Handling the chimp in relation to Agile and Devops

Last week was very busy at the digital transformation summit (https://digitaltransformationit.oracle.com/london/) which for me was one of the best events I have attended. The presentation quality was so high it felt every session provided a new piece of innovation for me.

Each week when I write this little article I try to cover new ground. This week it is not new ground but more how a piece of brilliance can be related to innovation in IT. The key note on Wednesday morning was made by Sir Dave Brailsford who in his 18 year career has been responsible for 33 Olympic medals, 18 of them Gold and 3 Tour de France victories (see my tweets from the event https://twitter.com/JAbel_Oracle, plus some pictures of the presentations).

Now I know about Dr Steve Peters through one of my daughter’s own sport, but never really related it to my industry (an excellent book to read is “The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness”). So here we go; consider Agile/Devops which is a corner stone to rapid innovation giving us constant updates to improve quality, experience or new features e.g. “marginal gains”.

But when you want to jump the innovation chasm you need to understand the inner chimp. David explained the three areas; “the chimp”, “the human” and “the computer” which are the parts of the brain we are interested in for this discussion. So a simple way to consider each is when you receive an email which really gets you angry. “The chimp” is making emotional decisions, so you will either immediately respond with something you regret later or “the human” will take over or consider the consequences of the action. “The computer” is the fast action part of the brain which is programmed by the chimp or human as already discussed.

So let’s relate it to our industry. If you come up with a new great innovation which could deliver great value you are excited and “the human” side is saying all the positives and making total sense. But at some point “the chimp” will start saying “this looks hard, why not wait for a better time”. The problem is “the chimp” is very powerful in negotiation with “the human” side and this is why most innovation struggles to leave the white board and be executed.

But when we introduce lower barriers of entry for executing innovation like Cloud or Digitial Cloud services we can see a quicker route to success. The end result is not so far away, then when blended with agile we can now implement marginal gains and not a massive jump to the end which again will allow “the chimp” to start bring negatives into the journey. During the presentation I was thinking about my own career and then realised my first steps into the industry which started in support at Oracle gave me a “devops” culture by default. When you have to support something in production all the decisions that impacted support are very visible. Meaning when you move into other roles you consider the impact of support / operation by default which is where you have unknowingly trained your brain.

So a rounded career, learning new skills and especially understanding the impact of your decision is so valuable; it has been for me. So a very thought provoking week indeed for me. Again, you can read all the great reviews from the event. The biggest announcement was the extension of the UK Data Centre for PaaS and IaaS which when blended with the SaaS provides a total solution.

Next week is exciting as I will start sharing some of the highlights from the latest IDG research we sponsored to show how the private, public and hybrid cloud has matured further.

Also on the 7th March I will be presenting a webcast on Road To The Cloud

https://twitter.com/JAbel_Oracle