 Thank you for coming today. Actually, most of you guys are expecting technical things for KubeCon, CloudNet.com, all right? Actually, I am. But my session is not so technical things. That's why you can take a rest on the easy time. Because maybe this time is after lunch, right? Maybe some of you guys are kind of sleepy. And you want to take a nap. So that's why you can be the cozy during this session. But my session is focusing on really cultural things and organizational things. So if you like it, I'd be happy. So my session title is Psychological Safety for UAP Platform Engineering. And this is me. My name is Shinya Yanagihara. And my Chinese pronunciation is not so good. Maybe you guys are roughing. Well, she, do you and Shenmue? That's my name. And I'm working for Bohemian Japan. And I'm working as a developer advocate. My career is kind of unique. So I'm working as for middleware and platform. That's why I'm talking about platform. But I'm not infrastructure guy. I'm always working for workload on platform, so applications. And that's why my motto is work for the developer experience. I'm always pay attention to the application developers. That's my motto. So let me start introduction. Have you seen HypeCycle provided Gatuna, this one? This HypeCycle was published in 2022, after last year. I can find the platform engineering as mentioned in the HypeCycle. And this one. Next HypeCycle was published in 2023, this year. In this HypeCycle, you can find internal developer portal. The internal developer portal often called IDP for short is a platform managed by and provided by platform engineering team. Maybe you know. Now then, can you guys explain what platform engineering is? This is one definition of platform engineering, according to Gatuna. The point is that it's not just engineering for infrastructure. This mindset means there is always an application and also application developers. And within this definition, the development and the use of tools, as well as importance of automation are explained from the technical aspect as a platform engineering. And I believe you have probably seen this diagram so far. This diagram was used to illustrate platform capability in the CNCF platform white paper. Since this is the description of platform, which is central technical aspect of platform engineering, you will find that lots of technical elements are listed, like web portal, golden pass, the observability, data service, something like that. And we have seen platform engineering that is required to maintain and provide a platform for developers. So it is not surprising that lots of technical components are required. By the way, if we think of platform engineering as a platform engineering team, is the technical components alone sufficient? Do you think so? In platform engineering, not only technical aspects are important, but also the cultural and organizational aspects. It is said, not only one with the other is important, but both aspects must mature. Both aspects need to support each other in order for platform engineering team to grow. So my talk session is focused on cultural aspects of platform engineering. So what would you think to be cultural aspect of platform engineering? I have listed some of these, a lot of things, actually. Now I will pick one. Are you familiar with platform as a product? This is a concept we, at Buryemia, have been working on since before platform engineering became the focus it is today. So I will introduce platform as a product slightly. I'd like you to think of the food and drinks you buy in your daily life, as well as appliances you use in daily life. They are advertised and branded to differentiate them from other products, right? Also, their improvement being made with consumer in mind, right? The mindset of platform engineering is the same as general retailing, the product. In platform engineering, we treat platform continuous and platform as a typical product, like a appliance, like for food, like drinks. This means branding the platform as a continuously improving platform. And in the context of platform engineering, the consumer become the application developer. You may have heard about platform as a product, as it's often talked about various prices in the context of platform engineering. And platform as a product is very, very popular so far. But I will talk about, actually, I don't talk about platform as a product today. I will talk about psychological safety. If you are interested in platform as a product, please talk to me if you see me at this event. So let me start psychological safety. So have you heard about psychological safety? Perhaps some of you have heard about psychological safety. If you have attended teamwork training, something like that. Psychological safety means taking risks and sharing ideas without fear of negative consequences. And this psychological safety has several pairs of mindset. Here are some of these. First of all, open communications. It's really important. Open communication is all about sharing thoughts, ideas and consent with a random team. In a psychological safe environment, people feel free to speak up without worrying about criticism. This encourages honest conversations, creates misunderstandings, and achieve listening among team members. And next, risk-taking. Don't forget about risk-taking. It's really, really important. Risk-taking means that people feel safe to propose new ideas, take calculated risks, and try innovative approaches. Without fear of negative consequences, it's