People Engineering - DevOps perspective - 1st Principle

I do not intend to scare you !! But believe me when I told term "People Engineering" to my ten year old daughter - she asked me - "Is it a dark magic Papa ? Something like what Voldermort did ? ". The question kept me haunting for some days altogether , untill I started spending more time reading about the human nature and motivation theories until again my co-author Manas hit me with a term called "Propensity" !

I immediately looked at the internet dictionary and found out that propensity means

Well to me it meant "internal tendencies"!!

I further decided to explore the meaning of propensity in Sanskrit. The reason of choosing sanskrit because the only language known to mankind that uses context free grammer.

There are papers written on Sanskrit as a programming language in addition to the first major publication by Rick Briggs

Now with all this background when I looked up the meaning of the word Propensity in Sanskrit is "PravaNatA" [Capitalization is for emphasis on the letters]. The word "PravaNatA" is also found close to the english word tendency.

So when I go from English to Sanskrit with the word Propensity - Sanskrit comes back and tells me that please also consider using the word Tendency. So I used the word Natural Human Tendency as an elaboration to Propensity.

So how can we change the Natural Tendency of a programmer ? or a Tester ? or an Ops Guy ? What can be done so that their natural tendencies to work changes in a way so that everyone works in a given way so that maxumum delivery velocity can be achieved at all times.

It is not that easy to change !!!

For this I had to step back to a previous question again asked by my co-author. The question was in hindi.I was planning for my first trek to Gangotri and Gaumukh in Uttarakhand. The picture below is a famous picture of Gaumukh.

Now along the way there is a place called Bhojwasa

If you can figure out the glacial flow in the above picture - you should also be able to identify a big rock near the green roof huts.

Now before I go further - let me tell you what was the question. The question goes as follows: "Pran ka sanchar kaise hota hai ?" When I first heard the question - I thought let me ask this question to some self proclaimed Babaji's who live in this region. So I met with a few and asked them the same question to a Babaji who stays along the river , if you have a keen pair of eyes you should be able to find his hut in the above picture.

The Babaji - kept quite for sometime and said only one thing. "Yog se". I went ahead and asked him "Can inner tendencies be altered ?" , He said , "Yes". I was surprised and I asked him , "How ?" . He kept quite for some time and again said " Yog se".

I thought whether I should ask him the next question or not. He looked at me and said - "Whatever question you have , I have only one answer 'Yog se'".

I gave up and left him alone ....

After coming back to my hometown from the high altitude trek, I decided to understand more about this "Yog se" .. thing.

I started looking at youtube and other places on all possible answers to yoga and none of them seemed really scientific unless I stumbled upon this book by the noted positive psychologist M Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi goes ahead and says that as human beings our information processing capacity is 120 bits/sec, out of which 60 bits goes away to understand a dialog and there are bits required for the person to really be aware of himself or herself. So really 120 bits/sec is not much.

So my take was how to best manage that 120 bits/sec information speed effectively to maximize the performance of the team. So I started thinking like if some bits were reserved bits for the team, what would happen ? How can this be done ?

To my understanding Csikszentmihalyi uses the word physic energy[combination of psychic and physical energy] to describe the word "attention" and using the right attention , which is an internal force , can be used to manipulate the 120 bits.

Hence the question generally was how to use the right level of attention ? While it can be easy to answer this at an individual level [practice of meditation], how can this work in groups that too geographically distributed ?

So the journey till now has been from Propensity to tendency to attention. Now while all these are internal forces - attention is the only human faculty which can be altered externally through behavioural mechanisms. So if there is too much noise - it is difficult to read a book. Hence if there is a way to change the external world so that the internal attention schemes are equivalently changed, at least some behavour changes can be improved.

Hence how the external world is designed should ideally impact the attention schemes and hence our first People engineering principle.

"Control the environment and communication to promote attention."

You can find more on People engineering in our latest book.

This however is the old version. You can checkout the new version from Amazon!!!