S2 E9 - Rob England - The Original Skeptic
Rob and I go old school in this episode. We had first met back in my early days before DevOps when I used to run a Tivoli consulting business. Rob describes how he used Dr. Deming's principles in his consulting work. Rob works alongside Dr. Cherry Vu and describes himself as a Teal Unicorn. LinkedIn and Twitter are the best places to find Rob and Cherry's ideas and work.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robenglandattwohills
https://twitter.com/rob_england
Resources:
DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) concepts
W. Edwards Deming's work, including his System of Profound Knowledge
Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework
Gene Kim's work on DevOps
Gary Hamel's book "Humanocracy"
The Institute for the Future's concept of the "Second Enlightenment"
John Allspaw, Dr. Richard Cook, and Dr. David Woods' work on resilience engineering and adaptive capacity
Sidney Dekker's work, including the "Stellar Report"
James Urquhart's book "Flow Architectures"
The DevOps Enterprise Forum papers
Malcolm Gladwell's books "Blink" and "The Tipping Point"
Teal Unicorn (tealunicorn.com) - Rob England and Dr. Cherry Foo's company
The Business Agility Institute's Emergence Journal
Transcript:
John Willis: 0:08
Hello its John Willis with another Deming Profound Podcast and I'm an old old friend here. We go way, way back. And Rob, you want to kind of go let me actually let me tell the story first. So I, you know, when I first sort of moved over from all this heavyweight Tivoli stuff I was doing, I started blogging and there was a couple of people just started sort of noticing what I was doing, you know, Damon Edwards people know, you know, marking CO and I think somehow you got you reached out to me in
Unknown: 0:42
Tivoli trainer. Oh, every
John Willis: 0:45
way that I wrote a song for you. They may Yeah,
Rob England: 0:49
but you had you hit that blog.
John Willis: 0:52
Oh, guys, yes. With Michael Cote.
Rob England: 0:56
No, even before that you had a solo thing. God, but you were writing stuff. So
John Willis: 1:07
yeah, we had this whole cool thing going I'm like, oh, man, the IT skeptic. He's a cool dude. And he knows who I am. This is pretty awesome. Anyway, I'm gonna head to myself. Rob. Go ahead and introduce yourself.
Rob England: 1:19
Yeah, yeah. So Robin England, yeah. Retired, the it skipped in 2000. And a year ago after 15 years of blogging, but that I'm in New Zealand, right, I'm on the last rock on the planet. And, and, and so I used to sit in a little three foot or four foot by four foot office in a village on the coast of New Zealand and connect to the world I used to do my header on this new with this new thing called blogging you know, on this fairly new thing called the internet and, and, and I was exploring it and I found you somehow anyway, but there was this guy called John Willis writing this cool stuff and we connected and, and that was you were still actively training right?
John Willis: 2:09
It was way way back. But I think I liked your which was I still want you to give me a little more bio. But like you didn't take any bullcrap. And you let the one thing about the it scale. That's, I guess why? Like, like, I dug you so much early on. Like you would just call them out. You know, if somebody a vendor was saying this, you had that cat? What was the character yet?
Rob England: 2:28
Oh, um, um, the there was several characters, but there was the the folk singer called rambling, rambling kid. Realism,
John Willis: 2:39
or genuine there was funky or something that called bullcrap on people. I think you have one that was Yeah, yeah.
Rob England: 2:44
Yeah, that was smoky. That I'm forgetting it. Gosh, Melissa, can you bleep that? I'm forgetting at all. Um, yeah, it was the like the smoky the beer. Yeah. Oh, God chokey, the gym.
John Willis: 3:01
And he would just call on an X actually, that's mostly how we got because I just moved over from I think it might well I don't know. But I was like, calling out the sort of big for the BMCs and all those guys. And then I started seeing your stuff about like, Oh, this guy's calling him out. Man. He's like, not letting them get away with like, our product does this. Yeah, need to be like the chokey guy would say, word, I'm gonna it was pretty
Rob England: 3:27
awesome, actually. Well, I just retired from Pindell. And so I knew all the tricks, you know, and in in and recognized all the, some of the vendors. And the other one was, of course, the sort of idol.
John Willis: 3:42
Yeah, that's what's your Yeah.
