise kids … until they’ve raised some kids.  With my crew, my first born, Brandon, is the guy that experienced my wife (Terri) and I challenging that learning curve as we discovered who we were becoming as parents.  His experience, then, leads to a different perspective than his younger siblings because he lived by rules that have changed over time.  The values we seek to instill in our children have not changed, but the rules/enforcement changed in some ways, I hope, because I have grown to understand more about helping younger humans find their own lives in a fairly crazy world.  Meanwhile, Brandon’s value does not change, even if the rules around him did.  He may have experienced responses to his behavior from me that his younger brother and sister did not (even in similar situations), but that is a sign of my maturity (I can hope), learning through my life with him, not a change in his value.  He may have lived under a different set of expected outcomes for his behavior, but my love for him is constant.

In my childhood, I was the first born in an incredible home; loving family, deeply committed to our church, surrounded by close friends, protected from many negative experiences.  I was a first hand witness as my parents grew and changed the rules the older we got.  Very strict on me, very lenient with my youngest brother, Andrew – who is 12 years my junior.  While my memories of those days are becoming opaque as my distance from them continues to grow, I do remember one such rule change that really upset me.  I had just turned 17, and my family had always been pretty strict with things, like movie ratings.  I had never seen a rated R movie (that my parents were aware of).  The previous Christmas holiday had brought the family one of the early, newly minted VHS tape players, and we were so excited at the idea that we could watch movies at home anytime we wanted.  My Dad thought it would be awesome to watch a scary movie with me (now that I was ‘of age’) and we sat down to watch the 1979 classic, Alien.  Ridley Scott really freaked out a generation with that one!  I was very excited, ready to be terrified, and it was sort of a rite of passage to watch my first rated R film with my Dad.  And then, when the time came, my little sister (2 years younger) and middle brother (5 years younger) were on the couch with us to watch the movie!  At least my 5-year-old brother was asleep!  I felt … insulted!  I still managed to enjoy the movie (always been a sci-fi fan), but I was revolted that my younger siblings received the same honor I did!  I’ve grown to understand things differently now, but at the time, I could not understand why I was being ‘disrespected.’

My intent is not to compare employees to children, although human development is … well, human development.  We experience similar changes at work.  So much of what we do is in furtherance of our desire for self-actualization.  Who am I?  What is my value to my friends, my family, my company?  Do I measure up?  Am I worthy of my compensation?  In finding meaning in our lives, we mark ‘rights of passage’ where we moved from one level of value to another.  As an example, at one point in my career, I was promoted multiple times over an 18-month period, which really had me feeling like I was ‘coming into my own.’  I was finally ‘of age,’ metaphorically, for more responsibility.  At this point, I really believed I was now in a place from which to help others chart their own courses, and lead highly successful teams.  At a different time in my career, however, those that had not walked my path (10 years at roughly the same job level) would suddenly jump up and be a peer, or even a superior, organization-wise.  For the most part, I’ve been great through these transitions, because I have taken to heart what I learned as a kid.  Organizations learn and change the rules, hopefully for the better.  Even as a hiring manager, I set as a goal to find talent and a quality of person that I would like to work for, not just with.  So, I never found my value tied to who all else is invited to the movie, but rather recognized who I am as valuable, regardless of position.  I’m currently learning to divorce myself from the need for constant external applause.  That is a wonderful thing, but it does not define me.  I am, in essence, uniquely my own, and my value is immovable and inseparable from me – no matter my position (reports, no-reports) or changes in measurement.

I’ve found that more broadly, we are individually on different paths to learning who we are, and our work often sets incentives that impact our sense of self.  Often, this influence of our perceptions will have unintended consequences as we seek to change culture in our firm.  For example, in several of the customers I have worked with, individuals move up the ranks, in order to gain more decision-making and freedom, as well as a much more decisive voice in product direction and project oversight.  Often, this increased span of control means that the individual also has purview over more teams, more work, more projects, wider range of architecture, etc.  While this hierarchical growth path does drive individuals to excel, it also has some undesired/unintended consequences when we look to bring a more ‘transformed’ and open organizational culture.  If I were this individual, experiencing a long history of organizational endorsement and power, I might have a desire to react in interesting and unintended ways.

