'Slowify:' How Winning Organizations Create Fingerspitzengefühl & Einheit with Steven J. Spear, DBA | Ep 55

How are winning organizations wired?

Ready to elevate your perspective on complex problem-solving?

Brace yourself as we invite Shingo Prize Winner  Steven J.  Spear to a lively discussion on navigating the fast-paced world of technology and organizational complexity. Dr. Spear introduces us to the concept of 'slowification,' an innovative method of architecting operations around human cognitive capabilities. This enlightening conversation promises a fresh insight into how organizations can shift from being in a danger zone to a winning zone.

Ever wondered about the role of planning in the world of knowledge work? We delve into the historical military strategies and lessons learned from the Battle of Midway in 1929. Dr. Spear emphasizes the need for challenging ideas during the planning process, a concept inspired by the Japanese Admiralty's approach used in said battle. We also explore the relevance of case-based reasoning, resilience engineering, and high-reliability theory in the DevOps community, drawing parallels with European city architecture and the scientific breakthroughs of Isaac Newton.

Our conversation concludes with invaluable lessons learned from the US Navy's nuclear reactors program. We underscore the essence of establishing precise standards, tracking progress, and forming feedback loops. We extend an invitation to you, our listener, as we uncover how to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape of technological advancement and organizational complexity. Tune in and let's navigate this journey together.

Steven J. Spear on LinkedIn
Wiring the Winning Organization
High-Velocity Edge
Steve J. Spear Wikipedia Page
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of The Battle of Midway

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Transcript

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Navigating Complexity

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

Let's talk about some context or set some context . We have artificial intelligence , large language models . In the last year , a lot of complexity in the world , rapid product , shorter product life cycles , shorter product and company life cycles . Yeah , misinformation , disinformation . We have global wars , we have supply chain issues . We have a pandemic . What else can you add to that current context ?

Steve Spear, DBA 0:41

I don't know , it sounds quite utopian to me already . So you know , just smooth sailing going forward .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:46

Yeah , what could possibly go wrong ? Next right ?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:48

So , at the moment organizations , people , individuals . We're trying to figure out how do you navigate this context right . It's something that we've never seen the acceleration of technology and you have an idea that you worked out with Gene Kim called Wiring the Organization a new book coming out here shortly . So , dr Speer , great to have you on the show . I love to talk about the book and clearly talk more about things you've done in the past with high velocity , edge to work with the US Navy and so forth .

Steve Spear, DBA 1:16

So welcome to the show , thank you . Thanks for having me . Really appreciate the time Awesome .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:21

Okay . So just glancing at what's in your new book , you have something called slowify , right yeah ? And when I'm reading this , I'm starting to think more about tempo versus speed . And you know , when you're training kids to shoot baskets and become better athletes , you actually have to slow down to speed up . Is that where you're going with this ?

Steve Spear, DBA 1:41

Yeah , 100% . So let's set some context , and I think you know you and I come from very different backgrounds , but we've had similar experiences and let me explain . What sounds paradoxical is that , you know , you're coming out of the military with years of experience there , and I'm coming out of some combination of industry and academia and whatnot . But we've both been , you know , obviously impressed by and fascinated by organizations which can do so much more with so much less relative to everybody else . And this ties into this whole notion of slowification and the other mechanisms we have in our book , which is , when you start looking at these organizations , it's wildly level playing fields , right ? People are competing more or less in the same market space or competitive space . They're trying to accomplish more or less the same things as their counterparts . They have access to similar resources , raw materials , capital equipment , etc . The regulatory framework , legal framework , is more or less for the same , and yet there are just those who do so much more with so much less . And so the question is you know , what's the difference between them and everybody else ? And the answer is that they put the minds of the people in their enterprise to much better use towards solving hard problems for which the solutions have great value than anywhere else . And so in our entire book is framed around this idea that management systems deliberately have to be architected and operated around the cognitive ability of people individually and collaboratively to solve hard problems . So with that we talk about mechanisms in the book that help people get from places where it's very , very hard to solve hard problems . We call that place the danger zone . Things are fast moving , they're very complex , the risks are very high , we don't have much control over the situation , we have very little opportunity for iteration and learning loops . And how do you get from the danger zone down to the winning zone ? The winning zone is that place where all those conditions are the same but opposite . Right , you have control , you have a chance to get some iteration and learning loops , the complexity is dropped down , the risks have dropped down , and so we talk about ways in which you can go from that danger zone down to that winning zone , and one of them we call slowification is to change the context in which you're asking people to apply their intellect , and the term slowification is a very deliberate , explicit acknowledgement of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow .

Steve Spear, DBA 4:07

And in that book , kahneman , you know I'm building on his work and that of his late colleague Amos Torski . He says look , you know , we have two modes of thinking . And he's not dismissive either , right ? He says there's this fast thinking thing and we can call it biases , and that's not prejudicial . He says , no , no , we've built up habits , routines , biases , you know , kind of muscle memory what we might call of how to behave in a certain situation , so we can get to a good outcome very , very quickly .

