so excited to be back and what a wonderful time of year this is this is the regeneration of the world happens now isn't it the first day of spring I think tomorrow is the vernal equinox and it's the celebration of holy which is a wonderful wonderful kind of time of year so what I was here last year was actually heading up design at Walmart and this was my Walmart design team and what I love about connecting with the design spirit and soul of this crew is that when you actually give them the permission to do bold things you see a new side of the design team and so we're here now at a new capacity at a 324 year old Victorian era British Bank which of course is the place you go to do design right and we're gonna be setting up kind of a new design team here as well so I'm so excited to be with you guys I'm as a designer my whole goal and focus is to bring moments of joy and impact in the people's lives and so you can imagine after a career of working at Microsoft on the original surface does anyone remember by the way when surface before the tablet was a big-ass table you guys remember this like era yeah so such an interesting project around how to connect human beings to technology without keyboards and mice and a new way so you know doing a lot of that work I at Google I worked on this thing called project aura which is a modular phone I'll talk a little bit more about what that was about and why I think that's important to banking so you can imagine having done all of that and for the last 10 years I've been in the Silicon Valley my last project was actually doing a redesign of Walmart.com which I talked a little bit about last year at Jalindia you know it's been a little bit challenging for me now to say that I am a banker because somehow being a designer and being a banker this just it doesn't feel like those two things go together and but I wanted to talk to you today about why I think it's so extraordinary to bring together the left brain and the right brain you know creativity and humanity with finance and if you guys in banking or financial services the audience help you guys cool so I am now at Lloyd's banking group which I don't know if many of you know about Lloyd's banking group is not in large global bank they're actually only focused on the UK and their mission is to help Britain prosper and it was interesting when I first learned about this mission being a designer Silicon Valley you know I my bullshit leader started to go off a little bit you know like is do you really mean that mission or isn't banking just about helping make wealthy bankers more wealthy and you kind of really screw people isn't that really financial services is what what it's about and as I dug deeper I learned that this is a really deep refelt mission at Lloyd's banking group and then the founding of Lloyd's banking group has a lot to do with giving access to finances in society is actually one of the first institutions that gave savings accounts to everyday people in an era when you had to have like a 10 pound note to open up a savings account as a wealthy individual they allowed pence accounts so that ordinary people can actually get access to financial services a couple of quick examples of it we just a couple of months ago did a workshop with some of the non-profits and small organizations that work with Lloyd's to help them on their journey of understanding digital skills we partnered with Google Digital Academy and we really want them to be able to dispose more of their time on their mission less around managing the logistics of their business we care a lot about making finances to everybody in the UK and what's so interesting about that focus on the UK is that we actually go deep into vulnerable communities you know one of those communities is individuals who are facing critical illness and actually partnered with McMillan which is a non-profit that helps individuals on their journey dealing with cancer you know I heard this stat from the team that's working with these guys that in their lifetime in the UK 50% of everyone in the UK will face a cancer diagnosis at some point in time it's kind of a shocking and striking statistic to learn about and often as bankers we think about people's numbers and finances and accounts but when you face a critical illness right after you deal with the medical possibilities the next questions are can I afford this is this going to destroy my finances and so we've actually done a lot to work with our pay with our customers who become patients on average our patients people who are recognized as going through critical illness they have a really special treatment within Lloyd's we're able to actually postpone mortgage payments we kind of you know can waive fees our customers save on average 95 pounds a month actually when they're identified and they work with us in fact one of our customers Tracy really wanted people to know about this because people don't talk about critical illness and they don't talk about cancer and Tracy actually passed away a few months ago she wanted her story to be told so that other people they say cancer can actually kind of so I so my bullshit meeting was still there but it eases off a little bit and I realized here's an institution that does have a genuine desire to focus on this word prosperity and you know this word prosperity is a little interesting first of all when you ask people what does prosperity mean to them they say well I never use that word that's a weird word to use like I was just like you know talk about it in everyday language but when I do use the word prosperity I think about it in more human terms and so as a designer we came together we have there's about 500 of us at Lloyd's banking group across all different fields of design design research design strategy service design systems thinking and we started to imagine what is our purpose within that organization what does prosperity really mean to us and we said very simply we designed for that we design for prosperity the human side of that not the kind of like material acquisition side of what prosperity is but the human side and in fact this is we get some work in our studio about asking you what prosperity means and they said it's me it's my loved ones and it's a fence in my life and so this is actually using Lego and play dough some and we were kind of having people map out their lives and that's really what prosperity is all about in fact we've defined truck prosperity as helping people end the day just a bit better than a starting and that's really interesting because often we work in places where there's lots of innovation and high concepts and we have these really you know interesting visions but they feel so vague or disconnected from our lives so we wanted to have this definition to help ground us in what it can mean on a daily basis like what actions can I take today to live a life that feels more fulfilled and my financial health can go can go up just a bit now I have a confession to make in addition to being a designer in banking where I feel kind of not actually in you know always in the right environment I grew up actually without any money and there's kind of my dad was a designer my mom was an actress I was really into Star Wars when I was a kid that had just come out and we couldn't afford even buying like little Star Wars figurines so my parents gave me like garbage bags and that middle picture is me trying to become a stormtrooper and I just remember you know just feeling like I think I remember my parents fighting about money more than I remember that teach me about it and there's no public education around finances at least not in the US or in the UK I'm not sure about and we live in a society that lured us the acquisition of material objects and so when you bring together the taboo miss of nature the tattoo taboo nature of money a society that glorifies physical things you really end up with the situation that I think is best summarized by this Google search check this out so autocomplete is a pretty brilliant data analytics snapshot in culture so when you're typing finances are Google's trying to like quickly shortcut you to the top terms related to finances and so this is a data acumen snapshot of the most popular search items right around this topic so for those in the back that can't read this this is finances are ruining my marriage that's number one finances are stressing me out number three a mess are tight out of control so in some ways I feel like this is the perfect place to be a designer because we are so disconnected from our money that this this is a wonderful place to be and actually I looked at some of the statistics in the UK and this is pretty shocking but in line with that disconnection at any given time in the UK 40% of adults are dealing with financial worries and stress we lose a hundred and twenty billion pounds a year in the UK because of that the lost productivity we're relating from that stress and financial worries are significant it's number one cited cause of divorce and a significant contributor to suicide so to me I just got back from South by Southwest actually in Austin and it just feels like this is the conversation that's happening in tech around finances and like how can we have a conversation around FinTech when ordinary people just cannot make sense of finances so to me what I'm going to talk to you about today if you saw the title of this talk FinTech or something it was a little bit of you know I'm not actually talking at all about blockchain or distributed ledgers or anything related to find the FinTech what I'm talking about is how to break humanity and I'm going to talk about just really three things very simply the first one is about designing with people the second one is we have to create a new language and the third one is how to tell a really good story with a really good metaphor and all of the things I'm sharing with you today are in flight it's a little bit I'm a little bit vulnerable here because these are not like finished projects that have all been successful and in some ways I feel like this is the making of like we have a team that's in the background working on this as we speak and so but let's start let's get into it so number one designing with people who is here last year of my time you guys remember we had some Play-Doh so the whole Play-Doh piece was how do we get ordinary people to create with us and give them design tools so I'm not going to do another round of Play-Doh this year I think we did enough toothbrushes last year but I just want for those that are maybe new to this my hero is Liz Sanders Dr. Liz Sanders has really inspired the industry to think more about how do you bring people who you're designing for into the process and the whole philosophy here is that there's no such thing as experience design you can't design it for you can't design experiences for people it's in them and if you want to understand people you have to understand that experiencing is this moment in time at the intersection of our memories from the past and our dreams for the future and that's a really sacred moment that sometimes we don't even understand very deeply we have to like tweets and insta and Facebook stuff and I even I don't how many of you guys use Facebook everyone who's over the age of 40 just raised their hands there's this feature that shows you five years ago there was this memory that happened I don't know about you but like when I see those things I have totally new appreciations for those moments right so if we're if those moments are so hard to understand as designers