• First, I probably want to enforce my path on others.  I may not respond well if others gain authority, position or voice without ‘paying their dues’ the way that I did.  This makes me an extension of the command and control structure that, potentially, holds talented people in intractable processes.
• Next, I might be disgruntled and look for the door when I feel that my previous efforts are being ‘ignored’ or ‘disrespected.’  In a transformation effort, we often seek to raise the volume on previously unheard voices, and this often can feel to the existing technical or business leaders as a ‘net loss’ of influence or control.  This is the emotion I felt when my siblings received the same honor (and watching Alien is an honor!) that I did.
• I will protect past decisions.  An agile organization is looking forward, and rarely back.  The past is effectively ‘sunk cost’ and should not have undue weight on present decision-making.  If I were a leader that heavily invested in our past decisions, I may feel very defensive of those past decisions, using that to defend status quo.  This is especially true for those efforts and initiatives that resulted in my promotion or recognition by the org.
• I probably also have an inflated sense of self, valuing my own voice over others.  Due to this structure, the organization has reinforced the value of my decisions and opinion.  This limits the willingness of others to participate  in efforts I am involved with, knowing the ‘more valued’ or senior opinion is the one that matters.  This can make me dismissive or closed off to other, less ‘senior’ opinions.
• Many of those that have scaled some portion of your company’s ‘ladder’ intuitively desire greater and more broad span of control, as most companies glorify leaders with large-scale responsibilities.  However, the broader remit actually decreases my value to any individual initiative.  Effectively, my divided attention simply reduces my level of involvement and increases my distractions to focused execution.  If I couple this with some of the previous attitudes I articulated above, I add bad to bad.  For example, I discount the opinion of ‘focused’ resources who are ‘junior’, while preferring my distracted and spread thin ‘senior’ opinion.

These are just a few elements that prevent some excellent resources from jumping into organizational transformations whole-heartedly.  Generally, advocating for a shift within your company in terms of digital transformation takes a view to making the org more innovative and collaborative.  We desire to raise many diverse voices to solve the hardest challenges.  However, even this thought can be enough to cause existing senior folks to squirm a little, because their value has been so strongly reinforced by the written and unwritten rules of the organization.  So, how do we lead folks into transformation while minimizing the above stressors that will cause disruption/lack of buy-in to your efforts.  Here are a few approaches I have heard of and tried.

