Video from DevOpsDays Rockies, September 2024.
Keynote at SwiftCraft, Folkestone, UK, 24 May 2024.
also given at Explore DDD (video), March 2024; also given at Emerging Tech East, April 2024
At Honeycomb, we have a company value: Everything is an Experiment. Sometimes people take that too literally, and try to make every UI change an A/B test, every process adjustment measurable by some number.
The scientific method is fantastic for debugging–and completely inadequate for the unique sociotechnical systems we each work in. Yet we do experiment (probe), and we can do this rigorously (for a more appropriate definition of “rigor”). How does this work?
We need different ways to frame experiments, choose the ones worth our time, conduct them, and recognize the outcome. We need new words to replace “failure” and “success.”
In complexity, everything is an experiment if we look at the result. That doesn’t mean objective measurement. It does mean careful observation and curiosity. Let’s talk about how we do this.
Resources:
A Radical Culture of Culture Building, by Beth Anders-Beck
if you read one book for these topics: Learning Systems Thinking
Cause, Effect and the Structure of the Social World, paper by Stevenson
video: Diana Montalion on systems thinking, including knowledge flow (citing Larry Prusak)
Brené Brown’s research methods in grounded theory. A paper on Action Research and grounded theory.
Experiments in Daily Work, my post on Honeycomb’s blog
Slides
or Slides in PPT from DevOpsDays Denver