and as engineers and as leaders we have to be in humble deference to design for those experiences and if you want to understand them there's only three ways Liz says to do that you can listen to what people say you can see what people do and you can experience what they make and what people say is what you know most market research that you're all familiar with interviews surveys one-on-ones focus groups all of that what people do is kind of this really exciting domain of applying social science and psychology and anthropology into the world of software design where you actually look at behavior and then this third one is really interesting to me it's like what what do people create when we give them the tools to make now I won't go deep into this this isn't a lecture it is definitely post lunch coma time but the whole the whole idea here is you want to get to people's deep knowledge it's called latent or tacit knowledge this is the stuff that's really important to us but hard to talk about you can't get to that stuff with just basic interviews to hear what people say if you want to get to what people know think but know feel and dream you have to get them involved in making so I gave an example last year but I'll just share this one really quickly here's an example kind of what that looks like so when we were at Google creating this module on the phone the question was what would people create if you gave them the tools to make and if you some of you may remember we created this belt grow van covered with 4,000 linear feet of belt grow because you could you know it's like modular hardware you can stick stuff to it and then change the design 3d printers hackable phones laser cutters basically a portable version of Arduino and Radio Shack and we tried to bring this to makers to see how do they want to create what do they want to create and we drove 14,000 miles across six months and created these experiences and we had a body suit also which was great by the way you have to prototype but of course one of the things about agile is this continuous improvement in learning so one of the things we didn't do on this project we didn't drive at night before we went on the road and if you may remember this our first road trip at night we realized you actually attract a lot of insects driving a belt row vehicle in the middle of the night so prototype prototype prototype so we would we would take this this roving maker mobile and we would ask people what do you want to create and within a very short period of time they would form teams two days 48 hour hackathon and I remember this this one team this guy had gotten hit from behind as a bicyclist because the bicyclist behind him at night wasn't paying attention and didn't see that he was stopping so this guy created a helmet that has accelerometers and it has red brake lights when he starts to slow down and so this was something that he actually ended up raising almost a million dollars in Kickstarter to support and I just went into the Apple store a few months ago and this is actually one of this is the second generation album was helmet so it's so exciting to see what happens with the ordinary people that's rules to create or even extraordinary people in this space so at Lloyd's we're doing this in our studios we've built customer labs research centers and all of our all the science studios and we use these as spaces of exploration play we have prototypes of course we also have kind of Lego and Play-Doh and we have people describe their lives and the relationships and one of the things we started to do is actually we brought in some game designers and we had them do this activity around thinking about instead of finances well what about actually thinking about people what they care about so that's what I mean by designing people I encourage all of you about what industry you're in is to put people into the heart of your process because really exciting things will come out for us one of the exciting things coming out is create a new design language how many of you guys are engineers I'll get engineers do this really well you have this thing called a technical architecture there's many different flavors of that right and you have actually code languages which has structured reusable components and syntax that helps hold together a whole engineering effort design has to be like that as well to be successful so we've actually started to create a new design language and in finance we thought at first that these are the things that would be most important like access to financial services from an inclusion perspective or you know your financial well-being like how how much how many assets you have now and you know what your current financial state or literacy the second one around capability it turns out these things aren't actually that important to the goal of helping you end the day better than it started from prosperity for example we did a study where we gave people basic financial literacy and then track their financial health and had a point zero one percent impact on their financial health and so I'm going to show with you today a hypothesis but a pretty good working hypothesis it's actually Philip Joe's team the member of the design team will be doing a workshop later on I don't think he'll be talking about this stuff but you can reach out to him afterwards these are the things that we're starting to talk about that actually help people make forward movement and I'll go into each of these are kind of hard to read on this but before I do I thought I would have the design leader on Phillips team that's leading the design language just tell you a bit about her personal story because to us that was the breakthrough that led us discover this my name is Lily Dart I am the design language delivery lead in the design team and this is my story before I joined Lloyd's I had a really difficult two or three years I had a relationship that went very wrong my partner was actually having a breakdown self and ended up developing a drug habit my finances felt insecure my relationships were insecure and then on top of that work became a horrible place to be as well one day I walked into work and I disassociated if you've not come across disassociation before it's like you're still connected to your body but it's really far away so you don't really feel what's happening you can't really connect with people in the same way it's almost like you're in this bubble that's sort of adjacent to what your body's actually doing I was frightened by it and I went home that day and ended up getting signed off work and put on medication although I had amazing friends and I had amazing family the anxiety and depression wouldn't let me tell them what was going on it's this horrible vicious cycle where you need help and you need help more than you have done at any other point in your life but your brain keeps on telling you that it will lose respect for you that people will see you as the piece of trash that you are if you express that these things are going through your mind so it was someone at work who had experienced similar problems before who managed to call me on what was going on and helped me notice when I was experiencing particularly bad days by being able to talk to him about it and being able to talk to my therapist about it eventually I managed to open up to everyone else in my life who have since been absolutely amazing we're not always ready and most of us aren't for quite a long time ready to go right okay I need therapy now often what we need to do is talk to other people and put into context our feelings and when we start to play our emotions back to other people often we start to see truths that we can't see on our own but if you don't have that conversation about these things are going on and this is the way that I feel you will keep on underplaying the seriousness of what you are experiencing experience and now that she's actually in charge of leading this fundamental design language around helping people connect with their finances we started to think actually more deeply about what it what what do we have to do to become more human and so here are the four things that are starting to emerge beyond just the basics of just understanding the numbers of your finances so the first one is actually around having a goal orientation you guys may have heard about this famous Harvard study where graduates were kind of asked about their goals did they write them down and what they were and it turns out and attract those folks there was one cohort that didn't really write down their goals and was one that did and it turns out that when we're actually really specific about our goals we write them down we're actually much more likely to achieve them or at least to be conscious about the process and so when it comes to financial health this is this turns out to be something that's pretty important right if you ask someone do you want to be financially healthy they'll say yes and then if you'll say to them what is the next step you need to take to do that I have no freaking idea right so trying to make that concrete is key the second one is about conscientiousness and all these are on a spectrum so what what we mean by this is how many of you guys saw the marshmallow challenge you ever see this where kids were given a marshmallow and they were like said they were said they were told if you wait for a couple of minutes I'll come back and I'll bring you two marshmallows or you can eat it now and they tracked the kids that just gobbled it up right away and the ones that you know showed restraint and it turns out on the one hand it's impulsive behavior right it's like what are you talking about there's a marshmallow in front of me I'm just gonna eat it right that's impulsivity for someone who can kind of hold off that raw impulse and actually be more thoughtful about and be conscientious about it it turns out that that for that mental frame of mind actually as you can imagine helps with finances as well right and so that that's really key the third one is around optimism and this might sound obvious but when people are dealing with financial difficulty or life difficulty their natural amount of optimism or pessimism has a huge effect on things and you often forget this in a bank when we give you regulated statements and communications and just we communicate you in a very dry way forget how important sometimes it is to just tell somebody I know this is a rough month someone in your family had an illness and you had to pull you had to take out credit card debt but you can do this and we can help and call us anytime and we've got your back like I don't ever remember bank talk to me like that and it turns out when you have more optimism you're much more likely to have the right kind of behaviors to get into that a good healthy financial state and the last one this one's really interesting this one is around do we see ourselves as a agent of change being able to control our world or do we actually think about everything else around us is what has control we learned this from a London school of economics professor who normally tasks his tasks with understanding the effectiveness of social impact given right so the bill Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give 150 million to what elevate the status of women in West African villages and they will do a before and after survey and they'll ask people do you feel in control of the changes that you can make to make your life better and if people feel like they're not in control then they kind of act that way