• Redefine broad leaders as spreaders of ‘intent,’ rather than solution providers.  There is tremendous value in a broad view and understanding of outcomes the business desires, especially when coupled with deep knowledge of the existing organization (how things get done).  It infuses teams with purpose and an understanding of where ‘we fit’ in the larger vision.  When it comes to execution, however, you’re broader scope does not allow you to involve yourself in detailed decision-making, but rather in driving focus on intent/desired outcomes to all teams that own execution.  Do not feel the need to get involved in smaller, implementation-level decisions, as you are engaging there at your, and the org’s, peril.  You are not involved, day to day, and therefor lack context and dedication.  Also, your intent should be customer driven.  When intent is only for the benefit of your org, and not a customer or the company, then it is time to redirect.
• Remove territorial incentives.  I’ve kept aquariums for much of my life, and if you’ve ever kept ‘closed ecosystem’ style pets, you probably have experienced how adding new animals to the ecosystem can lead to a war as the animals seek to establish territory and control.  A good rule for the aquarist is to rearrange the tank as you introduce something new to the environment, which leaves no one with an existing turf to defend.  From this neutral footing, a new relationship to both the new animal and the environment is generally more collaborative.  Again, the analogy only goes so far as we transition to humans, but here are some ways to do something similar within your org.
  • Hire folks out of old roles into new roles.  I’ve actually seen customers that terminate an existing role, and create a new job description for the new role, while providing an enablement path for existing employees to earn the new roles.  The new role is defined by a completely new set of responsibilities, measurements, etc.  The intent here is to completely reset the individual’s view in how the company is seeking to find value in their work their view of the environment.
  • Establish a new org focused on a completely different structure and invite people to join.  Wrap this org around a new initiative/outcome for the company (like a new digital experience).  Much more voluntary, this again asks individuals to leave the old and enter the new.  In many cases, this provides a great buy-in mechanism, as well as a way to view the early adopters – those that are already bought in and are hungry for change.  Once the success of the new transformed team is apparent, then layout training and retention plans for those in traditional roles.
  • Create new facilities to house teams that operate in a new way.  Several organizations established a new culture and protected it from outside influence by moving the ‘new thing’ away from their existing surroundings and setting them up in new, external facilities.  In this way, there was a very real separation from the rest of the org, and a sense of building something new.  Make sure that the shift is not just a physical one, roles should be defined in new ways, but do not underestimate a shift in physical environment.  Interestingly, such a change also can kick start innovative, new thoughts.
• Recognize team identity over personal accomplishment.  In team sports, there are glory positions, and those that go beyond on the team.  Lebron James (perhaps the best basketball player in the NBA) will always stand out no matter what team you put him on.  However, Lebron does not win a championship without exalting his team to the highest honor.  Unless the Cleveland Cavaliers are awarded the title of ‘NBA Champions,’ Lebron will fall short of winning an individual award, like ‘Finals Most Valuable Player’.  Similarly, we need to establish a team culture where the team wins when customer value is achieved.  We can certainly recognize stars on that team for their individual efforts, but the metrics we use should promote bettering the team over playing for yourself.  The approach that I have seen prove to be very effective is shifting from a project orientation to a product orientation.  That is a subject for another time, and there are some great resources out there to understand this shift – but the point is to incent team outcomes and collaboration, not only work ethic or level of contribution.  We all win when we release new value to market, and you win for having helped us do so.

As we consider moving our organizations into more collaborative and innovative organizational and teaming structures, we have to do so while considering the impact on the individuals who are encountering these changes.  The past or current structures of your organization have created a system of written and unwritten rules that your employees have internalized in terms of their sense of themselves.  When you posit change, it will be challenging and unsettling, and we should consider how to find the most encouraging and productive road to travel so that we bring the most talent with us as we embark in a new direction.  Digital transformation, for all of its technical wizardry, is first and foremost a human challenge.  Embrace the human, and discover new possibilities.

Whenever you are looking to become more agile physically, you generally need to get off the couch and start working out.  For me, there’s been a few setbacks – a shoulder surgery, back injuries, and more than a little ‘I’m too busy’ sort of excuses to my consistency in working out.  However, now that the physical therapy is releasing me to get more exercise, one thing I can tell you is that parts of me are complaining that have been dormant for quite some time!  When you look to create change, you must endure the uncomfortable feedback that will inevitably come around.

Most large enterprises that have been around for a while have generally been in the game of sheltering their leadership from painful stories for years.  It makes sense, of course.  If you are looking to position yourself and your team for success and promotion, then you are, by default, incented to only bubble up good news, frantically trying to fix things that break ‘in the dark’ (if possible) so that the team is presented in the best possible light.  This is completely rational, but ultimately separates leadership from much of the reality of execution.  The offshoot of this kind of cultural creation is that when change is called for, leaders start trying to work 5 times harder to hide the pain of the change.  Unfortunately, this can be very counterproductive.