Rob England: 3:44
What do we call them, you know, but the idol, Military Industrial Complex. That try calling that out as well, because I was deeply immersed in that community so that the blog got me wonderful network of people, yourself included, and, and I was throwing rocks at all also calling bullshit. And so including agile and DevOps and you didn't like that very much. We got
John Willis: 4:15
we had to wait one year. I mean, we were for everybody who listens here we are geared here friends on Rob will bring me a little unique, you know, immediate a conference, he brings me some little unique sort of chocolate or something. So he's, he's just a sweetheart of guy, you know, he looks like a tough cat. But before one year, we, we got into it a little bit. Like, it was funny. So you were questioning DevOps. So the thing I loved about you, is you questioned everything I just kept the concept was, I ain't gonna just accept just because everybody else likes it. I want to figure it out. And I was frustrated with you because I kept trying to explain do this, that our stuff is good. And then in one day, you sort of said, Okay, I get it. And then I was mad at you. But the thing I realized, wait a minute. He's the it skeptic there. There's no other way he would accept DevOps, other than taking a long haul, critical, you know, critical thinking analysis of it. So, so at the end of day, I was like, geez, that's what he does. And like, Why was I getting upset? Um, so yeah, we had, and now
Rob England: 5:14
he's finally got it. Yeah. So. So it was you and Jane and Jesus were probably the three key influences that eventually got through my thick head. And I had my sort of road to Damascus moment. That it was anti fragility it was just writing about anti fragility was the straw that
John Willis: 5:37
really got me mad. I would write these like, you know, four page explanations why it was good. And he just said, you know, he made a recommendation. Like he wrote a four line thing about it, fragility and anti fragile, you know, Nyssa Talibs. But any like, Oh, I get it. I'm like, wait a minute. You're trying to get in
Rob England: 5:57
there. But yeah, I quote you all the time, man. And I, and I quote you mostly from when we were debating? Oh, yeah, go. Right. So the arguments you used on me I quote all the time on. One of my favorites is listen, we can get a fix into production faster than you can find around for your emergency cabinet meeting, right was one of the things you said to me years and years ago that stuck as an eyeful guy, and I use that on the list as all the time. And yeah, there's a number of John Willis quotes that I use. And they all come from when we were talking about yes,
John Willis: 6:30
the debate. I mean, debate is cool, right? Like,
Unknown: 6:33
the best ideas are forged in fire
John Willis: 6:35
that totally Well, you know, I know what I'm thinking about. And I still want to circle back on a little bit, Korea, and I want to talk about some of the cool stuff you do now. But you had a lot of like, respect and a deep understanding of idol. I tell sorry, I told service management before sort of DevOps came into vogue. And there's always been this debate of the, you know, I think when DevOps came in, it was like, agile, you know, our idol is stinking dog. But, you know, and Ben Walker talks about, hey, wait a minute, you know, have you really looked at the good parts of AI? I mean, I mean, the dogmatic the, sort of the way we were approaching the, you know, the AI, at least since you said, obviously, was wrong, but clearly, there was some good stuff, right, that is value today, or none at all?
Rob England: 7:26
Oh, yeah. And I think, I mean, there is a cultural divide of some kind that would be interesting to unpack even more but and still is, you know, that service management likes to make things structured and orderly in not necessarily creative and dynamic. You know, there is that some sort of really deep cultural tension, there's some, but I didn't want you know, Can I do a promo? Michael for man. And, and in that, took them until 2019, to suddenly realize there's something called Agile so they're only they're only two decades behind the game. And to realize there's something called DevOps but the high velocity it book Max smallie is just I've always viewed DevOps man, it's just that finally caught up. And and, and I guess that's to be expected when what you've got as a generally accepted practices framework e documenting what is mainstream so right, you're always gonna be a lagging indicator, but Jesus, it's a lagging indicator was pretty lagging for a while. Yeah, yeah. But, um, but even so, yeah, I think there are really good ideas in the the way I it's hard to articulate, but the way I usually try and do it is to say, automation, right? You can only automate that which is defined and repeatable. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. And and what's it all about? It's all about making processes defined and repeatable. So there has to be some sort of cross over there somewhere where these people are about standardizing work. And it's standardized work that we can automate. So so there's knowledge there about how do we find the standard component of our processes that that are amenable to being repeatable transactions that we can then yeah,
John Willis: 9:38
I mean, it's always the Wild West and I don't want to go too deep in the Wardley stuff, but like he, Simon Wardley has a structure it shows you sort of, you know, the evolution here, right. So you do always come
Rob England: 9:50
here are pioneers and then you have planners.
John Willis: 9:53
But you know, the other thing too, I was just thinking you said this, like in the early days of DevOps, you people think of agile and DevOps Just a beautiful marriage and everybody gets along. But I go into large corporation and sort of agile coaches at all. I mean, they were firewalls, I mean, not, you know, not, you know, IP firewalls, they were firewalls for getting DevOps in an organization. So, so I don't think people either realize that now, because it is now sort of a love of fast and congruent discussions. But back, when I was first going into large places, I, I'd have to go to battle with the sort of the Agile coaches in a large corporation.
Rob England: 10:31
And it would it would do, it would do a lot of heads in if I said that in a lot of ways because of that standardized, repeatable thing. DevOps is intellectually sometimes a lot closer to white or than it is to HR.
John Willis: 10:43
I agree with that. Because I mean, first off the like, it's always been lopsided on operations for good or bad, right. And then, you know, the way idol originally was, you know, so I first got into this idol back in in the mid 90s, you know, maybe and, you know, back then it was more of a vendor thing, but like, I think somebody described as we got to sort of idol version two, and like I forget, all this was said that, you know, when you argued against it this way, pre agile pre DevOps really are so agile as mainstream. He said, like, if you have chaos, something like I don't least whether you play with the sort of like it, love it or hate it, it was a prescription for a step function to sort of, you know, we meet remediating cats. And so in that sense, it saved us place and yeah,
Rob England: 11:37
the little black and white book, right from Jean, and Kevin and George, right. Yeah. Cabo,
John Willis: 11:45
this one is visible. opsbase
Rob England: 11:48
digital locks. Yeah. I mean, that was very audible ish. Oh, yeah. No, they
John Willis: 11:52
weren't they came for that. I mean, genius
Unknown: 11:54
on into DevOps at all. No, no,
John Willis: 11:57
I don't. I saw it back. But it was at South by Southwest in like 2009 or 10, where I met Jean, and he was still on the fence on DevOps. And I said, Do think of DevOps like a lighthouse. So he was ready to go battle like me, and you would, and I said, think of DevOps as a lighthouse. That brings operators back to shore. And it's just, like, dropped this drink and said, I get it, you know?