if they feel like they are in control and it's on them then there's a lot more agency so this is a totally new landscape for us and so you guys coming to agile India like what else in this guy talking about DevOps and like you know how we can do technology better it turns out like this really messy human stuff is pretty darn important to the actual tactical nuts and bolts of managing your finances and so we're starting to think about how do we create personas Alan Cooper of course was here last year and thinking about how the evolution of that space we're trying to think about these mindsets and how might we do things differently for different people depending on where they're at so a Christopher who doesn't have as much kind of confidence financial confidence and financial agency kind of might require a different way of being connected to and communicated with whereas a Roxanne who is higher on some of those locus of control and optimism she just really needs a kind of a high five and I like your on track kind of go for it right when she actually doesn't need a lot of the detail and so the question for us is how do we create a design system in finance that works like this so here's one example some of our customers have repeated patterns of going into overdrafts which is kind of an early sign for getting into financial difficulty and you can spiral out of control with all these fees and all of that so one of our suggestions is well let's take someone who isn't very conscientious who's kind of failing the marshmallow challenge in their own financial life and you know and that at the particular time of the month when they're more likely to go into overdraft maybe just or a week before send them a notification and say hey just heads up here's some upcoming bills that are coming out just so you might be aware right so that we can as a system we can hold some of that conscientiousness for you so you don't have to change who you are you can just be your natural kind of more careful financial self and just have the system kind of help give some nudges that would result in you just being a little bit more conscientious perhaps that week so that you don't have to get that notification from us you went into overdraft right so be a little more proactive we're starting to think about goal setting in a new way for a lot of us like setting goals can be hard or having being specific so why not use all of the data we have around your transactions and then proactively recommend to you a couple of specific goals which you can change at any time and again nudge and prompt you to adjust those and then finally why don't we just give you more encouragement in high fives instead of like hey you just wanted to overdraft and you know that's not really good and here's what you need to do like why don't we just actually the months that you don't go into overdraft give you a high five and think about loyalty program or rewards to encourage you on that journey and then the other thing in our language and again this is this is an early prototype thinking but all of banking information is about the past when you think about it our monthly statements all of our transaction stuff and what if we and then we can't really change the past we get insights in the past but what if we started to think about an interface that maybe this is now and the majority of the interface was about the future we can start to get predictive about your spend line you can kind of start to put on iphone with different kind of repeated bills that are coming out and just start to engage with you on that process and think we've got the future in a way and then of course we're thinking about the you know machine intelligence and AI and virtual systems where you can kind of go from asking a chat box a question to realizing that's actually a human conversation to then actually going to directly into a branch kind of face-to-face conversation so how do we have a design language that intercedes in the right places at the right time and again i'll show you something really that's a prototype phase but when you think beyond mobile what would a more dashboard life space and i remember we were looking at some of these comps and someone says well you know this isn't facebook or twitter or snapchat like why do you have this you know why do you have someone's photo on there it's just their banking account we're like well if you want to get people connected to their finances why not actually set the expectation that's my finances so again you can see things here around my goals and my life and dashboards and kind of the future but anyway just i want this is kind of what is starting to look like tangibly for us is how do we take a financial system which is really difficult to understand and make it more simple and i'm going to wrap up with um about storytelling and about metaphor so stories are fundamental to us um stories have been used ever since there were human beings to communicate values and culture and expectations and so at a bank we realized that that's kind of missing with your finances and so we ended up we actually built an experiment we created a storytelling team with filmmakers with storyboard artists with screenwriters and like they've done some pretty incredible stuff here's a little sampling of this 23 person storytelling team just over the past three months so one of the things that we did is we took agile teams and we took all these backlogs and these epics and these we actually use that language right in in agile we use the word stories right and chapters and epics and we decided to create a graphic novel about what would life feel like if the most important things of those 200 those 200 okay ours came to life in a really human way and this was only this wasn't like a big vision piece this was just in a 12 month time period and so this was the graphic novel that we ended up creating which told the story about how does how does all of this technical work come together how can finance insight help ordinary families get a grip on their hand on their finances and notifications and communications can be more human in real time how can we actually support you in the world in the real world without being logged into your banking your internet banking model and lots of other pieces and concepts that just started to bring a sense of momentum and humanity into how we do work and so we've only done this a couple of months ago I think the jury's still out on how tangibly this moves us forward but at least the conversation and the energy has been a lot more human and actually in that work there was this notion about financial growth and the team started visualizing it as like a little fish metaphor aquarium and it's like what if that's so powerful to be taught in schools what if it can be the way that like the parents can introduce their children to finance this is a new kind of concept of a cafe slash accelerator bank where multi-generational conversations happen where this grandma and the granddaughter you know education of finances happily across family lines and the and the fish was just like a placeholder it's like we weren't sure what the metaphor would be but it actually started a really cool conversation this is the the archives of the bank of scottland which is one of the four bankers uh uh banking brands and we went to the archives and was so cool to actually go down and see the founding documents from like the 1500s and uh this document particularly you guys know what this is yes this is a ledger and it's so interesting because you know back in the day the ledger wasn't the way that bankers innovated if there was like a ted talk in the 1500s someone some there'd be a banker on stage that would be like hey guys i just went to my church and they don't have piles of paper for every single transaction what they do is they take a big book and they record one line for every charitable contribution and they like give structure to it here's the date here's the amount here's the time and because they're really efficient and wouldn't that be such a cool way to manage your finances searchable it's compact all of that and and so the whole financial industry in the 1500s saw that innovation and said that's the model that's how we need to manage finances and it revolutionized data recording you know long before computers and spreadsheets were created now that's awesome but when you look at the existing financial applications today we still just use the ledger like it's been 400 years like i think that it's probably time for a new metaphor or some new way of understanding finances because clearly the current metaphor isn't helping a lot of us with our money in a really weird way and so what's so interesting about the storytelling team is they help us think about metaphor as a way of connecting in so if you guys remember i was around during this time but this punch card was the first way of interacting with computers see a couple people nodding their heads so these were from jack hard jack hard meeting rooms from the 1800s this is the first interface this is the first metaphor for how to humans connect with machines we then had this breakthrough of command line interfaces which many of you engineers still use today right to kind of access the system and then what was really interesting in this guy tim mott at xerox park he was doing co-creation with people in xerox park how do ordinary people understand computers and as he was having a lunch break he went and he wrote this down and this is called the office schematic he said what if we instead of a command line interface or punch cards what if we had you know a screen with a mouse and we had this desktop and what if there were files and a trash bin and what if these fundamental things of print and delete you know could be worked out and this became the prototype that steve jobs then took slash stole into the first mac and democratize access to technology we're still this metaphor completely changed computing as we know it and so i don't know exactly what our napkin sketch is going to be in banking but we're trying to create that moment so our designers went into a branch and we started having conversations with actual people and we had them actually finish this question my finances are like and haven't draw it out to check these out these are not like ledgers at all and actually there's a lot of negativity right check this out my finances are like an endless to-do list or i like this one an open prison this one is crazy it's like emotionally i feel totally trapped with my finances i don't know what to do but the door to the prison is open if i just had the right knowledge i could get out of it i'm so interested as to understand the mental model and then my favorite here the leaky bucket like the leaky bucket is so i have this thing called the well that's where my income is coming in and i've got this barrel where i want to save and i've got a little bucket which is my wallet and i just you know i take some of my my money and i'm on the way to the savings but along the way i get starbucks and netflix and fred almanje or whatever and by the time i actually try to like empty my bucket there's nothing left like such an interesting way to help people think about their finances in a way that's just much more intuitive than just a bunch of numbers so we're at the beginnings of taking this research and this insight and applying it to banking but my hope is that if i'm able to come back next year it'll not be the behind the scenes of them in the making up it'll be a little bit more of a world's premiere