Whose Transformation is it Anyway? with Andrew Clay Shafer

Matty and Jessica Kerr talk with Andrew Clay Shafer about transformation, recorded in March 2020 as the pandemic forced sudden change on everyone. Matty notes that the three had a 45-minute green room conversation before recording that nobody will get to hear. Andrew says "transformation" is vague and ill-defined, and like Agile, it's common enough that people think they know what it means, but "everyone has a different agenda." What Andrew cares about is how to get social-technical systems of humans and computers to do things in a way that gives the humans better experiences and performance. The cold open is Andrew's "There's always DevOps in the banana pants."

Forced Digital Transformation

Jessica notes that working from home during a pandemic, as opposed to voluntarily working remotely, makes everyone more dependent on the technical parts of the system for social interaction. Andrew says many organizations are being forced to live a digital reality they didn't want, which forces the question, though it's unclear how it will play out. Digital transformation as a tagline is not new. Andrew found an IDC projection of over $7 trillion invested in digital transformation initiatives from 2020 to 2023, made before the pandemic, and that most people consider the vast majority of those initiatives failures, with failure rates between 66% and 90%. Andrew adds that with no clear success criteria and a culture that doesn't allow failure, things that are failures by any measure are often called successes.

Pareto Inefficient Nash Equilibrium

Andrew explains the framing Andrew has used in talks for about seven years, Pareto inefficient Nash equilibrium. It describes a situation where changing certain things would leave no one worse off and at least one party better off, but no player would change their strategy unilaterally. What makes DevOps hard is that no one group can do it unilaterally, since all the players need to change behavior at once. Jessica notes that teams can act collectively but we lack a unit of collective action larger than that.

Andrew says it's slightly worse than that, because with the wall of confusion one group is incentivized to change things and so introduce instability, and the other is incentivized to maintain stability, sometimes with compensation tied to it. Jessica adds that those concerns are inherently intertwined, and separating them into units of responsibility creates conflict.

Systems Thinking and Identity

Andrew says most people don't think in systems. Dominant management thinking focuses on metrics, KPIs and OKRs and pushes them in the desired direction, while systems thinking argues you get more return by removing the resistance to those things happening. Those barriers get institutionalized over time. Andrew also says people attach identity to their task, particularly in the Western world "where our last names are literally connected to our vocation," so when told to do something different, they hear "you are erasing my identity" and produce an immune response. Jessica's version: "I am a Java programmer."

Double-Loop Learning

Andrew explains single-loop learning as picking a metric, taking action and checking the metric, while double-loop asks "why are these our KPIs? Should these be our KPIs?" It gives an individual or an organization the ability to update the model when the data doesn't match. Jessica says the hypothesis is most useful when it supports or invalidates a model, and the model is what's valuable. Jessica offers the example of a code change that makes something faster but also overheats a laptop.

Matty asks what drives leaders to think this way. Andrew says dominant management theory is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, and applying Taylorism-driven metrics to knowledge work doesn't give good results. Andrew points to small communities pushing things forward, including Agile, DevOps, Cynefin, Wardley Mapping and resilience engineering, and to observability and chaos engineering as subgenres. Jessica says double-loop learning is needed at every level, not just among leaders. Matty notes that new ideas get retrofitted to old metrics.

Andrew says organizational learning is only possible if the central nervous system, back to leaders, has a good sensor network connected to line workers. If leaders don't have that mindset, they can actively prevent the rest of the organization from having it. Jessica adds it's more than changing how you think: you have to want to continually change it.

Doing Versus Learning

Andrew describes Senge's two domains, action and doing, and enduring change and ideation, both pathological in excess. The quip is "I can't learn anything, I'm too busy getting things done," attributed to the least productive person in the world, and the other danger is being disconnected from the doing. Andrew wants a balance and cycle between them, and says learning has its own exhaustion, using chess, guitar and learning Arabic as examples. Jessica adds a motorcycle riding book's advice: devote 5% of your brain to observing while riding, and in a race put 100% on going fast.

Matty ties it to the moment: there are times to stretch your learning and times to just do the work, and right now people don't have the bandwidth to improve everything. Andrew says "Some people are born to transformation and some people have transformation thrust upon them," and Jessica adds that right now everyone is the latter. Matty's advice is to give yourself, colleagues, family and your boss some flexibility. Andrew's final hope is that humans have "the resilience and adaptive capacity to build something better when this is over." Jessica's advice: eat more chocolate. Matty adds: wash your hands.

• Pareto Inefficient Nash Equilibrium
• Systems Thinking
• Double-loop Learning