Wiring The Winning Organization pt. 2 | Gene Kim

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
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Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon. I'm delighted to be joined by the esteemed Gene Kim. You may have heard of him, author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, a new book, Wiring the Winning Organizationget. I just spoke with his co-author, Dr. Steve Spear, and I'm very excited to talk to Gene as well. And then he's also, of course, the program chair for IT Revolution's DevOps Enterprise Summit, founder himself, Gene. Welcome back to the podcast.

**Gene Kim** (0:59)
Oh, so good seeing you again. And by the way, I'm dying to ask, what was like hanging out with Steve for that interview?

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:04)
I love Steve. He is such a gem. I have to say he's got me kind of convinced I'm bow ties now.
So it was fascinating learning about your research. It was great to just kind of chat with him. He's a really cool dude. I can see why the two of you wrote a great book together.

**Gene Kim** (1:18)
Yeah, it was so cool because, you know, the question we set out to ask was, well, let me just set the stage a little bit. So I spent, I guess, 23 years studying high-performing technology organizations. And so we know that the organization has the best project duty performance and development. They have the best operational reliability and stability. They have the best posture security and compliance. And the state of DevOps research, we identified it has something to do with their technical practices, their architectural practice and cultural norms.
And Steven Spear, he spent 30 years studying the Toyota production system, engine design at Patent Whitney, the safety culture at Alcoa.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:56)
Submarines, incredible career.

**Gene Kim** (1:58)
Exactly, so it was so wonderful that when I met him 10 years ago, this quest that started to emerge was, what is in common between the Toyota production system and safety culture and DevOps and agile and concepts like psychological safety. And it was exhilarating to see that they are potentially all incomplete expressions of a far greater whole.
And I have to tell you, it was one of the most challenging things I've ever worked on. There was one point in the book where I almost quit. Yeah, did we get this? And should I tell you what?

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:30)
Please, yeah, that's a great story.

**Gene Kim** (2:32)
So it was about a year ago and we're just, I thought we were at a point where we were very stuck.
We had a theory that we knew it had to be three things, slowification, simplification and amplification. But we couldn't come up with a simple model to really demonstrate all three principles.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:49)
It felt too hard to boil down.

**Gene Kim** (2:50)
Yeah, exactly, right? And so I told my wife, I'm going on a walk and I'm not coming back until we have something. And so six months later, I'm pretty convinced I'm not smart enough that I don't understand software development enough. And I tried to come up with these much simpler scenarios like movie theater operations, but realized I don't understand movie theaters well enough. How about restaurant operations? Like, I don't understand restaurants well enough.
And yeah, it was a very, it was a kind of a one can manage a sort of distressing moment where you started something three years ago and you might not be able to finish it because you can't explain it. You don't understand it.
And luckily, I think that's when the notion of using this vignette that we had written a year before around, you know, Steve and Gene moving couch together, probably be expended to, oh, Steve and Gene, you know, being asked to help their spouses renovate an old hotel, right? So they have to do, you know, remove the furniture from room, paint the room and bring the furniture back in.
And it was just so exciting because I was like, oh, yeah, we can use that to show how even having just two functional specialties by doing, you know, not the most complex activity can be thoroughly screwed up, you know, if you, you know, organize them wrong. And so it was just even more exciting when, you know, in a 30 minute call with Steve, he instantly got it. And so I was like, ah, that's a wonderful moment. So it's been such a fun adventure. And my genuine hope is that this will not just resonate with technology leaders, that they'll find something instantly familiar, right? This is a recast, like everything that we've learned over the past many decades about like how to do great software well. But it also resonate with manufacturing leaders, you know, people doing bio research. And so I find something, I find that to be just a wonderful hope that, you know, that's going to create a common language to talk about, you know, how we talk about systems and leading systems.