How The Best Get Better, Every Day

Anders Ericsson, a researcher in expert performance and professor at Florida State University, studied the world's top violinist in 1993 to discover what separates the good from the truly great.

As Anders Ericsson observed the violinist at work, he learned that the best of the best combined extraordinary work ethic with what he called "deliberate practice". They practiced with intensity for short bursts, measured their results along the way, then took breaks to recover, reflect, learn and adjust. Then, they’d rinse and repeat.

The Lean movement is born:

In the 1980’s, unbeknownst to Ericsson, John Krafcik was writing his master’s thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was studying what Toyota was doing to help them make such jaw-dropping progress and compete with the big three U.S. automakers. Toyota too, was striving for greatness.

Krafcik, while watching Toyota make cars, learned that they worked, unbeknownst to him, much like the violinists in Ericsson’s study.

They planned their work. They did the work. They checked their results. They adjusted as needed. Rinse and repeat. Key to their approach was PDCA, or Plan, Do, Check, Adjust—the continuous improvement cycle, originally developed by Walter A. Shewart in the 1920s, and refined by W. Edwards Deming a couple decades later.

The Agile movement is born:

In February 2001, 17 smart software engineers frustrated with the high failure rate of software development projects, met at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah and wrote the Agile Manifesto. Perhaps unbeknownst to them, it was yet another form of deliberate practice, where software teams Plan, Do, Check and Adjust (although they don’t call it that) in short, two-week cycles they call “sprints”.

The DevOps movement is born:

In 2009, two frustrated Flickr employees, John Allspaw, senior vice president of technical operations, and Paul Hammond, director of engineering, did a little role play presentation at a conference that illustrated the inefficiencies and finger pointing between software developers and IT operations.

Getting software deployed and in use by customers was painful and contentious. The process had to become seamless and integrated, they argued.

According to  The presentation had a dramatic flair to it, as Allspaw and Hammond would role-play the contentious interplay between representatives of Development and Operations during a typical software deployment, along with all the finger-pointing/blame that goes on, such as, “It’s not my code, it’s your machines!” Their presentation made the case that the only rational way forward is for application development and operations activities to be seamless, transparent and fully integrated. Over time, this presentation has reached legendary status, and is historically viewed as the seminal moment in time for that called out to the IT industry for methods that we now know as DevOps.

Patrick Debois, a frustrated Belgian consultant, watched the Allspaw/Hammond presentation by video stream. He was that he formed his own conference called Devopsdays in Ghent, Belgium. The term “DevOps” was officially in the history books.

How to be a champion

Practice deliberately. Whether you adopt one of the improvement and performance excellence approaches above or come up with your own take on them, remember, they all have the same common denominators:

Plan, Do, Check, Adjust.

Raise your standard.

Repeat.