Steve Spear, DBA 4:35

And if the situation is moving fast we have to depend on muscle memory because there's no time for our brains to really work . And he acknowledges that's actually a very important skill to have to build up muscle memory . The other thing Kahneman points out is that sometimes if you're in a new situation and you're reverting to your well-honed habits , routines , biases , etc . You can actually get to very bad answers . And he said you know , and his point is that you really have to engage in slow thinking , which can be deliberative , it can be reflective , it could be self-critical , it could be generative . And so in the book we spend quite a bit of time talking about example organizations and how they go out of their way to get people out of fast thinking . You know the impulsive reactive you got to give me an answer right now kind of thing and allow them to be contemplative , generative and creative individually and collectively .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 5:31

While there's so much done packed there . One couple of things that came up to mind here is , I believe , when you're in the danger zone , it's okay , right , it's okay to be over there . In fact , I believe you want to be there and be a little comfortable there . That's the exploration type of space where you need to use these tools and techniques we can talk about those for a moment to bring it over to the winning zone , and that is very fantastic . The condominant point about going from System 1 to System 2 , and it's really you know , we know it's a network , it's not your brain is broken up into System 1 system . It's the way . It's just a metaphor , if you will . The idea here is that's orientation , right , we really struggle with getting people to slow down . We'll use red team techniques , we'll use anything to go from System 1 , again , it's a network to System 2 or Network 2 , thinking and that is very , very tough to do because it requires energy high energy , right and it's kind of uncomfortable to take people there .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 6:29

That is something that is absolutely in our wheelhouse , and the orientation piece I want to go back to it . You talked about biases , heuristics , things like that . That's part of who we are , right , it's in our DNA . It's work for humans . So what do we need to do ? Well , we need to do something . We have to act to reorient that and adjust and update our mind . If you will update our orientation , the basic idea here is you can change the world or update your mind , right ? A lot of people are too busy trying to change the world without updating their minds , and that's the problem and I think what I'm hearing from you , based on our previous conversations and your work there's a lot of overlap with how we kind of see the world , which is great , so I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this book .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 7:16

So , tempo I was kind of reading some of Gene's ideas on how the concept of slowification , slowify , came up and this kind of reminded me of tempo and it's a hard thing to think about and I'm gonna use something from theory constraints , the drum , buffer , rope thing , right drum like that cadence . That cadence doesn't limit us to go faster . You can . Always , when you have a cadence , you can actually play shorter notes . Right , if you want to use a music as an analogy , but that tempo is so critical that it's it's kind of like that drum beat the heartbeat of the organization . Right , you can . And that that's where we're going to find our advantage by using , I'm gonna say , to slowification in this case , to really accelerate how we work as humans , that people process and things . So where am I wrong in anything I fed back to you ?

Steve Spear, DBA 8:10

No , it's a hundred percent . Right is Is our brains operate to a certain tempo and our bodies operate to a certain tempo , and if we're gonna put our bodies into situations which the tempo is faster than our brains can work , then what we have to do is gives our brains an opportunity To teach our bodies how to operate at that faster tempo .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:27

That's happening now , right , I mean with when you think about how AI and acceleration technologies , yeah , and mental health right , that's happening around us at the moment . So you have to do that .

Steve Spear, DBA 8:38

Yeah , we talk in the book about Three phases and moving back . There's the performance phase , and sometimes the performance phase is very unforgiving , and you know it from your career . You just don't have time to think because things are happening so fast and if it's not built into Heuristics , your muscle memory , whatever you want to call it you just won't get to a good answer . And so the question then is how do you build that muscle memory ? And the answer is that you have to be a very aggressive learner During your planning phase , and you know you guys have terms like red teaming and forceful backup and things like that . We're planning is not .

Steve Spear, DBA 9:15

Oh , I just , you know , throw crap up on the board and then say , oh , that's the best , it is . No , I do throw crap up on the board and then I step back and I ask you I Don't try to pitch you on what I've thrown up on the board I say now , punch , can you find all the reasons ? This is crap . So now we can go through and cycle very , very quickly and try to improve on it , and then , once we've run out of our ability to find flaws in the thinking of the crap that's thrown on the board , then we put into practice and again , I think some people have this some Misunderstanding that practice is to take the plan off the board and then make sure that Steven punch can execute on it .

Steve Spear, DBA 9:51

Yeah , and the truth is , the purpose of practice in the best organizations is actually to still find flaws in the thinking , because if you and I can't execute on the plan , it that's a sign that the plan is wrong , because it's depending on you and me to execute on it . And if we can't execute on it , then we've picked the wrong plan .

Planning's Role in Knowledge Work

Steve Spear, DBA 10:12

And the in the book I make a passing reference and we've made reference in other articles and stuff there's a phenomenal , phenomenal book called shattered sword . It's about the battle of midway , yep , and it's written from the Japanese perspective .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 10:26

And I want to . So , after you and I met in 2019 , you talked about that , actually you talked , but I went and got that book and , yeah , fantastic book . It really Eliminated how I thought about or think about World War two , right ? Yeah , please continue .