of what hopefully will be kind of new metaphor that can power banking a much more creative way so thank you so much for your time i love just getting past this conversation and getting your thoughts on how we can help ordinary people make sense of money if you have any experiments or learnings or suggestions which fully open to your thoughts i would love to hear that thank you so much i think we have maybe one or two minutes time for one or two questions or one questions yeah it is kind of asking for some suggestions i am handling the payment sector b2b payments and where i have to deal with the b2b financial steps as well with my stakeholders i have done my engineering and i had not done any masters in finance but so far i'm able to get to know okay what is the liquidity what is the cash flow rebate rate the cost kickback markup beyond exchange rate that kind of stuff but what is your suggestion like should i be getting into the finance or is it kind of manageable stuff being holding an engineering degree i think you don't have to be a designer to start connecting with the people you're designing for and involving them in the process and i think it'd be really powerful for you regardless of your backgrounds to when you're looking at the scenario to not just do kind of a use case analysis of let me just take the current state and then let me do a service design map and kind of like what can we do that's that's new if you can involve folks in the process i mean even b2b transactions you have a you have a customer right it's a business customer and they're trying to get something done and i think in the business side there's a lot more stress in getting it wrong right if you do if you have a transaction that's not the right time and there's not liquidity and you can't meet payroll like the level of complexity that's required in that situation so i would actually just involve folks there in a little bit of role-playing and improv around what the future could be like and sometime now it's really hard you can imagine a suited business banker who is like in a tie doesn't have a lot of time for you and trying to get them to get creative with like crayons and paper or like that's tough look at liz sanders work go to maketools.com it looks horrible on a on a mobile phone because she used flash but anyway go to a desktop site some of the tools that she used would be a great starting point for you to get a little bit more inspiration into how to take business transaction and actually turn that into something that's more powerful


Hello everybody and welcome again to another OpenShift Commons briefing on Transformation Friday. Today we have a wonderful speaker and guest, John Willis from the Office of Global Transformation here at Red Hat. You probably know him as Bacha Golupa. I think that's how you pronounce it. There you go. And from his work in DevOps and the Phoenix Project, so today he's going to walk us down an alley. I think that I've watched him do qualitative data analysis from lots of notebooks and notes and posted stickers and all kinds of things. But how we take that and turn that process and use some computer assisted methods to do this as well and how you can take that into your organization. So I'm going to let John introduce himself, introduce the topic. There'll be time at the end for live Q&A. Just ask in the chat and with that, John, take it away. Great. Thank you, Diane. Yeah, so, you know, fancy title, qualitative data analysis for digital transformation. So I'll go through why, you know, why this title, you know, my sort of experience of, it's something I've been doing for probably three or four years now. And it just isn't, recently, I've gotten more sort of academic and prescriptive. And that's primarily because I now work with Jay Bloom who has a PhD in design transition. So he helps me a lot of showing me a lot of the stuff I have been doing over the years and how it actually is can be enhanced through some well known techniques and processes. Anyway, if you've been paying attention on Fridays, you've probably seen these, the four of us. We're called the Global Transformation Office, that's Andrew Clay Schaefer, and it's Kevin Bear, who's co-authored the Phoenix Project. That's me, the short guy, and then Jay Bloom, who I just talked about. Andrew likes to say we wrote the books or wrote some books, I guess. You know, Kevin Phoenix Project, I did a collaborative project with Gene called Beyond the Phoenix Project. I was co-authored Dev Ops Handbook. In fact, we're talking about the five-year anniversary coming up next year book, so a revise, so pay attention. Andrew wrote some chapters, Web Operations, Site Reliability, and Kevin was one of the original authors of Visible Ops. I was an advisor on a unicorn project, I'm not really credit as an author, but just quickly on myself, again, if you don't know who I am, I've spoken a couple of times on Fridays, I'm part of GTO, but I just listed a couple of the sort of publications I've worked on. I think I've, you know, back in the day, I used to write IBM Red Books. I probably have 10 or 11 books in my resume over many years, but the two I think are really interesting. I'm not even in today. Normally I talk about automated governance, and so there's two papers that are out there, IT Revolution and Five Governors for Owners, and both of those are Creative Commons, and then I've only sort of listed the last 12 years. I've worked for a lot of companies. I think I've done like 10 startups, but I sold a company to Docker. I actually started my career at Exxon, I would say Red Hat now, sold a company to Dell, all good stuff. So one of the things that, you know, I've been doing this and all for a long time, right?  So, and I got, I went through the first sort of distributed computing, and then I spent many years supporting a reasonably successful services company based on the Tivoli portfolio. So the first crack of distributed computing, and then I moved into the open source world with Chef and, you know, Puppet Chef and, you know, all the other great things including then cloud. So this notion of how do you help people improve, right? Like this is the golden ticket, if you will. How do, you know, and so about three or four years ago I left Docker to become independent and I was really working as a one person shop at one sales person myself. And I went in and I had this whole notion that like I was going to use all these sort of prescriptive ideas that I had learned and used and, you know, learn from a lot of sort of friends, you know, being in sort of Jean Kim's tribe, if you will, you get to meet like leaders across some of the biggest industries. They're all friends of mine. And one of the things I started finding out is I started sort of devolving my practice pretty quick. You know, I like, for example, I would come in with lead value stream mapping to do this and, and I realized there was a lot of other stuff that I really wanted to get to, you know, think about truth.  I'm not sure what you call them, but things like lean values to mapping. I think it's an incredible tool. I think it's the worst tool to start with. And I'll explain why. And, you know, horizon based stuff or zone the wind. I don't know if maybe eventually I'll agree with it. I think it could be used and appropriate, whatever. So the second sort of, you know, thing that I think gets in a way of transformation is this sort of impersonal, like some large organization comes in and says, these are the fire things you need to do.  They're, they're based on industry doctrine. But the reason I could impersonal was not, you're not asking or including the people who are going to be affected by the change in the change.  And I'll go through each one of these really quickly, right, which is everybody has these different mental models.  And when they go to get the, you know, what they looked at once that they had red hair, the other ones that they were blonde hair, you know. So, so in getting looking at these three, right, I was, this is something I've always said, you know, in fact, I came to this conclusion. When I started decoupling my practice, you know, the idea that I was going to do all the frameworks is you can't lean agile, say for devouts or SRE or, you know, zone to win or whatever your way around a bad organizational culture. And you like, you literally have to get some understanding of what the organization from the people, I say the people at the edge, the people who do the work. Second is, I did an interview with Christina Maslach, who is the foremost organizational burnout expert in the industry. She's written books. They've named a canonical test. It's got her name in it, the NBI, Maslach Burnout Inventory. And so I just, she made a comment in the podcast, so I took that as a quote, but it's, it's whenever we're talking about any kind of change or improvement, and you're counting on a bunch of human beings to make the change to make this happen. If they haven't been part of figuring out how to do it, the change efforts will be done. So you have to at some point include the input of the people who are going to be affected by the change. We don't do that a lot in our industry. And third is this notion of mental models. We go back to Peter Senge, the fifth discipline, pretty much the father of system thinking. You know, mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works images that that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often we are not consciously aware of our mental models and, you know, in the, sorry, I just an effective way we think so then the net net is that these mental models actually get in our way when we're trying to transform because different people. I did an exercise once where I was talking organization. It was a group of people and I asked three people that worked on the same service work together to go into three different rooms and whiteboard their service. You know, how it looked and you wouldn't be surprised that they were all different. I mean, you all had the same general idea, right? So this idea that people, you know, mental models sort of have my concept or something, even words, taxonomy in an organization. You know, people go into meetings with going in and the intent like the meeting is about compliance, right? And everybody in the room or at least there might be three different definitions of compliance of the people in the room. And nobody knows that. And so the meeting really didn't really go anywhere. So, so then I talked about qualitative data now. So I think it's important to quickly mention the difference between the quantitative approach, which has been taken in sort of DevOps and transformation and a qualitative approach that I'm sort of suggesting or I've been using and I think it works very well. So in a quantitative, you start with generalized theory and you use correlation towards specific conclusions. It's inductive deductive, if you will, right? So it's your specific conclusions from general principles or premises. It's typically numeric, right? Statistics. And it usually is either, in our industry it's been surveyed. So we'll talk about some of the surveys. It's impersonal, like a survey is impersonal, you know, like when you're taking a survey, you don't get to ask, well, what does that mean? Or what if the answer depends, right? And it's closed ended, right? So there's sort of, there always is one answer. It's either strongly disagree or strongly agree in somewhere in between, or it's a multiple choice, you know, I deploy between six months in a year. I got multiple services. What do I do? And so let's take an example. So probably the canonical quantitative approach that's been used in DevOps, which has been very successful, is the Dora. Now it's accelerated, you know, and which has been a psychometric survey. There's this number of patterns that address and I don't want to just limit it, but in general, the industry has accepted the fact that there are basically four variables that we look at.  