Rob England: 12:21
Yeah, absolutely. So I like to another thing I like to say about it is, intellectually there's nothing wrong with I saw the problem is when the bureaucrats get their hands on it. Yeah. And I even to really be dangerous, say the same thing about Scaled Agile Framework that probably intellectually, there's nothing wrong with it. Oh, my God, when the bureaucrats get home. Yeah. And you're in trouble,
John Willis: 12:51
unfortunately, that like that is sort of a behavior of humans, right. Like, you can take anything. And then like, if you sort of, as it evolves, I mean, one of the things that DevOps has been creating successful, I mean, I, I'll go back to attribute patching the bar had a presentation. It's great. It's one of the better presentations about why DevOps been successful. And it was in Austin, I think it was 13. But I'll try to put a shout out. But he talked about how he he stewarded DevOps, and he was, you know, he wasn't like a benevolent dictator, he just put, he tapped the guardrails all the way along the way. So it never, for the longest time it had this sort of like, what is DevOps? Well, there is no definition, you know, but at the same time, you know, so it had this freedom to evolve, but he put some guardrails on it soft guardrails. And I think that's why it's been incredibly successful for so many years. Totally, totally, you know, another area of
Rob England: 13:52
work ahead. And so represents, I mean, one of the things that I, I, where I work most at the moment is what I would just call new ways of working or better ways to work. And, and DevOps so represents that in the way that it is emergent, collective, unstructured, and totally undefined in such a modern way of creating a movement with it's very modern in that sense
John Willis: 14:23
that yeah, no, it was certainly born out of that, you know, depending on how you how do you construct the evolution of DevOps, which, you know, I've tried to do, but there's different variants, but it was, you know, mostly born out of emerging operational things, you know, so that brings me that, like, the damning podcast, we talked a little bit before, you know, so, um, you know, you know, what are your thoughts about sort of Demings relevance now, and then certainly, as the conversation we just talked about things like idle and DevOps and an agile Flume. What are your thoughts about him, you know, in his we sit here in 2022
Rob England: 14:59
Yeah, it was As I was saying to you earlier, I wouldn't say I'm an academic and terribly versed in any of the great thinkers. But you're ready. Thank you. You say this was just things. I recognize, you know, deeming and Drucker probably as two of the biggest influences on the stuff we do carry an eye. And still, and and you know, when you do go and read him, he was unbelievably visionary. I don't know enough about him as to say in the work he did, I sometimes get the feeling that he was as much communicator as original thinker. I mean, he drew a lot of ideas from other people. Right, and then communicated them brilliantly. I don't know enough about him to unpack how much of that was actually his original thinking and how much came from taste, you know, and how much came from Sure. And how much came in, he drew on some pistol on the shoulders of some amazing giants as well. But man did he put it out there. And so he gave us this amazing body that we can just you can pull demon quotes for just about anything. And they're all just nail it every time.
John Willis: 16:19
Yeah, he was really good on sort of, like, I think I've learned in my study of this man is that he went right didn't suffer fools. But he was very particular about the words he used. And I think the reason his quotes are so powerful, and sometimes, like, a lot of times is debate on the misinterpretation of them. But even in the sense, there's some that when people like the you're in God, we trust all our issues data, which is this just came up recently. Um, that is a brilliant quote. I think if Deming was alive today says, Yeah, I think he did a good job with that quote, and then he'd say that, that that, but what I really meant, you know, was that you know, that it is this things that are unknowable, there are things there's a whole deeper conversation. And the last point that your earlier point you made about, like, your he, you know, he was clear about where he got his information, he was a sponge. And, you know, he was like this incredible ingress egress machine. So, and he was no, he, he basically short gave me a lot of information. And he learned when he went over to Japan, so he was, but again, to your point, he was incredibly good at content, you know, we see this in our industry, there's certain people, you can hear five people explain something to you. And then you go to some conference, and you see this one person, I was gonna ask you about Kevin, and when we can talk a little bit about that. But like, he like that was a good example. You know, I was trying to figure I'd listen to this person talk about connect, and I love this person. And then you did some writing about putting it in context. And all of a sudden, like, Oh, now I get it, you know, so I think that was damning superpower. Really feel like he was the humanists. There was other great things about him. But he was
Rob England: 18:05
he was I'm not gonna say ahead of his time, but he was voicing. What is now so obvious. Yeah, that's the point. At it's still, it's still relevant. Yeah. No,
John Willis: 18:22