When I spend a week just working in the office, come home and drive kids around, then to the dinner table or couch, then nothing in my body physically complains to me.  When I start making the effort to work out, then I get lots of pain from all over the place.  The challenge, of course, is understanding that it is really, really good to be experiencing the soreness of a good work out, but really bad to experience the pain of an injury (setback).  Similarly, leaders embarking on a digital transformation journey need to gear up to hear much more pain in the system than they typically have.  Part of this is not that the organizations have changed their motivation (i.e. they STILL want to protect leaders from negative reports), but true transformation will cause conflict between many teams and leaders, in addition to potential internal strife within the team.  More than likely, the reports from team ‘Y’ will read something like this, “We’re doing great!  However, team X is really not aligned, which is preventing us from being as successful as we would like to be.”  Meanwhile, team ‘X’ will say, “we’re doing smashingly well, but team ‘Y’ is struggling to keep up,” etc.  The truth is likely that the pain to transform is rippling through each team, but the incentive still persists to shelter the team and the leader.

So, how can we enable leaders to express themselves and their teams without recrimination?  Well, there are several aspects that need to be addressed.

1. Senior leadership should expect pain, and learn to differentiate between ‘good pain’ and ‘bad pain.’  ‘Good pain’ would be anything that helps us drive change.  For example, release management may be struggling to understand their new role in a CI/CD world where automation should be driving code changes straight into production as quickly as possible.  This struggle should yield a bunch of interesting ideas around automation, the value that can be provided, etc.  ‘Bad pain’ would represent disruptive conflict that is damaging to morale, and/or leading to interpersonal conflict (injury to the culture – setback).  Leaders need to be ready to turn negative conflict in a more positive direction quickly, and preferably, without punishing indiscriminately.  Certainly, too much in-fighting can and should lead to personnel (hire/fire) considerations, but we should understand that sweeping changes WILL create conflict, and humans have a tendency to over-react or over-rotate, especially as uncertainty is injected into the system.  If we can have some grace for leaders who make mistakes, we will create an environment where people will feel more free to express themselves and bring ideas in addition to conflicts to the fore.
2. Senior leadership should also invite open communication by admitting you are aware that conflict is coming, that we will have run-ins and its ‘OK,’ provided we are respectful and willing to change even as we expect others to do the same.  If you are capable of graciously dealing with conflict, to the point of being open to your own change, allows others to follow.
3. Embrace the ‘retro.’  In true agile fashion, feedback can be surfaced routinely through the use of a properly facilitated ‘retrospective.’  This long-standing agile development team practice can serve us well at the leadership levels.  Take care (as I mentioned above) to keep the retro constructive.  Running a retro with leadership that are helping you to drive your transformation should not be shy about raising challenges to the program, but should be equally bold in proposing solutions and assigning actions to overcome these challenges.
4. Be quick to experiment.  The best way to drive the right change is to simply try numerous approaches to your organizational challenges.  In the same way that product development should be ready to change direction on a dime, so should the organization.  At the org level, we do not want to change so frequently that employees cannot get their bearings before another change hits, but be ready to try something, assess it over a reasonable amount of time, and change again should it not yield the improvement that was hoped for.  Numerous experiments can yield a better result, and it culturally instills little value in immovable silos while getting rid of the ‘that’s not how we work, here’ syndrome.
5. Get to the root.  Often, our initial desire is to react to the symptom without trying to understand the challenge behind the feedback.  Challenge the team to examine what created the conflict or pain.  Ask a bunch of questions that come back to the ‘why.’  When your team has gotten a hold of why the feedback/pain exists, then you can begin to drive solution.
6. Enjoy the moment!  Change is always a wonderful time to learn and grow for everyone in the organization.  Lean into it and enjoy the ride.  Yes, old measurements will lose their meaning, and aspects of the job that you felt made you super valuable may go away, but there is much more new value to create than we can even see.  Lean in.

As you begin your journey to digitally transform, get ready to embrace the negative reports that you must begin to hear.  Take the time to get at the root of the pain rather than react to the symptom, and use this tremendously valuable information to create a better world for your company, your customer, and your teams.

As we consider industry, business and digital transformation, the time for market theory, guess-work and ‘marketecture’ is over.  It is way past time for us to get real.

