DevOps Report Says: Culture Keeps You Stuck

Anti-Impression Management and Clarity practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age”  

At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us. We’re currently running a 4 weeks license-free trial campaign, come ask us about a demo at contat@peoplenottech.com  

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I expect most of us reading this would be aware already but the State of DevOps Report 2021 is out.

Some good news, some bad news as ever. Loads about the state of automation, cloud readiness and DevOpsSec as ever but I’ll focus here on the part that underpins it all. 

“In fact, many of the teams that are “doing DevOps” well don’t even talk about DevOps anymore, it’s simply how they work. But for every team “doing DevOps” well, there are far too many organizations that have been stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolutionary journey for far too long —even if there are pockets of success in which individual teams are highly evolved.”

Why? Culture.

“…while DevOps was made possible by automation, programmable infrastructure, and more accessible programming languages and APIs, it was fundamentally a human-centered movement, focused on improving the interactions between people. In fact, “culture” talks—in which speakers explore the roles of empathy, trust, and psychological safety—have always been a part of the DevOps movement and corresponding events. However, large portions of our industry led with a focus on technology without setting out to change the way work happens, which is—fundamentally—culture.”

What a superbly built explanation of why DevOps is all about culture and almost none about the technology itself that is. It takes no more than one DevOps events attendance to know that beyond a shadow of a doubt because if you look at the proportion to talks that are to do with tech matters versus the ones that, as mentioned above are about the humans - trust, EQ and in particular Psychological Safety and healthy team dynamics, the contrast is staggering. 

This doesn’t prevent the cognitive disconnect -likely caused by the 5th type of impression management - the fear of looking unprofessional that holds us back from the human work as I was stating earlier this week in the other newsletter- that causes all those professionals to have left the DevOps event and carried on “like normal” with a day-to-day that far from reflects that preoccupation and is at times devoid of work on the very aspects they agreed counts the most. The report does call out this very inability of translating values and beliefs into sustainable, good behaviours and advises it is necessary to constantly “nudge behaviours in the right direction”.

If by that we mean always keeping the human work at the centre and being vigilant that it doesn’t slip we completely agree but what we have observed with our client teams is that once they are empowered and able to work on their own dynamic and once they have made the people work a habit no constant nudging is really necessary and they gleefully embrace the work. 

“It’s taken me 10-plus years to come up with my own one-line definition of DevOps: “DevOps is whatever you do to bridge friction created by silos, and all the rest is engineering.” And so, if you’re doing technology just for the technology and you’re not trying to overcome some friction of the human kind of siloing or group siloing or information siloing or whatever, then you’re just doing the engineering part and you’re not, in my opinion, doing the DevOps part”. Patrick Debois, Advisor, Snyk (Formerly DevOpsDays)

There’s nothing wrong with doing engineering and it’s the safe, enjoyable, measurable bit of the work. The culture part, the human bit where we have to decipher how others feel and what it takes to better our interactions is the messy, uncomfortable and hard bit so it’s no wonder the stuck-in-the-middle teams avoid it. 

“The historical focus has rightly been on technical practices. Organizations that have put in place these technical foundations are finding that they need to address team dynamics in order to move faster safely” Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, Team Topologies

I put it to us that if the report would have been able to measure the amount of Psychological Safety amongst all the teams surveyed they would have seen a correlation between the siloed, stunted, stuck in the middle ones and low degrees of PS. In fact, it’s made me think of an interesting piece of research and exploration Manuel Pais, Matthew Skelton and us at PeopleNotTech could undertake to show more of that connection and thinking time permitting I will reach out to them and keep you guys posted. 

Allow me to be controversial for a moment and ask what would have happened if the report would have been bold enough to boldly assume the culture-only role of DevOps and left out the vast chunks about bettering automation and instead dissected good team behaviours, what it takes to empower teams, what deep psyche barriers exist in the minds of exes who can not let go of command and control and ways to increase empathy, EQ and truly speak up fearlessly and engage fully removing any kind of friction that Patrick names? 

The sky wouldn’t have fallen but the readers may have recoiled - after all they opened the report to find out what best DevOpsSec practices and software that they can put in place to get out of where they are stuck in a half-baked DevOps journey and not to hear how it’s all about emotions and human interactions. That’s whit’s only part of it. 

The main message of the report to me? “You’ve done enough engineering, time to do the DevOps - Do the human work.”

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.