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Mirrors, networks, and boundaries what technical leaders need to know for the next 10 years of devops Lindsay Holmwood

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10 years

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Sensitive dependence on initial conditions

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What were the initial conditions?

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Post-GFC scarcity

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Organisations were requiring increased operational tempo

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Siloisation was becoming a less viable organisational strategy

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Infrastructure was becoming commoditised & on-demand

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Barrier of entry to dev tools had been lowered

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The last 10 years

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Three lenses: Delivery Systems People

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Delivery

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Operating models Delivery Before Waterfall

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Operating models Delivery After Agile, Lean

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Devops started as “agile systems administration”

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Deploy frequency Delivery Before Weekly-to-monthly deploys

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Deploy frequency Delivery After Multiple deploys a day

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Continuous Delivery is the standard in web industry

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Systems

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Infrastructure Systems Before Blend of: ◦ bare metal + virtualised ◦ on-prem or “hosting”

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Infrastructure Systems After IaaS, PaaS

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Commodification of infrastructure

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Infrastructure management Systems Before Scripting

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Infrastructure management Systems After Powerful config management

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Architecture Systems Before Monoliths

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Architecture Systems After Microservices

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Is this reality or aspirational?

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Deployment unit Systems Before Virtual machines

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Deployment unit Systems After Containers

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Deployment unit Systems Future Functions?

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People

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How we respond to failure People Before Blame culture

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How we respond to failure People After Just culture

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Blameless post-mortems

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Relationships to our co-workers People Before Silos

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Relationships to our co-workers People After Empathy

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Build DevOps culture through shared experiences

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Devs on call + Ops shipping code

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Organising around the deployment pipeline

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What’s next?

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“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” 
 – Niels Bohr

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I’m not going to make predictions

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Yes, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. As long as the technology is an enabler of the underlying principles (communication, collaboration, a holistic view), the DevOps movement is still sound.

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What are the conditions now?

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The DevOps dream ain’t evenly distributed

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…the overall industry is improving its software development and delivery practices

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…low performers are struggling to keep up, widening the gap

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Increasing, fragmented regulation

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◦ GDPR ◦ NDB + APP ◦ “the Netflix tax”

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Good for society, a PITA for us

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Frameworks for accountability

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Custom ASICs are proliferating

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Machine learning is becoming more accessible

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Google Neural Machine Translation Source: NYT – The Great AI Awakening

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Generative adversarial networks

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Let’s talk about skills for managing uncertainty & ambiguity

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Mental models for: ◦ Understanding culture ◦ Harnessing mirroring ◦ Mapping strategy ◦ Managing risk

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Understanding culture

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We don’t know shit about culture

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Schein’s three levels of culture

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Artifacts Values Assumptions

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National ↩︎ Organisational ↩︎ Team ↩︎ Occupational

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Artifacts

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physical manifestations of culture

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ceremonies

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org charts

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desk layout

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documentation

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software

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most visible parts of an org’s culture

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easiest part of a culture to adopt

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Values

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conscious goals, strategies, and philosophies

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rules that guide how we interact with people

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rules that guide how we do our work

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“we will dominate the market”

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“management is available, and listen to our concerns”

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“we value quality over delivery speed”

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“nobody will be fired for making an honest mistake”

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values: lived vs aspirational

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Communication We have an obligation to communicate.

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Respect We treat others as we would like to be treated.

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Integrity We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.

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Excellence We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do.

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Ethical We conduct business affairs in accordance with all applicable laws and in a moral and honest manner.

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Work as imagined vs Work as done

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Be clear about what values are what

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Assumptions

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beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, feelings

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exist at an unconscious level

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hard to discern

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“anyone can take on leadership responsibility”

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“bad outcomes come from bad people”

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“it’s OK to withhold information”

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“individual performance is valued over team performance”

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“we can trust that team”

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Artifacts Values Assumptions

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Our systems are artifacts

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Our processes are artifacts

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Artifacts Values Assumptions

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Tools are a snapshot of our org’s culture

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Tools are a snapshot of our org’s values and assumptions

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Artifacts influence behaviour

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Encode the org behaviour you want to see into your artifacts

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Change your org’s values by changing your artifacts

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Artifact: All changes go through a CD pipeline.

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Value: We create fast feedback loops to learn from changes in production.

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Artifact: Developers and managers do on-call

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Value: Performance, availability and sustainability are everyone’s responsibility

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Artifact: Our ceremonies include and engage non-technical disciplines

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Value: Nobody has all the answers. We succeed by working together.

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But the tools are only a 
 means to an end

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The goal is transforming our ways of working

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Harnessing mirroring

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"Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." – Melvin Conway

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Mirroring

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“In a complex system, the technical architecture and the division of labor will “mirror” one another in the sense that the network structure of one will correspond to the structure of the other.”

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Two separate research traditions studying mirroring

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1. Computer science Conway’s law

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2. Management Org + product design & orgs + products as complex systems

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What is mirroring?