it isn't relevant in you know, I mean, the biggest part of his portfolio of knowledge. I mean, it wasn't the only and he, you know, he thought about psychology thought about system thinking he thought about epistemology. But the biggest sort of tool and it's too bad came from off the shoe it and which was the very issue, it's difficult to control that all that stuff. And I was just listening to somebody the other day, which said that in 1980, he made a comment that it would be another 50 years before anybody really understood the impact what you were saying, was 1980. Yes. Yeah, no, it's good stuff. Do you want to talk about some of the stuff you did? What can happen? Is it still sort of relevant in your idea because I, I really enjoyed some of your some of your books and things that you've written, because you will put them in real context, when I browse, which can happen for the longest time was, you know, I can only see theory with it, I couldn't find, and it probably was out there. But I couldn't find anybody who could practically give me a practical way, in a way that I understood of why they fail you to me, as somebody who likes complex thinking all like you like, this is cool. Okay, where's an example? And I struggled and I don't want to exactly the stuff you were doing, but you put
Rob England: 19:43
some goods was probably standard plus case the but and I did a three dimensional view of Cunniff. And he did yeah, loved as well. Yeah, cuz Dave Snowden is a super cerebral. Yeah. Super intellectual thinker. Have you ever makes my head hurt? Yeah, you know, just even trying to follow Him. And so I struggled, right? I was doing a thing called Santa plus case 10 or 12 years ago. What about standardized work versus Hey guys work, right? There's this crossover back to what we were saying. And and I came across this thing called connection in my research, which thing was quite new and new to me. And I, yeah, I really hurt my head trying to get my head around it. So if I am any, you know, if I have any particular skill, I think it is to try and come up with layman's language for things. And so yeah, I tried to articulate Cunniff and, and in more practical terms, and to draw, I drew this three dimensional thing that sort of helped to and Dave, actually, Dave Snowden actually revised it for me and said, No, no, it should be like this. And then they've come up with a much, much better 3d version in the new Cunniff. And book that came out. I haven't read it yet. Yeah. So on page 200, and something there's a 3d version, which me and Martin Berg and Chris Bromley all had a input into different previous treaties to make this mostly it's Martin Berg. Did this beautiful news sort of illustration 3d. Yeah. So try and make it practical. And connect. So connection for me. I've been on a long journey, I actually want to rewrite that Senate plus case book because I've learned so much about Kenneth since and will actually have a more prominent role in the rewrite of the book, which I'm halfway through. I think it is an insight into a fundamental of nature, because we're all trying to come to terms with complexity in complex systems thinking and, and I think one of the things about deeming is that he didn't have all the language. Right, like a lot of complexity, thinking dates from the 90s in the late 20th century, the butterfly and the Amazon chaos with medics, and when none of that was available to them. And, and so I think he would have loved and absorbed Yeah. Oh, yeah. To
John Willis: 22:18
say, Yeah, your action is killing. Yeah, buddy. Damon, I think he's, like, Damon was he got
Unknown: 22:23
off dreaming day? I
John Willis: 22:24
got it. Yeah, sorry.
Rob England: 22:25
Yeah, um, what's available to deeming at the time to use that language and some of those concepts of complexity, they just didn't exist,
John Willis: 22:35
you get some but they were evolving in parallel with him other
Rob England: 22:39
in there, you can see it, you can see that if he had been around, right, like, once we had chaos theory and complex,
John Willis: 22:48
practical, infinite formations of these things,
Rob England: 22:51
he would have just used that language. Somebody was telling
John Willis: 22:55
me Yeah, today, there's a guy who works for big corporation. And we've had like these calls, and he can't get approval that come on. He's one of the smartest guys I've ever talked to. But he can't get approval for this big corporation to come on the podcast. But but, you know, we geek out as if we're practicing. And he he's, you know, there's a Deming has this system of Crown knowledge. And it's the theory of variation, right? It's a theory of psychology, and his theory of knowledge. But it's usually referred to not as the theory of systems. It's basically appreciation systems. So I think that goes in line with your point, like, you know what I mean, I think it's that point. He did probably wasn't enough body of work, or that was sort of calcified. Where he like it, like theory of nothing. It was a pistol Knology pragmatism, like, that was I can call he could call Yeah, no, I think yeah, like, when
Rob England: 23:45
I read when I read his stuff, I'm like, he knew this stuff, or they knew this way. But we hadn't just evolved this new set of concepts to frame it in the way that we can now talk about complex systems. So we're
John Willis: 24:02
in the beginning of being able to at least put a framing around the conversations. Yeah, know that. It's a really, I liked that point a lot.
Rob England: 24:09
We've got new intellectual models we can use that he didn't have.
John Willis: 24:13
That's right. That's a great way of putting it. Yeah. And then he probably would have gotten into nasty fights with Snowden anyway.
Unknown: 24:18
Yeah, that's right. Yes,
John Willis: 24:20
sir. What a yell at him for calling, you know, one of the quadrants.
Rob England: 24:25
So, exactly. So, um, so that is my, that's one thing about deeming is is, is that is that when you read it, you have to then layer upon I think some of these new models. And I'm not as fond as you are of the manufacturing, like I'm a bit worried about. Yeah, we could go to school variation and things just just because that whole standardization is only some of the world thing. I'm still finding my way there. I'm still learning. I'm still exploring it.
