Objecting to Aristotle and Performance

As ever, any time we launch something unprecedented in our space, I am painfully reminded of the divide between the DevOps and unDevOps community and how that adds to the HumanDebt?. 

The former is welcoming, fast to try and adopt, open. The latter immediately digs out the “but”s, the excuses, the risk assessments, the contrary evidence. A stark contrast between a culture of “yes and!” and one of “computer says “no”. One that’s daring and hungry for good news and one that’s ultimately unsustainable and doomed, whether they realise it or not.

In particular this week, the reactions to our newly launched Aristotle Score reflected that. The enthusiasm of the DevOps community and the obstinate -and alarmingly irrational- detraction of the unDevOps one. 

I would have expected -and welcomed!- mistrust of what the score entails in our Dashboard, or how we formulated our questions to capture the four other dimensions that Google mentions and l was looking forward to dissecting every choice of words, or feature design decision -in particular so we hear if we got them wrong and rethink!- but l didn’t anticipate the pushback against the study in itself. Unbelievably, the most undebatable of studies with findings so evident that we all collectively knew where key, but never saw enunciated so clearly, manages to be controversial to some. 

“But their rigour…”; “But their lack of transparency…”; “But their special circumstances…”; “But they don’t use it themselves…” were the main topics. At first glance it’s just fear-based classic HumanDebt at play where people are terminally afraid of anything new, questioning any fundamentals or threatening the status quo, but in practice their objections are bedazzling. Let's try and go over some.

No rigour - it’s not an academic study. There didn’t need to be any. End of. 

No transparency - considering how adamant detractors are that the data is garbage, it’s ironic that they also complain about the lack of visibility in the same breath. Which is it then? But discounting the first “objection”, it’s downright arrogant of anyone to believe we were “owed” any kind of exact view when a commercial enterprise has spent their own time and money to investigate something internally. 

No replicability - the main thesis of this is “sure but that’s a Google thing” and that the findings only apply to their unique environment. This is easily dismantled by quoting the 2019 Accelerate: State of DevOps report -which anyone can ironically access for free courtesy of Google- outlining the DORA research -which specifically addressed this, to see if the findings apply across the board for other enterprises as well or not. The report interrogated 31,000 professionals and says “Our analysis found that this culture of psychological safety is predictive of software delivery performance, organizational performance, and productivity. Although Project Aristotle measured different outcomes, these results indicate that teams with a culture of trust and psychological safety, with meaningful work and clarity, see significant benefits outside of Google.” But while the report and findings are crystal clear, I fear outlining them to these unDevOps “critics” would be futile.

“Google appears not to be using the findings themselves” - This one is the most infuriating to me, as the example used is how they fired James Damore with no regard for the nuances of that happening and how it has no demonstrable relevance to whether or not Google holds these values dear, as if they dug deeper, they’d find they exist at the very core of their culture. 

If you google (ha!) some of these “critiques” you’ll fall down a guaranteed rabbit hole of blood-boiling-migraine-causing pseudo-arguments from people who clearly have a very loose grasp on the concepts including one article I won’t link for evident reasons, which claims that “Maybe there’s a role for soft skills and even a role for Psychological Safety” but teams that have it are prone to feeling too comfortable, too communicative and that may result in “romantic or other relationships at the office” and that “highly skilled teams which are subject to penalties for unapproved activities” will “vastly outperform the safe ones”. 

Needless to say, the article is so painfully unintelligent and outrageously stuffed with pseudo-science and straw men that it sends my blood pressure through the roof whenever I remember it. 

Most importantly, l think what hit me and left me aghast, is that there should ever be any willingness to object or tear it down in the first place. How can anyone argue with the common sense and decency implied in a statement that basically says “For teams to be performant, they need to feel safe in their bubble, they need no ambiguity and they have to derive pride and joy from their own work and its effects on the world”. 

How is that even remotely debatable?!? Quid prodest if you vociferously question the exact data or methodology, or anything at all to do with a study that ultimately advocates for human decency and employee happiness to gain productivity? What drives you to do that instead of fixing your evident HumanDebt?

Aristotle himself would have been a voracious DevOps practitioner who would have wanted to interrogate data and open the dialogue if he were still around, and he would’ve never questioned if the sum of all parts should or shouldn’t feel safe, trusting, stable, clear and invested.

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