The wave has begun, and many major companies are truly leaning into business transformation to fundamentally improve how they interact and serve their consumers.  Has anyone else noticed GE’s commercials to attract developers?  If you haven’t seen them, they’re pretty great (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ)!  This is a big shift in what we expect from this stellar brand, and its indicative of an industry change that is beginning to overwhelm analysts and business leadership alike.  We need look no further than recent press to see this move is not isolated in nature.  You need only consider Ford (https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2015/12/15/ford-teams-with-pivotal-to-speed-development-of-connected-car.html), Philips (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MqD6YDeRw), Mercedes (http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/10/19/mercedes-benz-and-pivotal-forge-smart-car-apps-on-cloud-foundry/), and Home Depot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl0oH0UdJPM) to find that, while we have been talking for quite some time about leveraging IT, and software development in particular, as a business enabler, we are now beginning to see the push to make that concept a reality in practice across industry verticals.  How then do we successfully create the needed changes within our companies to be truly successful in such a broad way?

It’s always interesting to see how vendors respond to these questions.  When a company asks, “How do we get started in transforming our company?” vendors will often reply with strategies that are tools-based.  ‘It seems that we can get you to a digital future with this analytics dashboard …’ or, ‘let’s put in this messaging solution to help you maximize the usage of your software services better…’ or, ‘Docker is the answer!’ These suggestions and approaches often can provide value to an individual or a team, but are essentially point solutions which, without a larger context, often lead nowhere close to holistic transformation.  They also tend to lead to theoretical ‘marketecture’ exercises to some dream of a destination that we think has a chance to lead us somewhere better.  This approach routinely does improve our execution, but almost never gets us to the ideal ‘dream’ we built PowerPoints around.

If our hope is to transform the business/culture/software, it is critical that we define the outcomes that we want to achieve up front, and the best way I’ve seen it work is to ‘Get Real’ and build something in the end-state vision.  Stated another way, the desired outcome is simply to build truly great software in the right way.  Hopefully that’s an interesting thought, but it is fraught with challenges.  What does building great software look like when we have not been doing things that way traditionally?  How do we deal with legacy debt?  How do we address our processes (funding, governance, etc.) which are designed with great intentions, but significantly limit our ability to innovate? This is where engaging with a firm that builds software the way you want to build becomes essential.

Often, you need to partner with someone who does the whole thing the way you want to do it and build something real.  I learned a bit about cognitive learning a while back, and people simply learn best when paired with an expert who is already where you want to go.  Your mind picks up patterns and modes of thinking that are new and more complex than we can define in a slide by working side by side with someone who lives life in the ‘target state.’  If you want to be an outstanding lawyer, you need to know something about the law, and then you should find a mentor to work with who is the kind of lawyer you want to be.  Learn from the best, stay nimble, and stay coachable.

Now this next part will be a bit of a commercial, but I love the approach we take at Pivotal Labs, and it provides an excellent example of successful implementation of the process I mentioned above.  At Pivotal, we seek to help firms by bringing them into our process (http://pivotal.io/labs/process) and building something new together to illustrate an end-state effort that allows for rapid innovation and outstanding software development.  The goal is to help others build software the way Silicon Valley startups build software (with as little friction to innovation as possible, building in a cloud native fashion, etc).   This includes experiencing culture, process, tools, platform, etc. to accomplish a goal or outcome (such as a new mobile application).  Our hope is that this knowledge does not stay at Pivotal, but rather becomes a part of who our customer is.

Once you have built something real and experienced an end-state approach and product, you can then rationally step back and evaluate what you do with everything else you have.  You can even figure out where tools can most effectively play!

A funny thing happened on the way to Hadoop adoption.  Several industry leaders agreed to a core set of common components to help enterprises adopt value added solutions above the open-source core with confidence and more ease of use, and there has emerged a very interesting backlash from parts of the open-source community who viewed this move as a ‘power grab,’ or ‘by the vendor, for the vendor.’  The theory is that by establishing a common core set of Hadoop components into this “Open Data Platform,” or ODP, that these vendors (Hortonworks, Pivotal and IBM, primarily) are essentially stripping choice from the world and making it a very bland place, while heralds of freedom (primarily Cloudera) steadfastly defend us from predatory vendors.  As I said, it is an interesting debate.  Who’s right?  Who’s wrong?  Do we even care?

To set the stage, open-source has created this bold, wonderful and transformative world that we live in today.  Hadoop has revolutionized our approach to dealing with data.  We can now gain insights where once we were blind, and we can leverage a breadth of data that has opened our minds to the possibilities of solving many of the world’s largest problems.  With these open-source components, GE seeks to improve energy efficiency globally, while John Deere seeks to improve crop yields. While these are also good for these companies commercially, it has opened opportunities to understand customers for better marketing, helps us deal with fraud and security concerns … these are a bit more ‘big brother’ in nature, but solve key problems for enterprises and consumers.  Companies serve their customers better, resources are consumed more efficiently, ne’re-do-wells are intercepted, and, yes, profits improve.

To achieve these goals, there is a great and growing sea of Hadoop components.  As an abbreviated list, the Hadoop eco-system is now composed of Pig, Hive, HBase, Storm, Spark, Sqoop, Flume, Kafka, Yarn, Falcon, Knox, Ranger and many more.  The challenge for companies without large teams dedicated to working with this diverse and growing ecosystem revolves around integration and managing all of the builds, versions, and matching components effectively to solve the challenges that companies face.  Without a team of experts, these companies must rely on vendors with specialized expertise, and as such, a nice market has emerged to supply that talent.  Additionally, vendors build value-added software on top of these core components (such as SAS, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Terradata and many other analytics vendors).  As a vendor, what pieces and parts, versions, etc. do you place your bets on?  What is your testing like if you plan to support multiple versions of every component in an effort to serve a broad market?  To solve for this complexity, vendors like Cloudera, Hortonworks, Pivotal, IBM and others will release packages of integrated components to make things easier for customers to consume.  As an example, Cloudera Enterprise packages a version of HDFS, Map-Reduce, HBase, Impala, Cloudera Search, Cloudera Navigator, and Apache Spark (to name a few).  This integrated package makes things easier for an enterprise as they contract with Cloudera for the expertise to service this complex stack.  “Don’t assemble the components yourself as Cloudera has already done it for you.”  The only downside is that it locks the vendor or customer who builds software on top of the stack into that vendor’s view of the world.  Hortonworks, IBM and Pivotal (and many others) are all game competitors in this space who could also serve the same customer, but their underlying open-source selections may be different (Kafka, Knox, Ranger, etc.) and the ones that are consistent likely are on different versions and mixes of components.  Could a customer swap out the Enterprise Data Hub open source components with divergent builds?  Perhaps.  Does the new vendor support the same versions?  Do we have the expertise to pull this all apart and put it together again without breaking any of the integrations that we now depend on?  And if we do, why are we paying anyone else to service this stack?

The challenge then is that once I have placed a bet on a particular vendor, I am placing a bet on a particular bundle of components.  The theory behind ODP, then, is that if we aggregate a common core set of components between industry leaders, then perhaps a customer can make a bet on a bundle that many vendors support.  A customer, then, could build on Pivotal’s stack (and value-added management, analytics libraries, WAN and eventing capabilities), but if they become sold on something IBM is doing, they are not locked on the big data stack level.  The ODP bundle supporting the solutions you build is consistent below your company’s/vendor’s capabilities.  I saw some comments from a detractor who implied that this is similar to McDonald’s, In-and-Out Burger, and Burger King agreeing to build the same burger.  While a compelling visual, it is more like those vendors agreeing that they will all use beef for their burgers.  The analogy is limited, of course, in that I wouldn’t be looking to swap beef from one reusable burger to another, but the point is that what differentiates the vendors is service to their customers and the value-added preparation of the core components (management, analytical engines, dashboards, libraries of machine learning algorithms, etc.).  At the next level down, contributors to the underlying open-source components differentiate themselves based on adoption by the largest set of customers.