John Willis: 25:05
It's open debate in you know, these are the things I definitely want to get into some of yours are the new stuff torquey doing but I mean, in short, and I just I did a podcast with Jean lately. I think there's a couple of things I think people misunderstand. It's like, like that quote, you know, in God, we trust all spring data. But there's one version of that. But then there's they'll go read this, the whole section in one of his books or two of his books, and you realize there are a whole the other one, I guess the more sort of prominent missed misunderstood one is the it can't manage that can't manage what you can't measure, in like Demi didn't really mean that, because he had a lot of stuff about managing, unmeasurable and unknowable data. So there's already a conflict. So here's my point is that when I think when people read a line in one of his books that says you must reduce variation? I think they're not sort of catching that, like he thought you understood a whole bunch of other things. Yeah, by using advanced statistics, you were looking for patterns models, you know, common versus special cause. And then one last piece is the other thing I think people conflate when they talk about, I can't still see manufacturing economies completely translating to a sort of knowledge economies. You know, and I think some of that is true, but I think people sort of over rotate on how much of it is true. And that, you know, if you read the total supply chain book, when they talk about the four wheels, and I had a long conversation with Jean, about this, they are really clear about the distinction between variety and variation. And I think people conflate variety of age, and they're, they're these subtle things. But, but variety is people say, like in knowledge work, you have to have sort of lots of experiments. And, and so you can't like you can't have this sort of reduced variation at all costs. But one dummy never said reduce verification or costs. And then to, I think Demi understood, what they learned probably from Deming is that in poorer star chain, they had a clear distinction between the ROI a variety. I mean, you don't just experiment to to know cost, I mean, to access, it's a point. But there's, but there's a sort of, I mean, not to get crazy, but like the Taguchi stuff, if anybody goes to gives you less function right in, it sort of gives you this variance that isn't just tightening in it's like figuring out the investment of a suit. Anyway, that's just, I mean, there's a longer conversation on that. But I think there's the when people just say, and I'm not saying you say this that, you know, sort of, I'm not sure Demings right about variation, I have to question like, What do you think he
Rob England: 27:52
know, so when I get there, it's the applicability. So what I'm trying to understand at the moment is dealing with complexity. VUCA is very trendy term, we use it a lot. But the idea that in our real world, all systems are, in fact, complex adaptive systems. And therefore, everything is a network of interacting agents. Everything is, is a value network. And, and so the idea of a value stream or a value chain, to me is something that is localized, that if you zoom in, and if you introduce a bounded system, you can create a flow. And, and so a continuous delivery pipeline effect production factory, yeah, right. That's a bounded system, right? It's bounded by process, and it's bounded by concrete. And, and so that the work does actually float in a stream. But if you zoom out, from macro view of any real world system, it's always a network, it's always something much more complex, right. And one of the things we know about complex systems is you can never know them as a whole, right? And so, I just feel and as I say, I'm not sure about this yet. I'm still trying to understand myself, but I just feel that a lot of these ideas of theory constraints and and, you know, variation of variability and Six Sigma and, and a lot of these flow ideas, to me work really well when you have a well bounded local system that can be treated as a flow. Yeah. And we just got to be careful not to try and use it in contexts that are not well bounded linear flows. So
John Willis: 29:57
like six sigma, right, that's a whole lot of conversation towards something I don't want to even bring it up. I know I don't get it. But But I think there is more determinism in Six Sigma than trc. And, and so, but the thing that you have to understand about Deming in again, you know, and I'm not saying you say that saying this, but like when you sorta create a sort of a focal point of Deming a variation, system, profound knowledge is indeed
Rob England: 30:24
now he got the stuff he absolutely
John Willis: 30:27
cannot understand variation without understanding the theory, psychology without the appreciation system, and the theory of knowledge, epistemology. So he constantly was like, trying to bang in everybody's head that and he called a profound knowledge specifically for tight words. He wasn't like being egotistical, like, I'm the most profound man in the universe. He said that profound knowledge meant that you had to understand the relationship between psychology between variation between pistol Knology, and in systems. And in that case, he is always sort of looking at, you're trying to break the hole into the hole until like, in other words, you know, I mean, even the same gay stuff, saying gay wrote an apology letter to him after your first book, saying that, you know, like, like, Oh, my God, like, I didn't realize he wrote them. He wrote them a letter, right. And then he's letter and said, and he said, Oh, my God, that's my book. That's the Fifth Discipline, you know, so so all this is intertwined. The only thing about to see is what's interesting. Is go rat did spend a lot of time talking about global versus local optima. Right? So, so ever again, um, yeah, I think it goes back to like, what you talked about earlier is if people get dogmatic or they sort of isolate in on like, just the way I do it, you'll then you can look, Six Sigma is I think, six sigma, fundamentally, I mean, I was a black I don't my wife was blacked out. I was a green belt, in all honesty, at GE Capital. Everybody got to green, it was a everybody gets a trophy, your green belts in likes, and T. Kava was like here, your starting point, like it's like a white belt in karate. But I understood it. And they just totally did a terrible job of implementing because it was like the police, you know, what's your sigma? What's your process? Show me to chart right now? Well,
Rob England: 32:19
I'm actually going to bathroom. This. This the bureaucrats getting the hands on a good idea again.
John Willis: 32:25
And actually, I mean, that's my point. Is that like, I think there is the sort of pure intention of things, what to see. And again, I think,
Rob England: 32:34
but it's a, I think it's deeper than that. I think that what I'm saying is that the whole idea of flow optimization is potentially a limiting mental paradigm, if we're not careful where we use it, that our systems are, in fact, not flows. A lot of the bigger systems aren't, you can only find local points within the system. And otherwise, it's a network. It's more like, the analogy I use is it's more like an Everglades. Right where the waters moving, but it's moving in all sorts of directions. And actually determining what is the direction of flow is really hard. It's not a stream, that swamp of network of co creation, failure flowing in both directions, constantly dynamically changing.