about creating environment where individuals are comfortable stepping out of their comfort situation. This forced innovation and continuous improvement. And running culture. In running culture fostered by psychological safety, mistakes are seen as a chance to grow, not as a failure. Team members actively seek to learn from their experience, share insights, and adapt their approach based on lessons learned. This culture prompt ongoing development and personal improvement, and innovation and creativity. Psychological safety encourages innovation and creativity by welcoming diverse perspectives and fresh ideas. In this environment, team members think creatively, question as a question assumption, and work together to come up with innovative solutions. It encourages creative problems solving. There are other... readiness to explore new and unconventional approaches. And finally, collaboration and teamwork. I love this one. Psychological safety enhance collaboration and teamwork by building trust and reducing the barriers to effective communication. Team members are more likely to share information or assistance and work together cohesively. This collaborative atmosphere enables the team to leverage each other's strengths, achieve common goals, and collectively drive success. So if you already joined psychological safety training, maybe you have seen this matrix. This slide shows four different zones that represent how the safe and engaged team feels. Each zone reflects different levels of comfort in your team environment. So, lowest accountability and the psychological safety zone, its opposite zone is called. And more or less, you have the psychological safety, it's called the comfort zone. And psychological safety and accountability is higher. It's called running zone. And there are actually comfort zone has a psychological safety, but this is a kind of illusion for the psychological safety. Why is comfort zone is illusion? I will explain that. Comfort zone is a literally cozy environment because of open communication. And therefore it appears to be a really, really psychological self in terms of open communication. However, they tend to avoid risk taking. As I mentioned, it's really important, which prevents them from achieving challenging goals. That is why we need to aim for learning zone. So, there are several reasons to avoid comfort zone. Like a complacency, missed opportunities, lack of innovation, reduced to resilience, lack of adaptability. And there are several reasons to aim for the learning zone. Or let's take a look at the reasons for the zone. Continuous improvement, the learning zone makes us want to keep getting better all the time. It pushes us to a new thing, experiment with different ways of doing stuff and learn from when things work and don't work. This helps us keep improving and come up with new ideas. And next one, adaptability. In a world that's always changing, right? It's important to be able to adapt. Anything. The learning zone helps us to be open to change, not get too worried about things being uncertain and be okay with new situation. Being able to adapt like this is really important to stay competitiveness and up to date and innovation. The learning zone makes us think creatively and try out new ideas. It lets us question what we assume in truth, challenge how things are usually done and help come up with new and smart question. The resilience, people in the learning zone become tough because they are used to dealing with tough stuff, difficult situation and difficult problems. And learning from when things don't go well, things, toughness helps them handle problems better and come back strong after failures. So as I have told, just mentioned, I hope you know, understand that it's better to improve learning zone, rather than comfort zone. Learning zone is better. Now let's take a look at the great state of affairs for the learning zone for platform engineering. First of all, adoption to technology advances in platform engineering, technology changes quickly, right? If platform engineers have a learning zone, they can keep up with the newest tools and methods. This means the platform stays up to date and can work with new technologies. Next, innovation and creativity. Platform engineering is about solving tricky problems. The learning zone makes platform engineers think in new and creative ways. This helps them come up with fresh solutions that makes the platform better and more user friendly and continuous improvement. Platforms always need to get better. The learning zone makes platform engineers want to keep finding ways to make things work even smaller and faster. It helps them make the platform better, keep it self and make it work more efficiently and user-centric design. Good to platform engineering means focusing on users. So it's a developer's. The learning zone mindset tells platform engineers to pay attention when the user say what they want, be flexible when needs chance and make a platform for developers and complex solving. Platform engineering can mean dealing with really tough stuff. The learning zone helps. Platform engineers face these challenges like problem solvers. It invites them to find new ways and tools to solve tough problems and risk management. Comfort zone might make people lazy, but the learning zone says it's okay to take some risks. Platform engineers can try out new technology or ways of doing things. Knowing that if they make or mistake, it's a chance to get better and learn something new and