So, does this mean customers no longer have choice?  Hardly.  If a vendor builds to the ODP platform, it simply implies that a common set of core components, at X versions, on Y release schedules are certified.  Can you assemble them without a participating ODP vendor?  Of course. Is open-source innovation on these individual project levels stifled?  Why would that be?  If more companies adopt the open-source components because of this approach, I would expect increased investment, not less.  Besides, ODP is not a ‘fixed’ ecosystem.  Innovators will build additional compelling capabilities, and ODP will flex and morph.

Ultimately, the jury is still out.  A really good friend of mine challenged me recently with a question: “Isn’t this just by the vendors for the vendors?”  That really challenged me to reconsider the position until I realized that he is exactly right.  It is geared to solving the challenges of vendors.  But who are the vendors?  The list includes IBM, Pivotal and Hortonworks, but also GE, Dell, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, silicon valley start-ups, SaaS vendors and the hundreds of other companies that seek to build value-added capabilities that leverage big data stacks.

Undoubtedly, some customers/vendors will build up their own expertise and manage their own integration and operational challenges with regards to these components.  This is a great approach if your company differentiates itself through these efforts.  Everyone else, those customers who do not differentiate their brand based on the minutia of operating the big data stack, will have a choice to bet on vendors that support ODP or not, and there will be plenty of criteria that will impact that decision-making process.  Regardless, ODP is not the tyrannical takeover bid it is portrayed to be by opponents.  Innovation will still proceed at the individual project level, and I expect projects to come in and out of the ODP, but what a change can be brought to the industry if it does make adoption less risky!

Is ODP evil?  Is it good?  Neither?  Ultimately, you (the industry) will decide … and perhaps you’ll even comment!

Please bear with me as I set up this topic.

One of my great joys in this business is interviewing new candidates. The interview represents the moment when the candidate’s hope wars with his or her insecurity as they dream about their future, while the hiring manager’s hope and vision for the future organization wars with his/her trepidation of making a hire based on limited information. This tension in a time of flux in career and organization is an amazing recipe for ideation – new and creative ways to find and place people into areas of greatest value for the individual and the company. I’m not sure there is a better picture of what business truly is than this.

So it was with great joy that I brought a candidate (let’s call him ‘Jim’) up to our vibrant corporate headquarters in silicon valley. It’s a great place for us to bring customers and candidates because they get to feel the electricity in the air. They get the palpable sense that things are happening and moving, and the feeling that we are leaning into the future with dreams of changing the world. So, I spend about a half-day with Jim. I ask him to consultatively position solutions, I test his technical depth, and we talk of his vision and hopes as they relate to career and mission, and then we go to lunch with a VP to give him another opportunity to make an impact on our organization. I invite him to stay and have dinner later that evening, but Jim has plans with friends, so we shake hands, I put my hand on his shoulder and tell him there are great things ahead … and I find out two days later that Jim never came home. A car accident that night claimed a brilliant career, and cut short dreams of a long marriage and days at the beach with his children.

I tell this story not to establish pain, but to provide a ‘why’ to this writing. You see, Jim was away from his family on a ‘work thing,’ and any life cut short leaves us pondering fairness.

Today, we talk about ‘work-life balance’ and how to be healthy and hale we must take these different segments, place them on a scale, and make sure that home gets its fair share of our time. We express sentiments through platitudes like ‘no-one on their death bed ever thinks about how they should have spent one more day at the office’ as ways to help us focus on those relationships that should be most important to us. While this is true, I think it can be a bit misleading and pushes us into a sense of dissatisfaction with our lives and choices when we segment our lives so starkly. This is not a question of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ where ‘office’ represents the evil empire and ‘home’ represents the good and holy republic. Of course no-one dreams of spending more time at the office, but we do dream of spending more time with people in whom deep relationships dwell. The office is just a building – the relationships we build in that office become an extension of our lives; they help define us and our view of self and the world.

