2021's First Big Ticket

You very nearly escaped my last musings of the year, we’ve said so much in all the other editions of this newsletter and you have all been so incredibly supportive and open that the break was justified, but I realised I still need to ask something of you. 

First - a "thank you". On a personal level, I’ve realised I have much to be grateful for, aside from writing my book “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teams in the Digital Age”, my magical talks with TEH Gene Kim and speaking at DOES, my 2020 revolves around so much learning and growth I find it hard to properly moan despite how I feel by deferring it, I may be missing on this natural “moaning window” as it looks like we all have a tough few months if not a whole hard year ahead.

Above all, my greatest personal gain has been being welcomed into the DevOps community. I say “welcome” knowing it will make some eyes roll at my lack of seemingly well-deserved imposter syndrome. I’ve never built a DevOps pipe myself, never had to explain the point from scratch to some stubborn enterprise, never had to vouch for either the tech or the process at great risk to life or limb while still potentially writing code and doing stand-ups and while I have built teams, fought tough intrapreneurial battles inside bellies of beasts, or made sure DevOps was the soul of my startups, I’m not and will never be enough of a techie to feel like I’m worthy of the company of greats and yet I’ve had a warm reception over the past few years since I’ve “left” the FinTech world and focused firmly on my work on Psychological Safety and my obsession with Agile from this community, so thank you.

I hope we all have a few entries on the personal gratitude retro despite the year we’ve had, but the greatest collective net win of all has been on the people side across the board. With the “POC of WFH” proven, a new and worthwhile dialogue about humans and humanity both at work and in society re-started and, above all, with more momentum behind the idea of teams and the need to be Psychologically Safe to be performant than ever before, we stand to make great strides once we come out on the other side of this.

Still, as I was saying, this article is not just a list of wins but contains an ask. 

Here’s the deal: I know you’ve been working hard, -maybe harder than anyone else because that pesky combination between your power of conviction and passion make you do so-, but I need to ask you for another push and it is one that I know is doable because the DevOps community is the repository of extreme resilience, wisdom and courage. 

We need to push this over the line. The wins above, while monumental, they’re not yet secure, not ready to be moved to the “Done” column. 

Unless you’re in an enterprise who has very clearly said WFH or hybrid is their new normal unless you’ve seen the dialogue on race and gender be completely redefined and unless you’ve seen resources to measure and grow being diverted towards the topic of teams and Psychological Safety in particular, then none of the HumanDebt? has actually been touched and it’s all just lip service and you’re in great danger of it all “going back to normal” once the vaccines have been rolled out. 

DevOps Superheroes have known that the only winners in the tech industry are the ones who can put their people first and obsess about high performant teams to deliver on any of the promises of Agile for years and now, after this 2020 shock, the rest of the organisation has had to -very reluctantly- agree, but that agreement will never last unless it’s underpinned by actions. 

The theoretical tickets - redefining work around outcomes and products; firmly placing the customer at the centre of every action again; cleaning up language; insisting on complete honesty; leaders modelling true vulnerability; learning empathy together; grabbing organisational permission slips about every human topic - they are all needed still but harder to grab from the backlog, but the hands-on actionable tickets should be worth the grab and doable. 

Getting a commitment towards hybrid -if not fully remote- should still be doable. 

Asking for resources to organise your teams in the wake of the new reality be they budget or approvals to purchase software or knowledge is still doable (if hard!).

Insisting on relentless measuring should be doable, in particular with the new kick-off coming up. And I wouldn’t use the word “measurement” outside of this group, just recently the amazing Ffion Jones and I were discussing how the term is absolutely terrifying to most and we ought to only ever use the term “data” and never mention the actual measuring as it paralyses people. But you’re not those people, you can’t be scared off by words, in particular when they are true and correct. 

There’s so much we can and should be measuring from a human perspective, that we can stick many of the theoretical big tickets in there. We can measure the change in rhetoric and bias if we’re honest about internal dialogue and candid conversations about big societal issues. We can measure if leadership workgroups are real teams or not. We can measure all the elements of Psychological Safety. And if we can measure if there’s courage and if we’re open, if we can check if we’re flexible and if we’re resilient if we can look at how we learn and if we’re engaged and EQed and empathic enough then we can measure how our people really feel and what makes them interact the way they do. Add all of these to your KPIs or your OKRs or any other set of objective indicators you have to judge if your last sprints went well. Don't measure only code and deployments, or frequency and cleanliness, add the above, balance the tech indicators with the human indicators and make it your mission to better both.

And if we usher in a culture of honest measurement we’ll have to eliminate some of the HumanDebt? around asking too. So much trauma from the yearly sterile surveys and the punitive 360s that needs to be cleaned up, that we can never have honest dialogue before we deal with it. If we show our teams we can measure (or rather that *they* can measure) in ways that will make them safe and valued they’ll welcome it. If we show them the results stay at team-bubble-level and are only there to inform the next best action for the wellbeing of the team, they'll be excited about it. If we can show them that the measurement is not only “for the good” but that the actions will make them happier and stronger they’ll be the first to advocate for it. With teams excited for growth and betterment and the data to guide them through continuing the teamwork, they’ll soar and we’ll have transformed the lip service into a worthwhile cultural paradigm shift. 

The world of work needs your help to secure these wins and if we help them over the line, then we may be able to look back in 5-10 years and point towards this moment as the pivotal one where business understood success in technology is all about the people and started tackling their HumanDebt? and when it became important to make our humans happy in Psychologically Safe and healthy teams that became DevOps elite performers.

May you find the energy for this last superhuman push on the big ticket of getting the human wins firmly in place as we step into the new year, may your teams feel like family and make magic together, may you have countless moments of flow, may you laugh, may you breathe, may you have strength and courage and may your Psychological Safety ever grow and your HumanDebt?ever drop in 2021!

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.