Steve Spear, DBA 10:40

Yeah , so you know , partial and tally , who are the authors of shattered sword ? They ask this paradoxical question how is it the United States Navy showed up at the battle of midway , june 1942 , outmanned , outgunned out , shipped out playing out , piloted da da da and beat on paper at least , a superior Japanese fleet ? And it's ? It's one of these wild books , because they go through Ex not excruciating but tremendous detail about the Japanese experience , to the level of a pilot and a cockpit or a sailor who's in a in a you know below deck when a bomb hits and flame . I mean it's , it's incredible reading . You could film a movie just from their level of detail . And then at the very end of the book they say they say so , rita , when do you think the Japanese lost the battle of midway ? And the answer is you know spoiler . For so if anyone's gonna read the book , you know fingers in the air right now . The answer is 1929 . And you're like what the hell ? You know , because you go back in in 1929 , is not even in the book .

Steve Spear, DBA 11:38

And they say here's the thing by 1929 the Japanese Admiralty had settled on what they their concept of operations Around , what they thought about how war would be waging the Pacific now , bearing in mind , in 1929 the technology had an advances to that . It was a very arrogant sort of right , you know , put things , set things in stone and , and from 1929 on , everything was about executing to this concept of operations that the Admiralty had come up with . And In fact , they say , even in the weeks before the battle , midway when they were running wargame , you know , tabletop exercises on their battle plan and the people standing in for the Americans figured out how to beat it . The Japanese Admiralty concluded that the problem was the people standing in as , as avatars for the , the US . It wasn't that there was something wrong with the battle plan . It was that they weren't actually or accurately reflecting how the US would fight , and they had three , four , five shots at this . And what tolling in and his co-authors say is that , in contrast , in the same period , the United States Admiralty was taking a very different approach .

Steve Spear, DBA 12:48

They understood that if they were going to project power over the Pacific and Possibly come in conflict with the Japanese Navy , they needed an answer , but they never sat down and said oh , this is the answer . Instead , they went through this series of Well , you and I would call exercises , but they were deliberately dubbed fleet problems . And so when they looked at the Pacific , they said well , you know , how do you project power into the Pacific ? And in the early 20s no one had an answer . They said and they agreed , they didn't have an answer , but they said , you know , we might have to move assets from the Atlantic through the Pacific to the Panama Canal . So they set up an exercise , first at the War College , you know tabletop stuff . But then they went out to sea and they told one group of sailors and ships to defend the Panama Canal , another group to attack the Panama Canal , and they just wanted to see what would happen . Now they went through these 20 , some odd fleet problems the Panama Canal was three of those because they didn't get to it with to an answer , an adequate answer . They had landing troops on on , on islands , you know the amphibious stuff , supporting garrisons , refueling at sea , operating independently when you didn't have adequate communication . But here he was .

Steve Spear, DBA 14:03

The key thing and this is the using practice for this aggressive feedback Is that , whereas the Japanese Admiralty kept , you know , firing , as it were , the people standing in for the US during the stress test of their battle plan , the US leaders would have hot washes , you know , debriefs at the end of each day of these fleet problems , and they didn't do it down in their ward room with their other senior leaders and on and on , they did it on deck and they just opened it up to , like , you know , whoever was part of it .

Steve Spear, DBA 14:32

You know , call out , and in the book , we , um , we make , we distinguish between a , yes , admiral , you know , it was sort of the sort of that , you know , japanese deep bow genuflecting towards the senior leader . And we set up , you know , in contrast one could imagine this was filmed by John Ford or something like that the , uh , the , the wise ass from Brooklyn with the stoic minnesota and an hispanic dude from LA . So , you know , and they're going yo , admiral , what were you thinking , you know ? And and that kind of thing , okay , and um , so we set up this contrast of a , yes , admiral , yo admiral . But anyway , back to slowification . Slowification is , uh , letting us get into that yo admiral kind of behavior when we're still planning , when we're still practicing , so that we're performing . We got all the kinks worked out , yeah so , wow , that great , fantastic story .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 15:21

And what I'm thinking right now is planning . Uh , planning is continuous . We always tell folks that it's not something you do and hand off , and I think , right where you and our backgrounds with more in the operational excellence , a lot of safety connections . We talk about the , the black line and the blue line and things like that . You know , work as imagined versus work is done . We're trying to get organizations to see that you can't just come up with a plan and and your ivory tower and hand it off to execute somewhere else . That's that's the big problem .

Steve Spear, DBA 15:47

That is fundamental thing , because if those that are executing don't understand the why , the , the what , they're not going to really understand the how right , they're not going to come up with new and vice versa , the people who do on the planning , unless they're at the deck plate or the shop floor or the work site and actually seeing the context in which they're asking people to do things , how are they possibly going to come up with an adequate plan ?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 16:05

Yeah , yeah , and I tell you , I just got back from some onsite delivery and one of the biggest challenges was Understanding what that organization did . They did not know why they existed . They and here's what they gave me we exist to align and to communicate , and I'm like , on what Right ?

Steve Spear, DBA 16:23

and and maybe confusing means and ends . Yeah , yeah , so this is .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 16:27

this is absolutely I think this is a critical Uh connection between the work you're doing and what needs to be done inside of organizations is Really bring those what do you call them the yo yo yo admiral , and what would you get the admiral , turn that into yo admiral .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 16:42

Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . So the those folks that are actually doing the work , bring them in and find it's , it's knowledge work for a reason , right . I mean , you have to bring those that are closest to the work in To really understand what , what the big picture looks like you know and punch .

