Wiring The Winning Organization | Author Dr. Steven J. Spear

**Dr. Steven J. Spear** (0:00)
What we hope to accomplish with this book is take the mystery and the magic out of the design and operation of these complex social-technical systems and give confidence and comfort to those responsible other people. There's some very simple, basic ways to think about the problems.
And the issue is not mastering more and more and more concepts. It's about gaining acumen and skill and speed and applying the same basic principles onto harder and harder and more complex problems.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:31)
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Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon. We're here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in the Dev Interrupted Dome and I'm excited to be joined by Dr. Steven J. Spear, senior lecturer at MIT, founder of C2Solve and co-author of the upcoming release with Gene Kim, Wiring The Winning Organization. Welcome to the show, Steve.

**Dr. Steven J. Spear** (1:27)
Oh, thanks for having me. Really glad to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:30)
I'm glad you could bear with me while I flubbed the intro like three times here. You didn't laugh too hard, which I appreciated. And I'm really excited to have another author on the show because it's honestly been a while and this isn't actually your first time writing a book either. You also previously authored the book, The High Velocity Edge. What did that teach you about writing books that you've applied now to Wiring The Winning Organization?

**Dr. Steven J. Spear** (1:51)
Oh, yeah, thanks. First of all, I guess one key lesson is work with Gene Kim. It's a very good experience. Last time I solo authored and anyway, that's a whole separate story. But let me tie it back to content. Both books, both Wiring The Winning Organization and The High Velocity Edge, which preceded it come out of the same motivation. I came in professional age in the late 80s, early 90s when Japanese companies were posing this existential threat to American competitors. And I was one of many, many people were trying to understand what they were doing different that on any given day, those organizations were able to generate and deliver so much more value into society than their American counterparts. And what I came to appreciate after years of study and immersion in places like Toyota was that the winners had created far better conditions for people to give fuller expression to their ingenuity, their creativity, their minds internal capacity to solve problems in front of them, and then have those individual efforts harmonize and integrate in a beautifully choreographed fashion into collective action towards common purpose.
In terms of your question, what did I learn from The High-Velocity Edge to Wiring The Winning Organization?
The first book was based on my work with industrially intensive organizations, Toyota is at least half the book, Alcoa is a major case study in there.
In that book, I gave a lot of expression to the design of linear processes and how they can be designed to make it easier for the individual to understand where he or she fit into the larger whole, accomplish their work, accomplish their work in such a way that when it's passed on as a intermediate input into the next step, those handoffs and exchanges are very good. Also around this idea that anything we design is going to glitch at some point, this idea that not only do you have to design things with your best understanding, but you have to design them so they reveal very quickly and early and often that something's going wrong. In that book, I call this idea Design Things So You Can See Problems. So it quickly triggers this response to solve a problem. You mentioned, and I appreciate the mention of the software we've designed, and it's built and actually our company is called C2 Solve, so it's around that. Making the transition into wiring is that working with Gene, we shifted, I wouldn't say shifted, we expanded our area of concern from processes which look industrial in that they lay out in a linear fashion, sequential fashion through time and expanded to worry about things that spread out over space, technical systems. What we discovered, and I think it was fabulously exciting and validating, is that the same issues exist, that how you create the conditions as a leader, the conditions you create for those people for whom you're responsible, fabulously affects their ability to bring their ingenuity to bear on the problems which you as a collective are trying to solve. Where we went with this is that we had a better appreciation that we're designing around the minds of human beings and that we have to worry not only about things which exist spread out over time but which are spread out over space.