We are just back from The Value Flywheel Effect book launch at 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 morning. 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 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.
Learning Sprints at DOES 2022
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 LearnWardleyMapping.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.
Mapping with participants
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? 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 workshops, when you go through it, it clicks with people. And you can see them have that eureka moment.
The Mapping 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.
It’s the inertia points, the movement and the order
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. All the slides are there.
Creating the Value Flywheel Effect Talk
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.
It’s not the map that matters
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.
The Value Flywheel Effect Book Launch Signing
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.
The first book reviews are in
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 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.
Can you map psychological safety?
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 another while!
DevOps Enterprise Summit Resources
DevOps Enterprise Summit was a great event. Look up the slides on GitHub . 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.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai