Instant Teaming with DevOps Superheroes

This week in the Chasing Psychological Safety Newsletter we wrote about DIY Psychological Safety. It's not the first time, we often say the best thing you can do for your teams is to obsess about PS enough that you use our software or software like ours that has a way to smartly gather data about how the team interacts and feels (engaging UX, an algorithm to understand the complex dynamics and a way to measure team behaviours are the very minimum) and a way to empower the teams to make changes to that data by employing smart human interventions to improve their Psychological Safety (CBT for teams performed by themselves and kept at the team bubble if you wish) but if you can't use us -or some competitor-, at the very least do some of these things yourselves at the team level "manually". It's why we write and publish free videos three times a week. So that every team who has their heart in the right place, but doesn't have the support to access us, can still do something about Psychological Safety.

There are SO many people we meet every week that have their “heart in the right place”. They clearly read, learn, care. It’s a privilege to meet them and see some of the things they do to make substantial, worthwhile change when they could easily just coast and clock in and out with no ambition of bettering anything.

Unfortunately, if I’m honest, at times they do remind me of the innovation managers of the early 2000s in banks. All of them sharing an air of retired Don Quixotes who have seen too much and fought too hard. You’d meet them at “digital transformation” conferences and their half-defeated, half-uninterested attitude made no sense at first, they were after all, in a place where all their keyword-dreams were coming true. “Digital wallets”, “mobile banking”, “ripping out old antiquated backends from the 70s” that held back progress, “real-time transactions”, “data”, “customer needs”, “eradicating the bank branch” and moving to “online-only”, “human-centred design”, “Agile ways of work”, you name it, we were talking about all the things that they had undoubtedly been hired to reimagine and we simply couldn’t understand why they weren’t jumping for joy.

It wasn’t till later that it dawned on us they were "jumped-out". They had allowed themselves to cheer and hope and celebrate when each and every one of these topics seemed like it was passing the awareness threshold internally and it was becoming a real thing, and then each of those instances eventually ended in disappointment. Crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment later, with no real needle having moved beyond the odd green wall in a dedicated “innovation floor” they were now utterly exhausted, knowing all the things and having none of the hope. Defeated enough to be sad, but clearly still hopeful enough to not have resigned, still going to these events -if mostly for the beer and occasional commiseration- and still occasionally trying to get some potentially transformative project over the line. It was hard to watch them still have too much fight to give up but too little energy to hope.

The DevOps Superheroes with their heart in the right place we meet these days are nowhere as deeply broken as the bank innovation managers of yesteryear chiefly because they do see needles moving, they can make delivery magic and while they see much of the huge backlog of what’s left to do, they feel they have the power to move those tickets, even the tickets that have to do with humans, not technology.