Steve Spear, DBA 16:56

One thing I'll just pick up on that term is this notion of knowledge work . You know , we live in a day , in an age , and you're talking about AI and machine learning , all this stuff which generated by a bunch of nerdy dudes taping away on keyboards . Somehow we've gotten it in our heads that you know knowledge work requires that you have advanced degrees and a keyboard , and otherwise you know , um , I distinguish between two types of people those who , um , those who take a shower in the morning to get ready for work , and those who take a shower at the end of the day to wash their work away . And it's the people who take showers in the morning . Um , they think that they do knowledge work because they get up and they take a shower and you know , whatever you do , you and I used to put on ties , but no one does now . But , um , then you sit down and type way and that's somehow knowledge work . But the dude who's working in , uh , and the man and the woman who's working in a mill , that somehow that's that's not . But you know that when you're working in a mill , you know that stuff is throwing problems at you all the time and you don't have a keyboard where you're trying to capture what you're doing and how to fix the problem , but it's knowledge work nonstop , because part of the physicality of the work requires that you're seeing problems , you're solving problems , you're putting solutions into practice . It is just a digression . Sorry , it becomes a real personal rant for me because I have a bias against those who are condescending towards those who have to take the shower at night , not in the morning .

Steve Spear, DBA 18:25

Paul O'Neill , who ran Alcoa and then he was Secretary of Treasury , he was a mentor for 20 years for me and I think it's fair for me to say we became friends and I really am feeling blessed by that friendship and that mentorship .

Steve Spear, DBA 18:39

And Alcoa's experience was over a multi-year period .

Steve Spear, DBA 18:44

They took these high-risk , high-hazard processes of molten metal and caustic chemicals and crushing weights and that kind of thing and turned themselves into the safest employer not manufacturing employer , but the safest employer in the country , while driving everything else positive yield , quality , on time delivery , on and on and on .

Steve Spear, DBA 19:05

And when he asked Paul what was his secret , he said well , it's easy , because everyone else who runs facilities like the ones that we have , they assume that the job of the worker's body is to show up in the morning , put the lunchbox in the cabinet , check the brain for the day and then go out and just apply horsepower onto these big industrial processes . And so what we do at Alcoa is , when the body comes in the door , we say hang up your coat , put your lunchbox away . But we're really appreciative that you brought the brain in to help us sell froms every day . And he said look , if you have tens of thousands of employees and your competitor is competing based on the handful of brains and headquarters and the handful of brains in a laboratory , and you've got tens of thousands of brains on your team , you're gonna win every flipping day . And so , anyway , sorry for going off on a random .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 19:59

No .

Steve Spear, DBA 20:00

I'm the same .

DevOps and First Principles Connection

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:04

Fighter aviation , being a naval officer doing what we do . That's what works . People process and ideas or things in that order .

Steve Spear, DBA 20:11

That's not , by the way . No , I'm probably thinking about it . Imagine when you were doing that , getting into a plane and thinking that , oh , the enlisted person who prepared that plane for you , that they just went through the motions because it wasn't knowledge work .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:25

Would you be like wearing ?

Steve Spear, DBA 20:26

a straff and you say oh you know , wave me off , no way .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:30

Yeah , and it's interesting , as you pulled a lot of lessons from the military , from our submarine community or our new Navy .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:38

And then you also have a lot of lessons from the Toyota production system clearly your Shingo prize winner , and all that . What I wanna come back to you on this is the connection to DevOps . The DevOps community has really embraced your thinking and I'm thankful for that , because , to me , when you start looking at resilience engineering , you start looking at safety , definitely safety to hop , high reliability theory , things that are in your book those things scale . And why do they scale ? Because they're actually they're not case-based things . It's real research , is looking at what actually happens and then coming back and saying this will happen .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:11

This is a post and I'm gonna I'm gonna probably upset some folks from saying this . This is a post to the agile community , which comes up with case-based approaches and says here we tried this over , here you should try it , it will work . And here's a new book , here's a teal organization and here's Brian Riviera speaking at a conference about high reliability theory . And then people turn around saying you made that up . I'm like , how did I make that up ? So I really appreciate that connection that the DevOps community is making with thinking from a coherent standpoint , what actually scales , what works . So I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the connections into the DevOps community from your work on TPS , the Toyota production system , lean and , of course , our Navy nuclear programs .

Steve Spear, DBA 21:58

Yeah , yeah . So , ponshi , you know you're making mention to reasoning by case and by analogy versus sort of first principles . I just gotta say I'm a big fan of science . Yeah , it's a big fan of science . And let me unpack that statement a little bit is I don't think it made it into the new book , but when I present , I make a case that we need theory , we need science .

Steve Spear, DBA 22:23

And the example I give is I put up some pictures of a city in Italy , cremona , italy . It's where Stratoveris and some of these other geniuses made great violins and cellos and that kind of thing . And the point I make is that that city it's beautiful to visit . When we start looking at the buildings they're all the same . And why are they all the same ? And this is true of a lot of European cities of that era . You know , wherever you happen to pop things oh man , stockholm , beautiful . But it's like whoa , they really didn't have much architectural range , did they ? And this is true for a lot of cities of that era . When you get into kind of the rhetorical questioning as to why that is well , when you design a building , your first concern is that the buildings stand up and not fall down . And then he asked the question well , the folks in the 14 , 15 , 1600s , what did they know about the reasons buildings stood up and fell down ? The answer was they didn't have good science . They had examples , analogy , right Cases . And so when some architect or builder in Cremona , italy or Stockholm or anywhere else wanted to put up the next building , they said well , I don't really know why it's gonna stand up or fall down , but if I copy one that's standing up , and in fact if I copy the one that's been standing up the longest , I'm more likely to succeed . And then now you start thinking , when you start looking at the huge variety of architectural styles that happened in , so , the 17 , 18 , 1900s .