So the idea was that the authors of these surveys. And there's multiple ones, but you know, the most prominent one is, is Nicole Portram and just and Gene Kim. Sorry, I can't believe I forgot his name. And so the theory would be that if you have shorter lead time, you have more frequent deploys, you have a lower change, fail rate, and you have a quicker time to restore. That you're more likely a high performance organization and vice versa for a low organization, right? And so for 6 years, I think 7 years now, the, the idea is to collect a lot of data through surveys and sort of prove that theory out or inductive that, you know, that, you know, and then you'll see things like, you know, high form organizations are 100 times faster in lead time than low performing organization. Right. And so like, for example, how often do you play more than 6 months, you know, between month and or, and so again, I'll do the pros and cons here in a minute, but the point is, if I have more than one answer. If I don't know what you meant by on demand, I can't ask you. Right. So, you know, in, you know, and I don't know, I don't know the context of your specifics. Are you like a one person?  Is that representative of that organization? Right. You know, the large bank. And so the pros of quantitative approaches, it's definitely easy to minister. Right. It's, I can administer thousands.  I will, I've tried that. And in fact, it's why I went to a qualitative approach. I found that a quantitative approach inside an organization was a very difficult. I'll save that for another presentation, but you get more data. You know, again, the industry surveys have been very effective for us in our industry. Right. Finding out general theories of things like, you know, how high performance work versus low performance. It's helped us sort of gauge initial ways to create outcomes as more data. It is objective and it is based on a scientific method. The cons, like I said, is impersonal. I can't ask you. I can't look at your face and see that you didn't understand my question or I can't drill down on the question. Or you can't ask me. The answer is depends. Close ended. I would say it's theoretical as opposed to empirical, which I, which I'll explain when I get to quality. And like I said earlier, it is content specific. Now, qualitative, right, is it moves away from theory, driving the data to an approach where the data drives the theory. Right. So it's abductive. Right. It's, it really, James says that it's great. It's like, it's like a murder mystery. So, in sort of the qualitative is what, what Jay would say is inductive deductive. I think I got it right, which is you're really going to come out with an answer. Whereas abductive is abductive inductive or inductive abductive. Sorry. Is is basically more like a murder mystery. Right. I've kind of sift to a lot of different ways of you telling me stuff. And again, I think that to me, that's the power. Because these, the complexity of these organizations are just, they're just too complex to create 1 single answer from, you know, or 50 answers to 50 questions. They're categorical. So here again, what we're trying to do is decouple the mental models. Right. So we're saying is like, if I, if I can look at the answers to interview questions from multiple people. Right. I might have, you know, do an abductive process. Be able to get a better understanding of what this really means. And I can roll things up and I'll show you examples. It's interpersonal. Again, I can go back and forth. I can. You can ask me what the heck do you mean by that? I can say, do you know what I mean by that? And it's open ended.  I would say, and this is what I use actually have 7, I call it 7 deadly sins, but I would say that most organizations that I have worked with and been in and interviewed or just based on our general. Industry experience or even sort of like collaborative experience. What other people is that most companies struggle with invisible work, visibility, consistency, capacity and toil issues. Right. So in this qualitative approach or my approach now is that I'm going to basically sort of set these like these are the things I'm just going to try to tease out and actually have 7 and I'll show you them a little later. And I'm going to tease these out and then and so here's an example like a question might be what is the audit process like in your organization.  Another person might say, you know, they waste about 30 times a year. And then this is the one I love the best, right? Which is, we don't tell orders things down or no, because it allows me to, to, well, here's the sort of pros and cons is, you know, it's empirical. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I can, I can use multiple observations to drive through the process of understanding what they're saying. I can link things together.  It's open-ended. I would say it's combinatorial. Right. So going back to mental models, right. I, I can, you know, I can use the objective example of trying to figure out like, hey, you know, this person said this and even more importantly, like, for example, an overloaded tone, turn, turn, sorry. Something like compliance. You know, I find that a lot of organizations and different organizations have different meanings for things like governance, risk compliance, individual meanings, and then even in the organization itself, they might have their name. One group might call everything risk. Another might call everything compliance. So if I'm having these conversations or these interview processes, I can actually take notes and figure out what I thought you meant for compliance, what it really means in an industry perspective versus person three, four, five and six. And then through the, the rigor of the qualitative approach, which I'll talk about in a minute, I can actually create, you know, I can come up with a theory that I believe company X, you know, one word for this type of thing is risk. And here is how it's addressed. Right. Obviously harder to administrate a less data and it is subjective, but the end of the day, like all of these process processes are sort of inductive in the sense that you're, you know, there's some subjectivity like to the, you know, again, there's more rigor in crunching numbers and doing statistical analysis and clustering and all the things. But at the end of the day, there's the sort of kind of sort of. It isn't verifiable observations. So here's an example really quick of. So I'm going to show you a tool that I fell in love with. It's called max QDA max qualitative data analysis. There's a category of tools called computer assisted. Qualitative data analysis and just if you look really quick, you load in all the interviews and. And the, what you'll call it. And then you, you basically start tagging different. What they call coding different areas. So the approach I've been using here is called grounded theory. It is multiple theory. Again, I'm not going to sort of profess dying, like, you know, sort of a PhD qualitative analysis. I've. I've read, read a lot about it and I've fortunately have jade to help me understand this, but this is the approach I use. And so this approach. The implementation is approaches really. Using the qualitative data, the interview. So basically take all all the interviews that I do. I don't take the transcripts and then notes. And then I load them in as artifacts, including lots of other stuff like letters and sort of notes from, from emails that people sent about the process.   Sort of a temper, in my case, it would call a temporary def definition to it. And then you roll through what are called concepts categories, which then you get to sort of out. So think about the industry doctrine is how I sort of start. And it's my sort of industry roadmap or recommendations is how I ground it. So what I'm doing is I sort of know the things that have generally. Wrong with the company. And I know the things that generally should be done to fix a company. What I don't know is how to connect that to the data that's driven by the organization. And I do that to a qualitative data analysis process. So, so what you see here that the idea is codes are key observations. Concepts are groupings of simpler codes categories. So there's this roll up process. The interesting thing is when I sit down with a CIO and they ask me, you know, well, John, I don't know if I agree with this. You know, I can say, well, you know, okay, we can walk back through the category the concept and we can actually find the paragraph of the sentence. Of what was said about this. Now I always delete names and I always sort of do the aggregate. Like it's a beautiful process when you get disagreement CIO, like, you know, I wanted my famous is your audits or theater, like your audits are terrible. They don't really connect the dots and oh, no, John, I'm not going to accept that. And like, okay, you know, let me show you like 10 examples of why I came up with this. And this is to get back to the data. Like it's not XYZ corp coming in and saying, like, we're smart and you do these five things and you'll be successful. It's like, I have an idea of what's wrong with you.  And then I'll tie that to sort of industry doctrine solutions. So here's an example of a granted theory, you know, you saw this earlier, but now I've got it attached to the sort of methodology right the code might be the sentence that somebody said in answer to a question. The concepts are audits are inefficient. The category is risk. And then in this case, the, the recommendation might be automated governance. So I can walk in and say you should do automated governance. Right. Like, and I'm probably going to write. 9 out of 10 times or mess like 8 out of 10 times. But now I have absolute like confirmation and to go back to the, the other thing too is. Going back to the sort of the impersonal right like now people feel like they were so if the organization comes in and says, we're doing automated governance because we listened to you. And we heard that audits are terrible, you know, and they're really hard and they waste a lot of time. Everybody involved is like. Yeah, no, that was our input. Awesome. Right as opposed to a big four coming in and say you must do automated governance. And then all of a sudden they're doing all this stuff and it's like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, nobody asked me. And so, so the, the, I told you that I had like 7, I like the number 7. It works good for presentations. Like it could have been 6, it could have been 8. But basically these are the ones where I, I, I find over my experience over the years. That I can decouple or or go through sort of an. Inductive process by navigating around these ideas. Invisible work multiple mission. System toy like you might have 5 or 6 different systems to manage tickets. Alignment knowledge alignment, you know, so the Brent syndrome organizational design complexes and security compliance. You know, and some of you see my presentations having deadly sense of DevOps. Basically, I could sit at a funnel. That typically drives the worst and deadly sin of them all basically security compliance there. Again, I have longer presentations on this thing. So, so the approach then is. That I've been taken with an engagement is we have some original conversations. I do the assessment analyze port and then really help try to figure out how to do the transformation. So.  