John Willis: 33:27
I mean, this way I like I like having conversations. I guess the thing I would I will have to sort out because now I feel like okay, to continue this conversation, you got to rewrite my friends, James circuits, flow architectures book, because I think that's how he describes how you
Rob England: 33:42
don't mind so long as we understand that we've found a context where we have a bounded flow, it's a factory
John Willis: 33:48
and I know your DevOps, you're sort of certified DevOps, you've done a lot of demos. So like, you don't hate,
Rob England: 33:54
you know, continuous. I think it works. Yeah, careful about checking that you've got. Yeah, I
John Willis: 34:01
think I'm gonna just leave a footnote and a hanger for this one, and go back. But I think James or Cutts knew but basically, he's written a book about event driven architectures and I think he's the lead so that coming and he by the way, we're doing our the foreign paper this year I know you're gonna be involved in foreign papers genes. Nine
Rob England: 34:22
boys look for them. Eagle Yeah, we're gonna do adventure of the finest body of knowledge on a really bops in the world. People don't know I couldn't think of that.
John Willis: 34:31
Like there's such a wealth of free ink and by some of the unbelievable results that are putting and we put you know, you've been on all these like people I mean there you take you put like seven or eight people on one project and there's some of the smartest people and people just do it for Gene You know, it's what Gene gene is this person people want to work hard for. Totally and yeah, it's a credible anyway, there's a good conversation. I guess they let's let's dive into you know, I I've been trying to follow you stuff in You're You're obviously staying busy are always thinking ahead of the game. So what is the game now that you're sort of like, Is there is there any way you can sort of summarize the way you're seeing the world now and in the problem? Solve?
Unknown: 35:14
The world calls it business agility?
John Willis: 35:18
I'm not. You got it? Nothing.
Rob England: 35:22
not wild about the term. We call it human systems adaptability. Okay. So the humanistic and the whole values. Growth, evolution, to the right. That whole enlightenment, right. The, the, the Institute for the Future is calling it the second enlightenment and I'm not sure I disagree, right. It's the step change in enlight. Social enlightenment. So the whole humanistic I love Gary Hamels book, human ah, cracy Mm hmm. Wonderful, great book. It's one of those books where every three pages, I'd have to drop it go and write something. Yeah, that's fine. You know? Yeah. So human, and then systems, absolutely understanding complexity, understanding flow, because it has a place I'm not knocking it, I'm just so understanding flow, understanding complexity, all the systems thinking holistic, holistic, thinking, and then adaptability. But carefully avoiding the word agility as somewhere, and if you can tell me the origins, but there's a wonderful thing I've seen come up a number of times, which is adaptability is agility plus resilience. Right. So to be adaptable to a VUCA world towards constantly accelerating rates of change in the world, which I firmly believe in that you need to be adaptable. And that means, first of all, being small, agile, being able to change what you do very quickly. But also being highly resilient, to deal with the mistakes when you're trying to change and to deal with the blows to be anti fragile, right to deal with the blows that come from the world. And so I don't know where I saw it first. I've seen it a number of times, but the adaptability is agility plus resilience. Love
John Willis: 37:18
it. Yeah, the resilience is a big thing. I mean, adaptability is that next key, I think, agility, maybe we overuse, you know, because I
Rob England: 37:27
like That's right. It's become
John Willis: 37:30
Yeah, I really like adaptability, right capacity, you know, adaptive capacity. And just, you know, even sort of you in terms of skill sets, Jay Blum, who I work has an incredible way of describing adaptive capacity in terms of your skills, but, but the thing I think I'm probably the best body of work in this conversation really comes from John OSPAR. Dr. Woods and Dr. Cook
Rob England: 37:57
for resilience. Totally. Yeah.
John Willis: 37:58
And but but but but, but but again, not to say, well, they're resilience. These guys are adaptive. I mean, yeah. But their, their project is called adaptive capacity labs. Right. Exactly. So to them. And again, this is like, you know, I'm trying to describe your Dr. Woods is probably it is the most premium.
Rob England: 38:15
The Wonder fits where I got it from.
John Willis: 38:17
Yeah, you know, problem. I mean, he's just, I mean, here's the point. I want to make it like, it's definitely one of the major sources, then. Surely, Decker talks about it. But Decker is really decors really good at sort of telling a story in the common man.
Rob England: 38:31
The stellar report just floored me. Yeah, no, let's
John Willis: 38:34
do it. Yeah. I mean, because to
Rob England: 38:36
me that as an ITSM guy, as a service management guy, yeah, I was like, these guys are reinventing service management. And they still do. I mean, they focus on they really focus Incident Management narrowing in, you know, John, I
John Willis: 38:49
love John's. My favorite quote, John is incident or incidents are unplanned investments.
Rob England: 38:56
Yeah, that was one of the things that just I was like, yeah,
John Willis: 38:59
no, I think if I had to summarize, which is dangerous for me to do to summarize, you, John, Richard and Dr. Woods, is that I don't think they would, they would like, except that there's a difference between the term adaptive and resilience. Like they're sort of intertwined. So you know what I mean, they mean, the same thing. And that's a very layman's version of, like, if you read, you know, go to your blog, and you can read some of the stuff that I mean, if you want to really hurt your head, you know, try to read some of Dr. Woods, his papers, but, but certainly, John tries to, yeah, I'm
Rob England: 39:34
aware, I'm using resilience in a very narrow sense, and that once you start talking about anti fragility that resilience is tility and they're totally intertwined. They're totally Yeah, I get that.