To make this practical, I deeply love my wife, and through our relationship I see visions of a future holding each other in dark and in happy times. She challenges me to keep my eye on practical concerns (not forgetting the trees as I look at the forest) and she demands that I focus on intimacy of relationship – depth and quality of communication, etc. In my children I rediscover simple pleasures, I am reminded to communicate good character in challenging them to discover their own paths, and I see the world anew – they keep my mind young and full of dreams! These are absolutely a part of who I am, and they are the central core from which I evolve. But my life is also more … I have a mission and a purpose that extends from that base to impact the world around me.

I love the teams I work with. I am in meetings with people that report to me, and they present topics and vision that open my mind in ways I could never fully express my gratitude for. I feel a part of their lives, and hope I help them reach bigger and brighter things. I thank them constantly for their hard work, and while I think they assume I have to and that it’s just one of those platitudes their boss says to close a team call, I really do see them changing the world … and changing me. The same is true of my leaders. We face tough challenges, and I’m called upon to make tough decisions – hiring and firing is not just a task, it impacts the lives of the people we touch. Decisions which address business direction and product focus can impact the value perceived of our endeavor and everyone who is a part of it – and my leaders stand in the gap with me and my reports to navigate dangerous waters. My customers and partners constantly challenge me to see their world through their eyes so that, in my understanding, I can provide them aid as they chase after their own dreams. Visionaries at my company and in the industry at large impact me as I walk the halls with them. They bring the wider world into focus beyond where even my prodigious imagination can take me.

The point here is not to say that work is equal to home, or to challenge us to spend more time ‘at the office.’ Our lives most assuredly require balance, but what I have found is that when business and home are seen as a continuation of a single whole ‘you,’ we are healthier and more wise. I believe we have gone too far in our effort to ‘leave work at work.’ When we apply a hard segmentation to our lives, our family is disconnected and wanting. My wife will not understand where my heart is because I don’t bring enough work home for her to understand my passions, hopes and dreams for me, for us, for the kids, and for the world.

On the other side, our society has grown to see business as ‘evil’ in many cases. While there are abuses of power, I see many of these ethically questionable business patterns arising because we separate ‘home’ and ‘office’ so starkly. How can you steal money from people when you see them as part of your family? How do you abuse an expense policy when you see it impacting families who depend on paychecks and bonuses derived from your company’s profitability? Sociopathic behavior (as defined by acting in violent or negative ways toward another) takes place when we divorce ourselves emotionally from the target of our action. A lack of empathy can cause a world of hurt. We can cut someone off on the freeway much easier when all we see is another car on the road. It is much more difficult to be predatorially antisocial when you are cutting off Kate the young mother and her 4 month old son, Billy, who you care about. The point here is that we should bring much more ‘home’ into the ‘office.’ Those that I characterize as ‘my people’ include those I work with the same as they do those I meet outside of the office. You and I are but distant family.

I realize that this is a bit philosophical and ‘touchy-feely’, but I hope these recent events allow you to understand why I go there. In the very brief time that I interacted with Jim, I was impacted. Some small piece of him will be with me from here on out. I would have wished his wife and child could have had more time and that the future we were exploring together could have been more fully realized, but it was not to be. His death was a stark reminder to me that nothing is guaranteed, and, as is human nature, I ask ‘why?’ He was away from his family, he was ‘at the office’, etc. But that is too narrow a view. Jim was chasing a dream, and that dream included his family who he carried with him to the very last moments of his life. In some small way, I am proud that I was a part of his vision.

When my last days come, I will certainly not be thinking of the office. I WILL most assuredly be thinking about many of you: co-workers, friends, business associates. We are partners in a dream that is redefining many aspects of our world, and because of that you give me purpose and direction. My life is full because of all that I do and the relationships I treasure. I must relax with the ‘us vs. them’ mentality and rather look at life as a whole, prioritizing relationships over things, possibilities over limitations, and hopes above fear.

I pray that Jim’s family finds peace, and I am grateful for ‘the office’ that provided the brief moment I had with him.