I spent a month. On site, I interviewed like 300 people. Probably close to 50 meetings. I calculate the amount of minutes of. Of transcriptions and probably well north of 50 documents, right? But now virtually, I've been doing this with organizations where we'll do like 90 minute meetings with the team. So maybe 10 meetings overall over a 3 week period, whatever, right? So it all depends. But again, the virtual is I didn't think it was going to work virtual. It has actually worked really well. The only question is it just works better when I can be in a room with a team for the whole day. Typically, the way it works is there's some executive letter. It's got to have executive like it has to be. It usually has to be to say, I was buy it into this with everyone's have to tell people. I really want you to like this idea. Like, I want you to go in the room with this guy.  Right? Like, unless the place is on fire or whatever, but I really don't want you sort of in and out. Like for, you know, for a couple of weeks or a week or a 90 minutes virtual. I want you to just be focused. There's an engagement of interest response, which is brilliant. One of the clients that I came up with this a lot of these ideas. Every time I do on the client gives me better ideas.  Who'd like to go? And then people have to write sort of a response to an engagement and then I get to use that to identify you beforehand. It really works well. And then usually there's electronic notes, audio transcripts. Some cases it always works better when I can sort of record and throw away. I don't really use the audio. I just need the transcripts. So, and then there's this number of, there are people that I identify during the process that I get back and I'm like, I really want to talk to that person, Bob or Sue. And so I usually do sort of these post one on ones. The analysis, you saw the sort of process. Again, like this is an example one that was about 80 people. It was like 20 documents. So you can see I have all the interview notes. I have usually have two scribes have myself taking specific notes and then I have somebody else who's actually a scriber. And so I've got, you know, I've got the transcript. I've got the scriber and then I've got my sort of additional notes and this tool. And I'm going to come back maybe in at another time and just do a whole presentation on how I've got this thing I've been doing with doing a post-mortem on the Equifax breach. Using this tool. I'm going to write it up. It's, it's really cool.  So, you know, it just has just everything you need to know. I'm just going to give you a little sense. You know, one of the things I'll do sort of at some point after I've loaded a bunch of documents, I'll do some quick word mapping. So it has a lot of really powerful features for word mapping. I can get, I can whitelist terms and stuff. And then, and then there's, so then I can, there's another screen I had here where I can do it ordered and I can see what the, you know, how many words, which are the words that, you know, just sort of a tabular list. So I can actually start identifying words that really have meaning and that helps me in the taxonomy. So this all helps me sort of build that taxonomy discussion. Right.  So you're sort of sort of context sense of your head. And then you basically start identifying these codes with particular maybe risk design, different, different areas. And the idea is, even though I start off with these seven patterns, the seven deadly sins, I really don't know what is going to emerge from the data. So I'm not, I'm not stuck with those. I really literally try to free and it's hard. I try to free my head to say, you know, I'm not going to try to assume any solutions. I'm not going to try to assume that they have consistency. And even in the first couple of rounds, I really try not to, to do a whole lot of categorization. And then, you know, and then the tool becomes incredibly powerful in terms of the coding. Here's an example where, you know, sort of risk design consistency. These are the ones that just showed up all to you can see that consistency and design came up like most frequently on the right. And, and here's another sort of example of sort of a population of the codes. There's all sorts of tools here that can be very powerful. I'm still learning a lot about the tool. But there's these ways to do these sort of casing models incredible graphics. So here's an example of now once I've got all the codes, I can say to look at sort of structurally or graphically what's going on in this. So that there's sort of, and all these things are linked to each other. So I can go back and forth. I can, you know, this is a really good example. So I can compare the notes. To the transcript, right? So transcript, maybe the best transcript or soda, like will mangle certain words so I can get a sort of a gap analysis of what, you know, that the other thing I look for there too is like if the scribe was like, you know, distracted or something. What maybe there was something missed and I might be able to dive back into it. I've learned, you know, like I said, the more I do this more learn.  Now I do it after each interview and I do a post-mortem with describe so I can actually start with this quick.  This is just another way to look at the data. And then just, you know, like, like, there's only a certain extent that the graphics really help but it does help in presentation mode. Like here is sort of drilling in on risk. And then here again, a reducing codes. There's a lot of they called a retrieved segments. So now I can sort of say, I don't see anything other than risk. And then so in that bottom section, I can go through all documents. Everything, the 20 documents, 100,000 sort of a novel, basically, if you will. I mean, I'm crazy. I, you know, I would do in a review for the five year anniversary devouts handbook. I'm going to actually load the devouts handbook in here and I'm going to do my review in here. You can attach notes. I mean, it's just really cool. Just quickly. I don't I'm not going to go through the gory gory details of this, but so then as part of that process, you start, you know, sort of applying thematic observations. Again, I said, you start with sort of your generalized industry doctrine. Like, I know that like visibility and consistency and capacity and toil typically issues. I know that there are certain other things that I know there's a set of patterns that I think you should apply. And I'll show you that sort of list that I usually, but what I need to do is I need the ground to that. Right.  You know, we typically will say, well, the problem and any pattern to devouts is trust. Well, yes, that's true. But like, let me find it in the data. You know, that your lead time, you know, again, it's, it's difficult for me being involved in sort of the devouts movement since its inception and working to a large bank today and talk about getting a VM in four weeks or, you know, getting storage in three weeks. And I mean, I've heard recently I've heard this, like, it takes two minutes to spin up an Amazon instance. It takes another two weeks to use it. Right. Like, what are we doing, folks? You know, how many active projects like, okay, everybody's telling me there are too many active projects and nobody knows where they all are and where they're in. Okay, I think one another kind of quotes I got recently, which was, I don't, I have dependency, you know, that's dark, what I call dark dependencies, like where you have all these dependencies, you're coupled with all these dependencies, other services. And you, but you don't like know anything about their status. Right. And so the, this, this notion of sort of a dark dependency or dark workflow. So, somebody said to me, like, I don't know for certain dependencies that are critical path for me. I don't know if it's going to take two days or two weeks. So scale, that's just like, how do you, how do you even manage flow with that? Right. I mean, if I knew it was two weeks, great funding is always an issue. And then, you know, what I try to do through that categorization process to say, okay, I mean, now we're actually sort of borderline quantitative, but one way I try to figure out like, how am I going to tell this client, which are the things that are probably what I heard the most. So then I'll literally look at the categories and sort of from the roll ups from the codes to the concepts to the categories. So, you know what, out of all these, the sort of consistency was the number one thing we heard. But here's, I can drill down on all these sort of evidence, if you will on funding and toil. And then sort of look at these as like, how do we sort of address these. And so at the end of the day, these are all the concepts, you know, based on the sort of the elements of the category. Again, we don't have time to go through all of these. And then, and then so what I have come up with again, liking sevens, I sort of the seven DevOps opportunities, which are, you know, just taxonomy and models, right. The most organizations just are terrible, which is common taxonomy. You know, sometimes it is simple as say, why don't we take these 10 words that everybody's using and make sure we all understand exactly what they mean and want to say. So one of the most interesting things I saw in our industry over the last 25 years is, you know, for those of you who have read Eric reaches lean startup, right. It's a good book. I mean, just wrote lead enterprise. It's an excellent book. Just humble. But the, the thing is that I saw this in place that I'll just say it was years ago, but I saw a Beth Comstek was the CMO chief marketing officer in an Eric grease fireside chat. At one of his conferences and when she was talking about we have gone head to toe on lean startup. You know, we think in terms of pivots build measure learn all the things are out of that. Yeah, it's a great book. Yeah. And then, and then I actually about a month later was doing a cloud implementation for what I would say where the grunts, like the people in the edge who had to implement an on on prem private cloud. Right. And one of my startups, right. And like they were using the same exact term, you know, fluently that Beth Comstek was using the CMO. They were talking about pivot. And I realized that organization had recently successfully created a common taxonomy around lean enterprise, which again, the, the, the, the butterfly effect of toil of miss taxonomy, like somebody should do a study on it. Also, common models. I won't go. I don't have too much time to go too deep in this. I think team to policies is just an amazing book. I use it, like almost wrote as suggestions for models, cognitive load, team, API, which is not like programmatic APIs, but API is in terms of describing your team to other teams roles, responsibilities. You know, we're, if you haven't, if you've been following this, what we're doing. So, Jabe and and commenting and three economies and how we think about platforms and platforms interface outcome based metrics automation skills, liquidity. Like, this is a real, like it's 1 thing to think about skills updates. Right. But how do I build, you know, there's sort of the. We talked about T shape, you know, I shape T shape each shape individuals. Right. You know, I shape is an Oracle