John Willis: 39:47
And, and under twined with all that, so actually, one of the interesting things I've you know, I sort of stopped worrying about it, but it used to frustrate the heck that me that like Decker and woods and John and and Richard Cook would literally just not accept the work of spear, and Rother. All tax liens stuff. You know, they don't you know, they, I mean, you know, behind closed doors, they would say they don't get it right. And you know, I tried to do I think what Gina, we had a two and a half hour thing out of here. We're sorry. We got. We got. It was a great day, we had Dr. Speier, we had Dr. Cook, and we had Cindy Decker. And we did sort of a Charlie Rose, although I you know, I don't I'm not like, Charlie Rose is not a good dude. But, but we use that kind of style. And it was great. It was two and a half hours. And at first they were sort of like, didn't agree with each other. But after about an hour, they were like finishing each other centers. And I just wanted to prove the point that both of you both groups talking about, I mean, not everybody lean talks about comp understands complex systems. But Dr. Speier and my co author do, and I was trying to convince cook in in Decker that they're saying the same thing. You're saying, Oh, no, rarely, and I'm like, dude, they're saying the same thing you're doing. And I think, you know, Jean, and I pulled it off. He was a mission accomplished area. And so it's about the overlay is complex systems,
Rob England: 41:14
this totally so yeah, the problem with Lean thinking it over all those lean people is where it is too narrow, where it's just thinking the whole world is flow. And as simple linear, but I like this
John Willis: 41:27
idea about flow. I mean, you got you got me now. So you sort of like now I got to go off and do a little bit of unplanned research.
Rob England: 41:35
I use the analogy somewhere a while back in New Zealand, we have the braided rivers, which are the big wide gravel pan rivers where, yeah, it goes from the mountains to the sea. But the channels are constantly changing. And it's a complex web of channels. And every time there's a flood, they're all new channel, right? Yeah, it's not even like your OXPHOS in the US where it just makes a new single channel. Yeah, it's a braided, it's just, it looks like there's 100 channels at any one time all over the place. And so you've got your mountain stream, which is a nice simple from here to there, flow, very clear cut, then you've got your braided river, which is still pretty generally a flow, but still you couldn't met the detail of it at any point in time, because it's constantly changing. And then you've got your Everglades where, yeah, you can pretty well tell that water's coming in over there, and it's going at the sea over there. But it's pretty hard to tell when you're in the Everglades.
John Willis: 42:37
any given time, you know, it's the quantum experiment right there. Yeah. Yeah, no.
Rob England: 42:45
So that's the circle bag. That's what we're doing. Yeah. Sexuality, and, and people get it.
John Willis: 42:54
Here's the biggest problem, right? Like, I can go into a leader and I can sort of, I think, like, I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna really craft this thing that I want them to understand. And in sometimes, you know, this sort of smiling kind of John, and I go away and like, a month goes by a month goes by, and it could be that it just sort of rolls off. But a lot of times, I wonder if they just never really got it in the first place. And, and I like I think to me, that's our biggest problem. I work with Andrew clay Shea from the He's incredible. I work Kevin bear. I mean, I'm on a team of Kevin Bay educate Shaffer and Jay bloom and a blue smartest of all of us. And it seems like we go in and we tell all these people these, you know, like, I sit back and I listen to Jay Blum, explain something to a C level person. And I wonder, like, I think that's getting worse.
Rob England: 43:45
i Okay, so let me go one more step than that. Let's talk about my wife. Alright. So Dr. Foo, Dr. Cherry foo, I met five years ago. And she just finished her PhD in public policy, okay. And we, she was off to go work in government. I'm like, come work with me. And she said, I don't know anything about what you do. And so she studied what I do. And we became management consultants together. She now she's fit me. He's obviously Jerry boo and in influence, she's native Vietnamese. She's doing all her work in Vietnam. We started taking these cool ideas to Vietnam. And I'm now learning from her big time and what I'm learning from her to your point is third, cherry understands all these things we're talking about, but she has. She doesn't tell them much. She's very practical to them. She just says do this. Try that No. Right and and they experience actually discovered this stuff. But when she tries to give them the ideas, like you say they're all going uh huh, uh huh. Yeah, yeah. But but she's very much about just start where you are and, you know, experiment and experience to try these things. And they're doing. Her clients are just doing the most amazing stuff that we're podcasting next week on Friday to talk about it just to local Welly podcast, but it's global. So anyone can jump in on meetup, I'll give you the link to that. Yeah. But because it's all in Vietnamese behind a language barrier, and the business agility Institute, we did an article on the emergence journal a little while ago, about but some people don't really know what she's doing. But can I give you a couple of quick examples? Absolutely. So I mean, we are working with one of the biggest banks in Vietnam, and they've had like integer multipliers in the increase in revenue in the areas that are working with their 235 times, the revenues, one of the area's she worked with, they met their annual quota in a month, right? So she's just doing it. That's what I'm saying. She's just getting in there and doing it. And it's all about empowering teams and allowing skills, not roles and fluidity of work and experiment, explore and servant manager and hierarchy and, you know, all these sort of humanistic things that we're familiar with in the big seat culture. DevOps, right? And that's where it all came from. I mean, I shared it all with it when we first met, right? And, oh, there's a real estate agency had about 40 people and has a lovely lady who owns it, but she would just give anyone a go someone say I want to sell real estate. Okay, come on board, right. You're mostly on commission, you get a small monthly retainer, but you might associate 42 People who was selling very little. And we just allow them to self organize, and took the whole management layer out. They were creating fluid teams and working away and suddenly bond they're selling all this stuff. And a bunch of people left they changed the commissioning structure to pay everybody and not pay the sales people the superstar
John Willis: 47:41
ministration This is a damning prime idea. Or they
Rob England: 47:45
totally totally it's all straight out. And and so a whole lot of the prima donnas left and said if I can't get the huge bucks pay up because I'm the super salesman, I'm out of here. And he was like, Okay, bye. And and, and then a whole bunch of the people said, this is a brilliant formula for a real estate agency hungry leaving. And she rings cheery up and go, Well, my best people are now going off to start their own agency. Jerry's like great. Good. All right, you know, excellent, allowing them to grow. Stay in touch. So she kept tight working relationship. So now there's all these up. There's now several other agencies working this way. And they all collaborate to pass work between each other Oh, hang is hung had a baby. And there was all the stress of having a first baby and trying to shape the stages. So she went from 42 unproductive people to now she's got about three. And she's selling as much stuff as she used to with 40 people. He just got rid of the big office, right collective story,
John Willis: 48:51
because now she's everybody sort of working together. And it's pure
Rob England: 48:55
to me, oh, green, right just below but it's straight out of the playbook that people who could have been her competitors are in fact, her collaborators. yada yada. It's just the most beautiful story. And of course, it's hidden in Vietnam. So I'm trying to surface the stuff.
