29874_INT20 Using Neuroscience for DevOps Helen Beal | Ways of Working Coach | @bealhelen

Human Ways of Working Practitioner Chief Ambassador: DevOps Institute DevOps Editor: InfoQ Ambassador: CD Foundation Analyst: Accelerated Strategies Strategic Advisor Ecologist, novelist Volunteer warden at Kingley Vale Can dig an Olive Ridley turtle nest Mission: Bringing joy to work

The Biggest Challenge for DevOps Evolution

What Does “Culture” Really Mean? The DevOps “Elevator Acronym” C Culture A Automation L Lean M Measurement S Sharing

Brain Facts Icon made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com • Weighs 3lbs (2% of body weight) • 73% water • 60% of the dry weight is fat • Contains 86 billion neurons • Gets 20% of our blood/oxygen • 100,000 miles of blood vessels • 2% dehydration affects cognitive skills • Every minute one litre of blood flows through the brain • Humans have the largest brains proportional to body weight

Neuron Facts Icon made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com • Communicate with each other using electrical and chemical signals • Neurons link via axons • Producing a neural circuit • Different circuits perform different tasks • A neuron can transmit 1,000 nerve impulses per second • There are 10,000 specific types of neurons in the brain • Brain information travels at 268 mph

Unlearning and Learning

“I define unlearning as the process of letting go of, moving away from, and reframing once-useful mind-sets and acquired behaviours that were effective in the past, but now limit our success. It’s not forgetting or discarding knowledge or experience; it’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively gathering and taking in new information to inform effective decision making and action.” Barry O’Reilly

Neuroplasticity • Many learners feel their brains limit their potential and prevent them from learning • Learning can change our brains in terms of function, connectivity and structure • Our brain shapes our learning but learning shapes our brain • Research has shown that simply knowing about brain plasticity can improve learners’ ability to learn

London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than London bus drivers because this region of the brain is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London whereas bus drivers follow a limited set of routes. Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex)

Learning a second language is possible through functional changes in the brain: the left inferior parietal lobule is larger in bilingual brains than in monolingual brains. Icon made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule

Grey matter (cortex) volume is highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians in several brain areas involved in playing music: motor regions, anterior superior parietal areas and inferior temporal areas. Icon made by Eucalyp from www.flaticon.com Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule Premotor Cortex Motor Cortex Superior parietal lobule

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Working Memory

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What can you remember?

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What can you remember?

Practice shifts activity from working memory to regions more involved with automatic unconscious processing (away from the front of the brain). Practice helps consolidate freshly-learnt mental processes until we can do them almost without thinking, so reducing the burden on working memory. Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule Premotor Cortex Motor Cortex Superior parietal lobule Frontal Lobe

Automaticity • Cognitive load theory assumes that knowledge is stored in long term memory in the form of schemas • A schema organises elements of information according to how they will be used • Skilled performance is developed through combining complex schemas

“Software that is too big for our heads works against organisational agility. Limit the size of services/products to the cognitive load that the team can handle. Each service must be fully owned by a team with sufficient cognitive capacity to build and operate it.”

Fear and Blame

TRANSFORMATION

REVOLUTION

EVOLUTION

TRANSITION

DISRUPTION

ACCLIMATION

Transitions That DevOps Demands Dimensions Traditional IT DevOps Batch Size Large Micro Organization Skill-centric silos Autonomous, dedicated cells Scheduling Centralized Decentralized and continuous Release High risk event “Like breathing.” Information Disseminated Actionable Culture Do not fail High trust, fail early Metric Cost and capacity Flow (value and time) Definition of Done “I did my job.” Value outcome realized Planning & Structure Performance & Culture Measure Adapted from an original article by Mustafa Kapadia

“Several structures in our brain are actually designed to protect us from the potentially harmful effects of change. Humans are wired to resist change and we are working against our biology at every turn. It’s well documented that every year 50 to 70 percent of all change initiatives fail.” Britt Andreatta

The Principle of Little and Often Time Productivity Big Bang, Big J - Transformation Time Productivity Incremental, Little J’s - Evolution DevOps Kaisen: Attributed to Damon Edwards

An avoidance response is a response that prevents an unpleasant experience, avoiding something from occurring. Fear causes subcortical activity in the amygdala which in turn activates the working memory network in the frontal lobe (where conscious attention happens) which makes it harder to learn as the anxiety is a distraction. Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule Premotor Cortex Motor Cortex Superior parietal lobule Frontal Lobe Amygdala Hypothalamus

Building Safety In Behavioural Safety Systemic Safety From the top training that failure is a learning opportunity Continuous integration breaks builds and prevents defects from going downstream Fail walls like Spotify to make failure visible and addressable Deployment automation drives consistency/auditability and allows instant redeploy of last known good state Awards for failure like Etsy, LEGO and Proctor & Gamble Limited blast radius approaches: feature toggles, canary, blue/green, microservices Ensuring shared accountabilities and goals across and between teams Integrating the service desk to the product backlog Making experimentation time explicit (i.e. writing it into the product backlog) Application performance management delivers early warning preempting failure Using collaboration platforms to share learning and best practice ChatOps to swarm problems and incidents Writing actions from retrospectives as experiments and making time to ensure follow up Chaos engineering teaches failure as a habit – use the Simian army

Rewards and Motivation

An approach response is behaviour that brings an individual closer to a reward. Anticipation creates an uptake of neuromodulators from deep within the brain that influence the way our frontal cortex is operating so that our brain can become more focused on the source of the excitement and improves memory of the experience Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule Premotor Cortex Motor Cortex Superior parietal lobule Frontal Lobe Amygdala Hypothalamus

David Rock’s SCARF Model from ‘Your Brain at Work’ Status – the relative importance to others. Certainty – the ability to predict future. Autonomy – the sense of control over events. Relatedness – the sense of safety with others. Fairness – the perception of fair exchanges.

Hippocampus (entorhinal cortex) Left inferior parietal lobule Premotor Cortex Motor Cortex Superior parietal lobule Frontal Lobe Amygdala Hypothalamus Mirror neurons activate when we see someone doing something (like smiling or going to talk to someone) and are related to empathic, social and imitations behaviour. They are a fundamental tool for learning.

DevOps Agents for Evolution ● Be conscious (mindful) of these concepts ● Discover what engages your colleagues through learning about their interests, their existing understanding and observing their response to different approaches ● Look beyond behaviour to the brain ● Create psychological safety to improve learning ● Model the behaviour you want to see: you are a mirror Icon made by Surang from www.flaticon.com

Thank you for your time and attention. Stay human!