DBA T shape is, I know, Python and real expert on Oracle, but I also know my sequel. And, and then each shape is I'm sort of like pretty much can bounce just about anywhere within reason. Right. So, understanding that the sort of a measure of your skills, liquidity is a measure of your performance, which actually helps. This said topic. Digital transformation. All right. So, taxonomies and models, you know, so then I go through, now I start grounding. The opportunities, you know, so team topologies, maybe, maybe SRE is right for you. Right. A lot of times people, I can do a whole presentation on the toil of discussing and thinking about SRE in the enterprise. Right. So some questions are like, just stop talking about SRE in 2020. And you will save a ton of time. Team topologies. There's some workbooks. We'll make this available. We have an open practice library right at that. There's some really good stuff there that. So I've been going through and looking at like, what are some of the areas that we have roles and responsibility. You've probably seen again, Diane could probably point a list of like Andrew's 5 elements that we've been talking about in a GTO group. So 5 elements. Understand the difference between value stream analysis and value chain. So again, I don't start with these tools. But once we understand how to fit them in a roadmap that actually makes sense, then actually these tools become incredibly effective. And just quite frankly, the value stream mapping is typically around your sort of lean value stream mapping. The chain mapping is sort of things like, uh, wordly mapping, if you're not familiar with that. Right. And then again, a skills liquidity open practice. There's some great books. It revolution. I mentioned a couple that I worked on over the years is I think Gene said they produce like 50 or something. I kind of like 30 or something, but who knows it revolution. These are all creative commons. So you can just go to revolution, foreign papers. There's a value stream architect is a transformational leader quickly. These are great guides. And again, the open practice library platform transformation. You know, so here's an interesting thing too. I think. What's important when we talk about platform, so there's a lot of discussion about project to product like Nick Kirsten has an excellent book product. I'll show you the reference. Right. And, you know, and yes, of course, like, we need to move from to product, but then I'm like, okay, that's great, but not good enough. What about product service? What about service to platform? And then where does sort of the cab and change management. So I think there's a, there's sort of an evolution of, you know, project to product product to service. Platform as interfaces I discussed earlier, infrastructure scale and then sort of operations. So how do you sort of look at these things again? Normally when I'm reviewing this customer, we're doing a lot, you know, a lot more sort of education. A lot of cases it turns into a workshop. The 3 economies platform by design. And so in change management, like, you know, how do I sort of get sort of scale out from centralized to local authority, unified backlog, cab corporation, central debt. And then here, you know, so looking at, I find in some of the large institutional banks, like they spend up to 40% of waste. Around non-functional requirements related to service management, which by the way, I call that a negative risk ROI. In other words, if you're spending. A ridiculous amount of percentage of your time, like I've had examples where it takes me 2 weeks John to code this application. It takes me another 8 weeks to go through all the sort of spreadsheets and forms and all these things all related to service, ability, reliability or service management. And by the way, none of that actually made the service. More, you know, more reliant and then even worse. Or an audit is just, you know, even though you pass the audit, it's completely disconnected to how that works. And then so there's a number of books here that from the revolution press. Dominic, the agranus, if you haven't read making work visible, it's an incredibly good book. Again, it's one of those books I say is like, I always want to be clear. This is an amazing book. But I think you need to do the qualitative data analysis first. You know, so if you guys are 5 thiefs of time, it's brilliant. So, I'm a person's product, the project, the product. Again, the open practice library will make this available metrics. We talked about the magic for now. I will say this again. You know, I think that the work done by door and all has been incredible for our industry. It's led us down to the 1st, you know, the, the, the, the, the colleges to say we're science in the S H whatever out of DevOps, which is brilliant. Right. And I think if you don't, I'm not doing any outcome based stuff, you should at least be doing these magic for the common metrics. But they are lagging indicators. And so 1 of the things I really like is this concept of flow metrics, because I think they're more leading indicators. They, you know, anyway, I'm going to run out of time. But, you know, like, for example, if I look at lead time, I'm looking at sort of maybe depending on how you measure it. As long as it's consistent, I don't care, but let's say commit to, to, to prod. Right. But the, so I start looking that in the aggregate, like, I lose some efficacy because like, you know, 1 took 8 hours, but I don't know the explanation.  And then all of a sudden I got 1 that's like 8 hours. Or on Tuesday, Monday to right, you see, you get the point of Tuesday, everything average is like 6 hours.  I don't know what's going on there. Like with flow metrics, look it up. It allows me to look at the wait time in between. And so I'm analyzing so. Um, outcome. There's a great bunch of great publications. Again, I to revolution. Access library from right at automation. Of course, you would imagine we were pretty high on. On Ansible, but and we have some trusted software supply chain. The Dallas automated governance is the book I worked on. I've been very heavily involved in this. I've done a lot of presentations. If you're interested, look it up. It's pretty cool stuff. I'll just say real quickly, it's a model for shortening all the time to either from 30 days to maybe a half a day, maybe 0 day increases efficacy from maybe 25%. In other words, it's not it's secure. Moving from security compliance theater to actually made 90% efficacy and creates a real sort of roadmap to be able to reduce centralized cab authority. Some great books that were precursors to the Dallas automated governance that we worked on. Dear auditor. I don't like you in DevOps and audit. There's also a great paper that presented about some getting cloud providers to create at the stations to some of their infrastructure for automated cloud governance. Yeah, skills liquidity. Some of the things there are really important like, you know, Devo Stojo, big fan of that internal hackathons internal DevOps days. Right. Again, these are good recommendations, except that if I learned that there's certain things about your organization, I'm like, you know what, you don't want to do internal days right now. Like maybe that's something you need to sort of fix this, fix this first. So that's the other thing is transformation isn't linear. Right. Like there's multiple service and orgs within teams and team of teams and and orgs.  Some are going to be another cadence. So, so again, I do think that's where a qualitative approach helps you a lot. Skills liquidity. There's a bunch of really good tools out there for this. You'll lean coffees if you haven't I love lean coffees in the enterprise. It's, it's such a cheap way to create collaboration and create sort of horizontal, you know, move sort of tribal knowledge to horizontal, which is, you know, just set them up on Wednesdays in the afternoon. And, you know, people kind of just, it's, it's a, it's a really easy way to get people sort of communicating in different groups or learning about other projects lunch shows and tells. Good ideas demo days. You know, I think this works really good. It's, you know, everybody wins here. You know, people get to see. And most organizations just start out with demo days when they're successful. I know one bank where like every week now, instead of just having rigid board meetings with the executives. Half of the time is actually demo day. So now the board looks forward to weekly demo days about like how they've improved how they sort of dev ops payments.  You know, if, if, if you're in Chicago, you know, you're based in Chicago. You know, look on the agenda stuff and see, oh, look, look Adrian Krakow for his what is speaking on Tuesday. I bet you he'd be if I got him early enough he might stick around for a day and come in. Like, I love doing that stuff. Right. So. Inner source, right about Stojo. The dojo that can we go on about to Joe. I talked about the recommendations. There's some books is great book account last year about getting started with to Joe's continuous learning. Yeah, safe to fail. Right. These are things like incident analysis. If you haven't fallen John Aspar and the work he's doing adaptive capacity labs. Brilliant stuff. Understanding psychological safety resilience engineers. There's a couple of vendors now. That are sort of moving chaos engineering into convenience verification, particularly with Kafka, which is really interesting. Do I know more about that? Ping me. You know, flattening incident management continues verification. Here's an example. You know, sort of, it's really taking chaos engineering to a higher level. Because anyway, so. So there's actually a new book out by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones, like Casey was involved in the Netflix engineering of the chaos engineering. And again, some of the stuff we have on the open practice library and yeah, that's that's it man. That's Bob. Bob's not my uncle, but. That was great. We have a couple of folks that are on Prasanna and Steven, and if you guys have questions or thoughts about this, it's actually a really good talk following on the heels of the anticipatory awareness talk that jade did last week. And I really appreciate you teasing out the ideas around mental models. And, and that and combining that with kind of what jade was saying about, you know, being aware of them and making sure that you and you have a common taxonomy for your invocabulary when you're doing this work. I think that's really important. You lose if you don't just simply try to sit down. I mean, the best experiment I ever saw was what what he did right where they literally had everybody, you know, whether you like lean start up model or not. It was like everybody was communicating with like acronyms and terms, and everybody knew exactly what it meant. So from the CMO down to the sort of lowest level engineer that was like literally configuring configuration files for, you know, for one of the private clouds, like they were speaking exactly the same line. There was another thing that we went through and Steven, if you have, please unmute yourself and join in the conversation here. If you like. Back in the day when I was a baby product manager and startups, we all we made, I made everybody go through pragmatic marketing. Which was a is another way of getting everybody on the same page around personas and how you, you know, build out that and that mean it's been around for like 10 or 15 years now. So I'm pretty sure they're still in existence, but it's like the whole idea of that. You have to have a common vocabulary in order to do things like qualitative data analysis. And I think that's really that's the work that goes in upfront to before you get there as well. Well, and then, but well, but, but to sort of be clear, and the reason why I favor qualitative analysis is to unravel. Like, I, you know, if I talk to. Harnet people and I realized that there are certain teams like the database team is calling using a term. This is common everywhere, like using a term. You know, even I've had this even with sort of red out products where some people would call it. You know, the self service platform. Some people call it open shifts. Some people call Kubernetes. Right. And depending how far the drift was. You might not have been having the same conversation. So just getting everybody on the same remember when we did that. This was public. We did that. The commons in London, right? And it was the Deutsche Bank presentation where they gave their own name. They came up with their own name for, for our product, right? And I thought that was brilliant, right? Because now you like to sort of put their own little sort of marketing internal marketing spent on it. And now, you know, it was 1 word. So you do not scrap for like, what are the 5 or 6 terms that even red act uses for Kubernetes. And then they take, you take more ownership of it. Totally. Right. You have that. And to be perfectly honest with you, although not, you know, not in our best interest as a vendor, but to the point I made to them is it gives an ability to uncouple themself with a vendor. So that's a positive for the consumer in that, like, if they do need to shift to another product, it's much easier.  