Steve Spear, DBA 23:48

As an example , I given this presentation as a contrast between the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower . They're both products of Eiffel , but unlike Cremona and Italy , which was this repetitiveness Eiffel has the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower different materials , different locations , different functions , different forms , built within about three years , five years , something like that . You say how did Mr Eiffel pull that off ? And the answer is he had Isaac Newton . Because Isaac Newton , some years before , had said hey , look , you know , you worried about things standing up , falling down , going here , going there , going in circles . He said , actually there's a really simple way to understand it Put a force on a mass and it will go faster and faster and faster , and proportional to the mass . And if you put a moment around the pin , the thing will spin faster and faster and faster depending on the strength of the moment .

Steve Spear, DBA 24:36

And so here you have Eiffel who's doing the Statue of Liberty , holding a book with 1776 and the Toga and the Tower , and he says , well , I'm worried about the arm falling off . So what does he do ? He draws the arm . And then he asks , literally human computers , and they say , mr Eiffel , we've done the calculations . And right over here the forces don't balance and this joint wants to move . Or , mr Eiffel , over here the moments don't balance and the joint wants to spin . He says , oh well , let me redraw that .

Steve Spear, DBA 25:07

And you take that a step further get Frank Gehry with all the crazy bends and this thing and that thing . And you say what did he have that he could do such a huge variety of form and shape and function and material in about a 10 year period ? And the thing he had , that Eiffel had was Newtonian mechanics . What he had that Eiffel didn't have was computers . So as Eiffel was getting a few calculations per minute from his human computers , frank Gary was getting millions of calculations per second from you know all this CAD , cam , but I will bring that back .

Steve Spear, DBA 25:40

Turns out , when you look at disciplines which have huge application of ideas , typically it's some very few principles , like F equal , ma equal , mc squared that the principles are so sound you can apply them broadly . So this comes back to you know , agile , devops , lean , et cetera , et cetera is that reasoning by analogy is very limiting because it invites copying with a little bit of tweaking on the edge , but reasoning through first principle , like if we want to solve problems we need to slow down the thinking space . If we want to solve problems this is another mechanism we want to make sure that the problems themselves are partitioned so that each piece is simpler to solve . If we have first principles , we can get to much better answers , much faster about a much wider range of problems than if we're going by analogy .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 26:38

So yeah . So my experience in the military is we learned a lot of first principles in fighter aviation . You know we have team science from aviation , career resource management . You looked at nuclear reactors to see how we do business inside the Navy . There we clearly can't have time . We don't have time for mistakes . You have to trust the science .

Steve Spear, DBA 26:56

Yeah , I work with a guy whose job is fuel reactor refueling and he says I never want to have an exciting day .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:04

Yeah .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:05

Yeah , yeah , I want to have an exciting day . I think the idea of agile principles and values into a high reliability space or a fail safe space may not be the best . So its context determines a method . Again , it's the science that says this is what we need to do . So in organizations today , you do not have time to go learn by analogy . I think that's what you're saying . You have to learn by first principles , by science . We're saying the same thing . And if you don't want to do that , there is no requirement to survive or persist in time . There's no requirement . You can go away . Blockbuster , kodak , you name it .

Lessons From Nuclear Navy for Organizations

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:40

So I think my next question or a topic is really about some of the ideas you learned from the Nuke Navy , and how do you try to apply those into organizations today .

Steve Spear, DBA 27:53

Yes , great . So this is a quick paraphrase on your last statement . Edward's dimming and I'm paraphrasing him said something like learning is not a requirement , but neither is survival . You can look up the quote .

Steve Spear, DBA 28:05

It's beautiful . So as far as lessons learned from the Nuke Navy , so again for people who are listening or hearing and don't know 1955 , the United States put the first nuclear power submarine in the water and the US has nautilus and since then it's had a perfect record that no human being has ever been injured due to reactor failure on board or because of a US naval reactor ship and there's been no environmental damage done . And this is such a far cry from other parts of the military which have tried to work with nuclear power or atomic power . And if you look at the Soviet experience , it's a horrific in terms of the number of submarines and loss in crews killed .

Steve Spear, DBA 28:54

The thing about the nuclear Navy is they are wildly fastidious about building feedback into everything they do . In the book we talk about three mechanisms . We talk about slowification to make it easier to solve problems , and there's another mechanism we call amplification , and amplification is just to make it really obvious you have a problem to solve . It's just like take the bullhorn and turn it to 11 , as it were . And one of the things that really impressed upon me when I was learning about the Naval Reactor Program was the fastidiousness , the passion , the energy . There's a guy who works there now .

Steve Spear, DBA 29:34

I was at a presentation .