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Two networks

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Organisational

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Technical

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Organisational Technical Mirroring

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We do this to solve problems

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We do this to take people to where the problems are

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Who owns this system? ? ? ?

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We do this because it’s economical

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Organization design: an information processing view Galbraith, 1974

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As uncertainty increases, the amount of information that must be processed by decision makers increases

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The org can respond by reducing the need to process information

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The org can respond by increasing the capacity to process information

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The org can respond by Increase the capacity to process information devops

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Creation of lateral relations: Direct contact Liaison roles Task forces Teams Integrating roles Managerial linking roles Matrix organisation

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Creation of lateral relations: Matrix organisation Teams

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Creation of lateral relations: Matrix organisation Teams Dev Ops Design Frontend Backend App eng Infra UX/UI Research

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Dev Ops Design Frontend Backend App eng Infra UX/UI Research Why do we stop at dev and ops?

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Dev Ops Design Frontend Backend App eng Infra UX/UI Research We can also include: support marketing design analytics legal finance

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Dev Ops Design Frontend Backend App eng Infra UX/UI Research What happens if we don’t?

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Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms Henderson & Clark, 1990

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3 year study of semiconductor photolithographic alignment equipment industry

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field based study, high rate-of-change industry

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4 waves of innovation between 1962-1986

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4 waves of innovation new leader after each: Kulicke ↩︎ Kasper ↩︎ Perkin-Elmer ↩︎ GCA ↩︎ Nikon

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4 waves of innovation each incumbent could not course correct

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4 waves of innovation each incumbent invested heavily in new technology

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4 waves of innovation each incumbent structured organisation and communication based on product architecture

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4 waves of innovation What about this makes sense?

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Henderson & Clark’s framework for defining innovation Based on Schumpeter, 1942

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Strongly mirrored Broken mirror

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Henderson & Clark’s framework for defining innovation Based on Schumpeter, 1942 Mirror Don’t
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Mapping strategy

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Strategy is not just having a plan –

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– it’s understanding how you react in a complex environment

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Your criteria for making decisions when you face uncertainty

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“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson

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Mapping 101

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Why do we map?

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Build collective context

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Inform strategic technology decisions

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Understand and visualise tradeoffs

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– Sidney Dekker “multiple overlapping and partially contradictory descriptions of the same act are always possible, and even necessary, to approximate the complexity of reality”

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Subjective

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Navigate complexity Discover ambiguities Discover uncertainties

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Don’t replace architecture diagrams

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Arch diagrams + maps: complimentary tools

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What is a Wardley map?

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It’s a tool that clarifies: * Relationships * Position in value chain * Evolution/maturity

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It’s a tool that clarifies: * Hot spots * Where new initiatives fit

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Evolution/maturity Visibility to customers

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Start with user needs

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Then add most visible systems

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Solid lines represent dependencies

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Add dependent systems

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Direction of travel

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Visualise opportunities

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Keep in mind: * Subjective * Visibility informs priority * Maturity informs investment * Don’t replace arch diagrams * Maps change over time

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As the complexity of a system increases, the accuracy of any single agent's own model of that system decreases rapidly. Woods' Theorem

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medium.com/wardleymaps

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learn.hiredthought.com/p/wardley-mapping

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• What are complex system • Simple, rugged, and dancing landscapes • The interesting in- between • Explore/exploit

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stella.report

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Managing risk

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Likelihood % chance the thing will happen in the next 12 months

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Impact $ cost of impact expressed as range* *90% confidence interval

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Before

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After

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Use maps to understand your risk landscape

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1. Understand aggregate risk position

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2. Compare to appetite

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2. Compare to appetite Probability of exceeding loss 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% Loss exceeded 10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000 10,000,000 100,000,000 Current Appetite Residual

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Probability of exceeding loss 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% Loss exceeded 10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000 10,000,000 100,000,000 Current Appetite Residual

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3. Invest in: ◦ Reducing uncertainty ◦ Mitigation

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The biggest risk?

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We only look for answers in our field

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Our niche becomes obsolete

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We used to laugh at the box huggers

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But building your own PaaS in AWS?

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The 2019 version of being a box hugger

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COTS PaaS meets user needs of 95% of teams

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Your niche is going to disappear.

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– Edward Deming "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."

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Move up the stack

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Understand the business model

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Learn skills to navigate uncertainty & ambiguity

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Kill your heroes

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Thank you! ❤ the talk? Let @auxesis know.

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• Learn more: ◦ Algorithmic Impact Assessment report 2018 ◦ Stella Report ◦ Wardley Mapping for busy people ◦ Wardley Maps book ◦ The Great Courses: Understanding complexity

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• Learn more: ◦ How to measure anything ◦ How to measure anything in cybersecurity ◦ Organisational culture and leadership (Schein)

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• Learn more: ◦ Organization design: an information processing view (Galbraith, 1974) ◦ Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms (Henderson and Clarke, 1990)