Have to be careful with that because there is a company X by orange that I don't think they called it banana, but they have no, I know. The folks at orange are doing really amazing things with open shift and pieces of the cloud native ecosystem projects. They're pretty amazing. Stephen, is there anything that you wanted to ask or add? I'm just, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a fan of John's. We've, we've, we've met a couple of times at Dev Update in Austin. So yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I struggle with these conversations with my, with my customers. I'm a, I'm a fusion architect in the energy pod down here in Houston.  They have utilities, they're ISOs, they're running, they're running data grids and things like that. And they have that highly regulated environment mentality of adopting change, right? And a lot of the times it's, it's very difficult because, you know, there's one customer that we have that we open shift is on, you know, on premise on site. And unfortunately they're bastardizing it to the point to where it's almost unusable right there because they're basically lifting and shifting their old proven audible, you know, documented processes into this new platform and they're literally, they're getting some benefits out of it. But it's, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to, to cautiously tell them or not, and not to create an adversarial relationship but to basically shake them and be like, you're doing this wrong. You know, you're, you're, you're, it's great that you got this new platform but you're moving all of these antiquated old systems over because you don't know anything better or you don't want to change because you have this built in organizational knowledge of the products. You have organizational guarantees that if you use these approved products, you won't get in trouble type of mentality. There's a, there's a really low trust environment there. So I'm always looking at ways to a how, you know, how to start that conversation which doesn't turn into a you're doing it wrong conversation. But then be how to, how to move up the chain because I can talk to mid level managers. I can even talk to kind of director level, but they don't have the organizational power to be able to affect change in those ways. I'm always trying to figure out like a how to get the conversation going and then be how to make that conversation grow, go up rather than go down because I explained the concepts to them. I mean, I'll shake their head and they're like, oh yeah, that sounds great, but it won't work here. Yeah, well that's the, you know, again, there's no magic bullet right I mean, but I do find out of all the times I've spent over the years. You know, I mean, it seems I've always been on this transformation journey with clients, I think we all have right but going almost five generations of technology. And so I, I sort of like come to this, you know, conclusion at this point that that, you know, the thing that we're always missing is understanding those sort of three things up front, which is there are these mental models, you know, that we can't go into early with prescriptive solutions because we miss a lot of things.  And I'll ask them, did anybody talk to you from that, you know, big four organization.   Typically, I find all I have to do is say, the starter meeting with, you know, I used to think I had to do some time lining and boxes and very specifically. I find now I just say, you know, what is your company not doing that it should be doing. And literally that, you know, it just doesn't stop from there. And then I have to sort of drill in when I hear like a, I hear a trigger word like something that's related to risk or consistency. I'll sort of, well, what, give me an example of that, right. But, but my point is that to the, you know, to your point that, you know, at first this has to be mandated at the sea level. Right. Because, and then what you're doing then at that point is going back to them and then, and quite honestly, I had clients when I was not with red at where they didn't like the data.    Like, just because you don't like the data doesn't mean you're not going to get invoiced.  It's your people.  All the people we work with our clients, most of them wake up in the morning wanting to do a good job. Sometimes we get lost in the mile. Like we think everybody's sort of nobody. There's bad actors to this. The majority of people that go to work, want to do a good job. Right. And, but we put these barriers in their way to do that good job. Right.  Another Bob from office space. Right. And, and then, you know, and then at some point I win their trust. Right.  But John, are you going to fix anything? I don't know. I'm going to basically, I'm going to. I'm going to do some analysis and tell the executives what you tell me. So, you know, the fact that they invested in me doing this is a good sign. You know, because the other 8 people I talked to said they didn't want to do this.  You see them like, let me, let me tell you about this. Let me. And it's not like they're trying to like, bash their organization.  And then they're like, but John, is it going to fix anything? So normally I go back to CEO and if the CEO is like not receptive to like all the, you know, I've had. I was get fired while I'm in the middle of the process and the CEO is like, I don't know. I'm going to do this, this and this before I do that. I'm like, all right, I beg you, you do one thing. Like pick 2 things out of this list of 15 and just do it. Pick the 2 most harmless things that you think there are. Because if you don't do anything from this report and all these people spent, you know, basically, you know, a couple of 100 hours with me, they're just going to throw me into that same old category of like nothing changes. Every time I have to talk to one of these people, nothing changes. I'm like, do something.  Because again, I think people just get to the which end of like, you know, there's things that are wrong here. I know they're wrong. I'll say, well, I know running on time, but sometimes when I get somebody on a long ramp, I'll say, Hey, why do you work here?  And then normally the answer is, I like here, you know, to be like a 5 second delay where they got to think, right? Like, I like it here. I like the people just wish we could fix these things. Anyway, yeah, we can fix the things. We have to listen to each other too. I think that's really it and hearing people. That's it. My last question is the, the global transformation office, you and Andrew and Kevin and is there a set of engagement?  Is it a set of documentation to where it's like, here's all of our capabilities? Are you interested? I'll say this, you know, there's sort of two answers. One is, you know, any one of us in a pinch can be pulled in for just about any conversation. So this brings me back to before we started today's recording, creating the landing page on how to contact. And this is something that you and I and the team need to need to get that stood up along with all the presentations you guys have been doing on these transformation Friday. So here's my commitment to reaching out and pinging you guys again to do that. And Steven, thank you for the instigation to do that.


Hey everyone. Well, how about that tears of the kingdom is getting a game play? Yes, right ten minutes of gameplay Presentation tomorrow. It's almost as if we might have teased That's something was happening tomorrow now before we dive deeper into this I want to remind you that we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers and if we can get there by the time tears of the kingdom comes out We'll give away a collector's edition of the game that being said let's get into this news So on the heels of what we put reported back on Saturday and talked a bit on the podcast yesterday It does appear that there is something happening tomorrow because Nintendo announced a gameplay event a 10 minute event Happening exactly at 9 p.m. Central time now We're obviously gonna be live streaming react to do it and there's a ton of speculation We can get into on what's gonna be in it. What are we gonna do? But I'm gonna handle most that tonight. I'm actually making this video Literally in the car on the way home because when I get home, I need to sleep. I am pretty damn tired But I wanted to make sure I got this news out to you guys for those that maybe didn't see Nintendo stuff Maybe you've just been waiting for me to give some opinions on it or something I don't have a whole lot to say other than I am super super excited. I told you guys a long time ago I am done hyping responsibly for this at all. Seriously hyping responsibly is not something I'm capable of in fact here. Here's a cameo from Eric thoughts gameplay tomorrow. Yeah, boy That's right. That's right. Of course. He'll be at work or doing whatever, but so why if I got a lot of stuff I gotta do man When you leave for like five days everything just goes to crap sometimes So there's a lot of things I got to fix up But what I don't need to fix up is my height for Zelda. I am so excited for tears of the kingdom It's it's unbelievable to me that I'm coming back off a trip to Pax East where I got to literally lay underneath links crotch And now I'm gonna be seeing my friend all over again on Tuesday That is Baby So what I want you guys to do is go down in the comments below Let me know how hyped you are how excited you are that we finally get a gameplay presentation Featuring IG I a new ma I butchered it again. I need to stop thinking about his name I know you guys are gonna correct me. You know what? Maybe today. Don't let's just celebrate Gameplay for tears of the kingdom. You know what I will catch you guys later tonight like the in a live stream If not, I definitely will be live probably an hour or two early tomorrow