Steve Spear, DBA 29:35

He was given actually to a bunch of aviators it was kind of across the communities and he stood up in front of these aviators and he said we are incredibly disciplined about creating standards and we are incredibly disciplined about adhering to standards . And I turned around and watched the group you can see they were going through their heads and it was like oh , naval Reactor is a lot of command and control . And he said we are incredibly fastidious to make sure that we see right away when the standard is not working . What we're saying is that the way we get better and smarter is we make a really aggressive declaration about what we expect to happen , with an articulation of the causality behind it .

Steve Spear, DBA 30:20

I think if I take action A , I'm going to get outcome B , and for these reasons and then they don't just sort of stick to the insistence on keep doing action A , regardless of what the outcome is they're constantly monitoring . Are we actually doing A ? And if not , why not ? And even if we are , are we getting outcome B , and if not , why not ? And that was his point .

Steve Spear, DBA 31:41

He said , we have this incredible aggressiveness about making it easy to see that we're having problems , so that triggered us to swarm on the problems to solve it .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 31:52

So one of the challenges I see coming out of the military is a lot of folks will try to use that across everything they do in an organization . And to me and the science says you can't do that , you can't put a brush , but that because the context changes right , so I can't just go in and go super standards across everything , especially if we're looking at novel things , right , we need that creativity in there to kind of save the fail space , right . So this is a danger that I see with a lot of military folks that come out and try to go coach an organization and say , hey , I just got out of the cockpit , we're going to execute flawlessly , we're going to close the gap between where we are and some desired future state and we're like , well , that's not what complexity science says , that's what effects based operation showed us in a complicated space that we worked in . So it's not a one for one transfer all the time . So there is a danger in that and I think , based on our previous experiences and conversations , you really talk about complexity theory a lot to make sure people understand the context , and I think that's what is in it .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 32:51

It is a theory . I mean I want to go back to an earlier point you brought up . You have to understand the theory , the first principles . What do we try and what does this look like ? So do you have some thoughts and complexity in your new book ?

Steve Spear, DBA 33:04

What we do . It comes up twice , so one . It gets back to this movement from the danger zone to the winning zone , and the danger zone being characterized by asking people to solve problems which are so complex , convoluted , so many intertwined factors that you just simply can't wrap your head around it . And even if you could , the number of people whose efforts have to be coordinated to make a test of change is so many it becomes impossible . And the way to solve for that particular problem of highly intertwined things is through partitioning things into smaller pieces so that you can have local control and run high cycle experiments , fast experiments , and still have the pieces fit together .

Steve Spear, DBA 33:49

One of the examples we give in the book is Amazon's discovery of cloud services and the background on that , and again it's an IT story . So more my co-author , gene Kim , than my own . The way he explains it is that Jeff Bezos is there . He's taken email orders for books . He's taken a shopping cart figuratively , if not literally , across the street to the world's biggest bookstore . That's why he opened up where he opened up originally . He buys the books he needs , brings them back to his office , puts them in a box and sends them out with the post office and it turns out that there's appeal in that and that he finally gets the idea like why don't I have my own warehouse rather than walking across the street with the shopping cart ? And he needs some business process software over that and that's going pretty good , as we all well know . And then he starts adding clothing and , as the way the case is written , clothing adds a lot of complexity

Partitioning and Teamwork

Steve Spear, DBA 34:43

, because you take a book like the Flow System , the High Velocity Edge or Wiring the Winning Organization , and it comes in one size , basically One size fits all . But you pick pants , come in different colors and sizes and fabrics , and this thing and that thing , and then the excuse explodes on Amazon and the business process software gets so complex and convoluted that they no longer can update it , that there's some crazy examples , but anyway they get to the point that to update it they can only update it a handful of times a year and this affects a lot of the fang .

Steve Spear, DBA 35:23

I think it was linked in got to the point and I don't know if you remember this that there would be times where LinkedIn said you're basically working offline , that we have to update our servers right now and you can look at your page where you can't do anything with it , and this happened , though , across the board and back to Amazon as an example . I said this is insane , but we can't have problems where , in order to solve a problem , we have to coordinate the efforts of a thousand 2005,000 engineers . This is where they came up with this idea of APIs Very clean , modular interfaces that allowed problems to be contained in these smaller , coherent teams and that , within a team , the team could have lots of latitude to iterate , experiment , try new things , so long as they didn't violate the boundary conditions . It was that partitioning of the big thing into little thing . It got to the point that where they were doing a handful of releases a year , they got to the point they were doing thousands of releases per day . You see this pattern over and over , whether it's with Amazon . Certainly the same story has to go with Microsoft and its Cloud services , netflix .

Steve Spear, DBA 36:38

On and on this , taking a very big things and partitioning them into smaller pieces , you get more heads active simultaneously rather than have everything tightly coupled . Anyway , let me just he asked about complexity theory . So what's the draw here ? Throughout the book , we make sure that , whatever we say , we've got some luminary to link back to so slow-ification , back to Daniel Kahneman . As far as the complexity theory , we hang a lot of hat on Charles Perot and the failure of complex systems , this whole notion of coupled systems being very fragile because the ability of problems to race through . So we depend a lot on that to explain the notion of partitioning as a source of great value .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 37:25

Yeah , so to me that reminds me of distributed leadership , distributed thinking , distributed work , so that boundary we have boundaries , boundaries , we talk about that and that's the idea there is . I hear a lot of companies say that we're one team . I'm like I don't know that that's gonna be true , because if you were , you would go back . It would sound like what LinkedIn was going through several years ago , where you didn't update anything . You don't necessarily want that .