John Willis: 49:13
Yeah, no kidding. No, I think
Rob England: 49:18
the big learning from cherry is that she she does teach theory. Right? She runs through quite right. But really she drives them to the behavior. It's just come on. Let's do stuff. Let's have an open space. Let's work out what we're gonna do rocker rocker rocker WAM experiment, like,
John Willis: 49:33
I'm gonna make some wild sort of guesses here. But like, I think one the idea of coming at it. There's a I think it's in blink or tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell, where this guy comes in. And he, it's like every year they have this massive war game game of Navy ships like big auditorium, and this guy comes in and he basically breaks all the rules. But there are no rules. So he basically wins the whole thing because he his strategy is like this to kill off like 70% of his PT boats, you know, which no army would do. And, and he wins and they're all furious. Like, you can't do that, like, where's the rulebook? They can so he wins the first year, he actually never done it before. So there's probably some of that with Jerry where she didn't she doesn't have all the sort of memory muscle or the things that totally it comes into. It's it looks at it learns from you and says, and then I wonder if there's not sort of, there are like certain cultures that really do accept that do this, do this, do this, do this. And if you do it right, in a way that enables them to do this, things are helping them learn. I can see that combo, but again, that's just a wild wild guess.
Rob England: 50:51
Yeah. Well, I mean, what I didn't mention is that she's not a nobody in Vietnam. Okay, so I said so she, she has the, the
John Willis: 51:07
Yeah, nephew adult. Okay. I think you're old enough to get that she's better. We had it was a commercial for EF Hutton. You know, we have Hutton talks. People listen.
Rob England: 51:18
Totally she and New Zealand we say mana, which is like prestige, not prestige, but presence. Respect. And yeah, I mean, she has manner she used to be a lecturer at the Institute of Public Management, which are what I think what it's called, but it's kind of where all the senior civil servants and politicians and party members all go to learn to be since civil servants. Oh, okay. It's like Singapore, they have a professionalized. Okay. Civil Service, right. And so some of the most powerful people in Vietnam have had the small woman at the front of the room funny, telling them what to do. Right? In the past, and, and so a lot of, she has connections, and, and she has built her own companies in Vietnam. In the past, she's been a CEO. And she has degrees in accounting and law in Vietnam. So, you know, she's coming from a position of credibility. Right, right. Definitely. Which I can't match. And yeah. And so she did, she has a particularly advantageous position, and also to be a woman who left the country and went and did a PhD overseas and,
John Willis: 52:36
okay, yeah. But all
Unknown: 52:39
specialize.
John Willis: 52:40
The meta point is trying to find that way that actually can help people learn for themselves. Um, so anyway, I think, you know, I've been trying to hear these conversations where I'm like, I got my choice, I can split it into two parts. Or, and I'm trying to figure out what what do people listen to listen to podcasts? Are they okay, with an hour and 10 minutes? or so? Anyway, but at this point, I asked you to say, and we shall do this again. But how do people reach out to you and find you? If you want?
Rob England: 53:10
Oh, absolutely. Um, till unicorn we call ourselves. So teal unicorn.com is where we live. And there's a lot of the stories and the stuff there. And there's a Contact page there. Or I'm very active on LinkedIn. Yeah.
John Willis: 53:28
Well, my friend, I can't wait till we get to see each other in person again. Yeah. i There's a pent up you know, I think I was sort of upset about I came. For years, I worked for myself, right? So I was gonna be various sort of, you know, it's a very sort of structured way, someone's got to pay for it. Then I go to work for Red Hat. I'm thinking I'm gonna be great. I'm gonna be able to travel around the world. They're gonna want me to travel in a pandemic hit so, you know,
Rob England: 53:53
a bit. You did a bit of work for one of my clients here in New Zealand. Oh, yeah. Love those guys. Yeah. And so we might have to get you up to Vietnam sometime. Oh, I'd
John Willis: 54:04
love that. Oh, my goodness. As soon as this thing's over, man, I'd like I'll tell you like, I don't know what are your favorite whiskey or wine?
Unknown: 54:14
We're hoping to get up there in May.
John Willis: 54:17
So let me know if there's a way that makes sense me. That's one place on like, I have never been and it's sort of a bucket list place to
Rob England: 54:24
go. So definitely a great place. Yeah, hanging out to get back there.
John Willis: 54:28
Sure. All right, my friend. As always awesome. Have a conversation with you.
