Fast flow embraces decoupling, autonomy, asynchrony, and eventual consistency for both technology and for organisation design, together with a humanistic, team-first approach.
These insights explain and explore how organizations can encourage an ecosystem suitable for fast flow.
Over the past decade, organizations have given increasing attention to employee well-being. Recognising the importance of fostering a healthy, happy and supported workforce, and the obvious benefits to business outcomes, employers are keen to emphasize how employee well-being is a key focus of their organization.
Yet over half of employees believe their employer is guilty of well-being washing and a recent research study by William Fleming Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre concludes that individual well-being interventions have little to no impact. Putting some possibly justifiable cynicism to one side for a moment, what could be causing this gap between intention and impact?
Psychological safety is a foundational requirement for organizations seeking fast flow and effective change. We have seen a couple of articles recently that suggest psychological safety could have a downside, so we decided to reflect on the issue.
An article in Fortune in 2023 suggested that performance is improved when everyone is ‘held accountable’ and implied that this was at odds with psychological safety. Another (Hive Learning) suggested that being ‘comfortable’ was the opposite of psychological safety, though it did acknowledge that you could be comfortable with either scenario.
In this article, we review the benefits of psychological safety, why these benefits occur, whether or not there is a downside, and what you should be ‘comfortable’ with.
Summary: pay attention to group dynamics for effective transformation
The common theme that emerged from the sessions I attended at DevOpsDays Oslo 2023 is really that structure is not going to save or fix your digital transformation. Instead, we need to pay attention to the group sizes, group interactions, and group experience when using tools.
… it’s actually the sociotechnical aspects of delivering and operating software that are the most crucial, that the social and the technical cannot be easily separated.
This was apparent even in Matthew’s opening keynote when talking about deployment pipelines and how often they mirror the team structure in an organization. “Show me your deployment pipelines and I will predict your team boundaries.”
The mini-book answers key questions such as how to structure organizations and teams, how to get the most from all of your team members, and how to identify and remove inhibitors of flow. And there is a detailed section on the relative merits of different models of change. Should there be a central change department, for example?
The research from DORA shows that, for technology organizations, psychological safety is a double whammy. An absence of psychological safety will contribute to poor software delivery performance, deployment pain, and employee burnout. On the other hand, the presence of psychological safety will contribute to improved software delivery performance, organizational performance, and job satisfaction. It’s double or quits.
My colleague, Matthew Skelton (co-author of the book Team Topologies), was asked to curate a track on the final day of this year’s QCon London conference on the topic of ‘Optimizing for Speed and Flow’. I was fortunate to be able to attend and watch all the talks and panel discussion on this track (and live-tweet from the company account!). In this article, I have shared my key takeaways from the sessions in the track.
Organizations engaged in knowledge work must recognise that many of their current ways of working are the legacy of a bygone era and are no longer applicable or effective in today’s world. They need to adopt a new approach to how they do their work. Knowledge work requires teamwork and collaboration; it requires that people are engaged and switched on, able to use all their talents and creativity to solve hard and novel problems.
During the last year, staff and partners at Conflux have been changing the experience and outcomes that our customers’ software delivery teams have when they meet online. These meetings might be arranged to have conversations about their work, or consider topics like operability, engineering practices, or Team Topologies. In this article we’ll explain how we’ve been bringing intentional design and participatory methods to the way we convene teams, to transform the results they get when thinking and working together in groups.
To make it possible for those who are lower down in the organizational hierarchy to feel psychologically safe to speak up when the situation demands that they do, or when asked to do so directly, we need to create good relationships between people - relationships that are built on openness and trust. Schein’s argument is that ‘humble inquiry’ is the method by which such relationships are forged. These relationships need to be created before they’re needed, we need to invest in them upfront so that they are ready when the situation arises.