Steve Spear, DBA 37:49

No , no . Now you obviously want the pieces to come together . The team of teams , in fact . Right , but there's a team of teams , right ?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 38:00

To me when you brought up APIs . When I explain what teaming is , I'm like it's like an API . How do you actually work across your boundary when you're working with another team ? It's the same way . You should work within your boundary , right ? So that API and you don't disrupt that . The moment you start bringing in multiple consultants and they show you 50,000 ways to do things and guess what you just destroyed any of your human APIs . That's right . That's what it is , 100% .

Steve Spear, DBA 38:26

Yes , so for what it's worth , we make reference in the book to team of teams . Yeah , and when you kind of look beneath the hood and look with a process orientation like you and I bring to this kind of thing , you realize they took this one team . But because it was kind of a weird thing , because it was lack of clarity and it was a lot of ambiguity , it looked like one team on paper but it wasn't one team , it was just a lot of scattered pieces and you read through the narrative and team of teams about how the Joint Special Operations Command got way more effective , both in terms of operational tempo , when 30X off the charts are way more effective in getting the bad guys who are doing all these terrible , nihilistic , sadistic things . What they did was they started identifying what are the pieces , what were the teams , and then figuring out how to connect them in a much simpler , linear but well-bounded sort of API-like fashion so information gathered here could be processed in Bidara and then motivated mission down here . So same thing .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 39:36

I want to throw some caution out there , as when we're coaching organizations , the assumption is that everybody knows how to work together as a team and my background in aviation and I think your experience in naval reactors doesn't necessarily support that and what happens is you actually have to learn how to work together as a team . You have to slow down , by the way . You have to slow down to do that , and then you could start to do these amazing things . It's not like that in industry . Most people in industry this is my observation everybody knows how to work together as a team . We just need to throw more processes on it . We need to do more of these things . I'm like no , you got it backwards . Yeah , so is that what you saw in Navy reactors as well ?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:19

Yes , so on they spent some time on teamwork .

Steve Spear, DBA 40:21

Well , I've had some exposure there . My lesson coming out in naval reactors is the big thing about the amplification , the declaration of expectations , so that everything is turned into a very fast feedback experiment . The concern about process is something I really internalize with all the time I was learning and I continue to learn from Toyota , the reason I just want to . As a parenthetical , I still interact with folks there and I find that every single time I interact it's like I go oh man , I never really thought of that and to the extent that 30 years ago I thought of scratching the surface . Each time I go back I realize I've scratched the surface even less . But in terms of this whole notion of creating teams and processes , I think a lot of people get it wrong Is that they think , oh , we'll create processes , procedures , routines top down and then have people adhere to them . And one of the things that I really came to appreciate with Toyota is what we're calling with what client now mechanic-centric and it could be doctor-centric , nurse-centric , chef , clerk , coder-centric , but centric around the person is doing the actual transformative work of the organization by which value gets built up and accrues so they can someday be delivered .

Steve Spear, DBA 41:45

When you go top down with these elaborate processes and procedures and initiatives , this and that chances are they don't fit actually the conditions that someone needs to be successful . You flip that over , though , and you start asking the question well , in order to get this work done , it has these various steps that have to be accomplished . We're asking this person to bring their skill , their expertise , their motivation , their inspiration to do this task . What do they need ? What do they need in terms of materials , permissions , engineering , instructions , skills , capabilities , tooling , et cetera ? What do they need ? And then you work backwards from that to see if you can connect the connective thread to ensure that everything is flowing to the point of use , and then so what ends up happening is the process is the derivative of the need , rather than the behavior being the derivative of the process .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 42:38

Yeah , yeah , I like that . That's nice . I got a few minutes left with you . Mental health did you put any mental health considerations into the new book , or are you thinking about the individual ? How does this really affect them ?

Steve Spear, DBA 42:53

You know , it's interesting when you start with a mechanic-centric , or a nurse or doctor or a coder-centric view , you're really asking the question what conditions does a leader have to create so that individual can be successful ? And again I want to step out I think you and I are like in such sound , loud agreement on this is that success is not just a quantification of material transformation . And on this I'm going to channel Paul O'Neill again . Paul ran this enormous organization and took it from typical for its sector to the best in the world . And when you ask Paul , paul , how did you manage that transformation ? Thousands of employees , tens of thousands of employees , hundreds of locations , dozens of countries , et cetera , he said no , it was all three questions , three questions . He said yeah , yeah , he said we had three questions .

Steve Spear, DBA 43:52

We expected that everyone would be asking those for whom they were responsible Ask these questions every day . Question one did you feel prepared to succeed today and anytime ? Someone said no , we knew we had homework for tomorrow , because why would we ask someone to step into a situation knowing that they were ill-prepared ? So that was question one . The second question this ties right to your question about mental health and emotional well-being . The second question was when you did your work , did someone whose opinion you value , did they appreciate what you did and did they let you know they appreciated it ? And Paul's attitude was that if someone didn't let you know they appreciated what you did , boom , that was a problem to be solved .

Steve Spear, DBA 44:43

And then his third question was on top of did you feel prepared to succeed when you did your work ? Did you feel the work was appreciated ? Then the third question was when you left , at the end of the day , did you feel the way you spent your time added value to your own life ? And again , that was a kind of question which yes or no ? And if the answer was no , we've got homework to do tomorrow to make sure that you're set up to do things that actually make you feel important . Also , anyway , I think that ties back to your point about mental health and emotional well-being , because if you're answering yes on all of those , you're probably contributing to someone's sense of well-being . If you answer no on any of them , maybe not . And if you're answering no on all of them , basically you're saying to people hey , show up at work today . It's going to be frustrating , you're going to fail and you're going to feel like you wasted your time .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:36

I think , in this labor-constrained environment , future employees and employees that are shifting work need to be asking these questions , and questions should be are you following coherent practices in here or are you copying somebody else ? If they're copying somebody else , probably I don't want to run away and I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong . I'm just going back to the first principle . So , employees , today , if I were them which we are I would want to find an organization that is thinking like you're thinking , like Gene Kim is thinking , because that is how you're going to feel better as a human going to work Right .

Steve Spear, DBA 46:12

And Gene , think about it . You spend all those years in the military and you think about how the military attracts people to do things like you did and your shipmates did . It ain't pay , it ain't pay , right , it's the pitch . It's almost like the polynomial pitch , which is , we're inviting you to do something which is really , really important and we're not going to pay a lot for it . But at the end of every day , and certainly at the end of whatever your enlistment is or whatever else that happens be , your career is that you will be able to look back and say I did something important and other people appreciated me for doing it . I mean , we're a perfect set of sentiment to express because we're recording this today , on Veterans Day , right ? But boom , that's the pitch .

Steve Spear, DBA 47:00

And you think about the people you and I know outside the military who have made commitments to careers where you look at and say , man , the skills you have , the talents you have , you could be making a ton more money doing something else . But you know , the reason they picked caring services , teaching , whatever else it happens to be , is because every day , they knew they could show up and do something where , when they left , it was important that they did it because if it had gone undone , the world would be worse off . And when they went home they were like you know what ? Not only was important I did it , but people are glad I was there today .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 47:40

We started it yeah partially .

Steve Spear, DBA 47:42

This is one of my aggression . We start the book with this . It's right in the preface is a statement that every day and this is not exactly right , but every day people badge in , budge in , scan and swipe in and otherwise arrive to say I'm here and for some people the day qualifies on all those polynomial standards . They have a sense of success , they have a sense of connectivity to something much , much bigger than themselves and because of that they feel like they've done something valuable . And then we say , yeah , but unfortunately that's not true for a lot of people . When they badge in , budge in , scan in , swipe in , punch in , whatever else that they know they're walking into a situation that it's going to be dreary , drudgery , maybe danger , and the fact that they were there will go unappreciated and maybe even unnoticed . And then we say and the rest of our book is how to get from that situation to the former one- Now , hey , I want to thank you for many reasons .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 48:46

Number one is that you're supporting the US Navy . You were doing a lot of work with Admiral Richardson many years ago . Several years ago , we had some horrible things happen in 2017 . We really helped get us sorted in the right direction with high velocity learning and really built off your book High Velocity Edge there . That's number one . Number two I want to thank you on behalf of Nigel and John for your support on the flow system .

Steve Spear, DBA 49:08

That's awesome , absolutely Good stuff , yeah , it's .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 49:12

You know , when we all got together down in Dallas a few years ago , the conversation you know it could have gone on for hours and hours , just like this one can . Unfortunately , I got to step out and go

The Power of Creating Better Conditions

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 49:20

have a quick lunch in here and go get in a flow state with some buddies in the area here .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 49:26

We can talk about that , but everybody needs to go get wiring . The winning organization and I think that comes out in a few weeks . Get into that , ask questions . You have a huge network . You have the DevOps community . Is there anything you want to leave with our listeners about how they can contact you or how they should look for you online ?

Steve Spear, DBA 49:46

Yeah , john , linkedin . You know something , something , steve Spear , and you know you can find my email and whatever else and I just encourage Ponce , just like we're having this conversation now is that there are those of us who've had exposure , whether it was Naval reactors , toyota , this place , that place , the Naval aviation . You know , we've all had these experiences of what it's like to be those people who badge in , budge in , sign in whatever else it is . And no , the day is going to be phenomenal in terms of taking our time , our effort , our energies and putting it to good use , and I think we should just leave people with the thought that tomorrow can be much better . Tomorrow can be much better than today , and it's not a brute force thing . It's about creating conditions in which people can give much greater expression to their potential to be creative beings , and that's a wonderful thing . It's a wonderful thing .

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 50:38

That's awesome and we're going to wrap it up on that . I want to thank Dr Steven Spear for being with us today , and I definitely want to invite you back on the show , where there's so much more we can talk about the land-sengineering DevOps . We didn't even get a chance to talk about the OODA loop today , but we don't need to because it's . You know , ooda loop is something we're always going through . It's how we sense the world , how we make decisions , how we act in it , how we perceive reality . All right , thank you .