cross-functional collaboration. The learning zone encourage the platform engineer to work closely with developers, operation guides and security experts and the others, other people. Together, they create solutions that cover all the best and meet everyone's needs. The resilience in the face of the change. Platform engineers deal with the shift in the technology, business needs and industry trends. The learning zone helps platform engineers stay tough in the face of these changes. So the platform keeps saving the organization well, the future-proofing. By creating a learning zone, organizations prepare their platform engineer for the future. This mindset helps platform engineer foresee and welcome changes, making sure the platform stays flexible and ready to tackle with new challenges. As you see now, environmental psychological safety in the learning zone can have a variety of effects on the platform engineering. Now, as I mentioned, the platform engineering and the psychological safety, especially the state of the learning zone, great match. Now, platform engineering is about making software developer more efficient and it consistently changes the technology advances. The learning zone encourages you to learn and try new things. That's right. It's perfect for keeping platform engineering up-to-date and optimal. So they work really well together. So now speaking of learning zone, have you heard about the learning organization? This is a Peter Sanger concept. Learning organization is detailed with his book, The Fifth Discipline. The book talks like following. Learning organization is an organizational entity that fosters an environment in which people at all levels continuously learn, adapt, and grow to enhance performance and achieve goals. A learning organization is characterized by several key principles. It's a systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. And the learning organization concept aligns well with platform engineering due to the nature of the field. Continuous learning, systems thinking, the innovation, the collaboration, adaptability. So I will talk about one of them, systems thinking. Platform engineering often requires understanding the interconnected of the various components, complex components. Systems thinking helps teams understand how different technology interact within the platform. Then I will talk about systems thinking later. Now, I'm sure most of you have seen this chart, right? This is a CNCF cloud native landscape. As you see, it is really exciting how many tools are displayed, right? On the other hand, some of you might say too many tools, it's so complicated, right? Actually, I can say it's kind of complicated, I think so. But now, do you remember the platform white paper by CNCF provided, I mentioned, as I mentioned at the beginning of my session, in many cases, the tool listed in the cloud native landscape will be combined to create a platform. That's why we should think about running organization for platform engineering as well. So like rapid technology changes, complex ecosystems, innovation and experiments, knowing sharing and knowledge sharing, the continuous improvement, lots of aspects. So now, I will talk about systems thinking as a right way. So you've already seen running organization has a several key principles, as I mentioned. One of them is system thinking. Now, let's take a look at it. But system thinking is a kind of discipline of the way of thinking. And that's why it's kind of difficult to explain it with just one slide and for the rest of the time. So today, I just like you to know that there are several approaches to system thinking. System thinking is approach that recognizes inter-connectedness and interdependence among the various elements within the complex systems. The emphasis on the viewing the system as the four less than isolated parts, understanding how the components interact and recognizing that changes in one part can affect an entire system. There are lots of components and I will pick up some. Oristic perspective, system thinking incorporates looking beyond individual components and understanding their relationship in the broader context of the entire system. And next one, interconnectedness. It emphasizes that everything is connected and changes is one area can impact other areas of unexpected ways. And next one, feedback groups. System thinking explores the feedback groups within the system where actions and reactions will influence each other, leading dynamic behavior. I will deep dive with this one. Next slide. I told you this system thinking has a kind of looping system, a looping thinking. So this is a visualization of the system thinking. It's called loop diagram. It's an illustrator, interrelationship. One loop diagram, it's a reinforcing loop in which one event has a strong influence on subsequent events. So on the other hand, there is another loop. The balancing loop, which acts to restore the affected state of the original state. This example, considered for the enhanced performance of microservices, like service microservices has become overloaded and no longer performing. But maybe when you have the trouble, maybe you will configure some of them, but conflicts and events happen something and effects. Then you must think about the kind of the loop diagram. But remember, this loop diagram is really, really simple. Usually, loop diagram is more complicated, especially cloud-native things, cloud-native technologies and ecosystem, like Kubernetes. So this is the kind of the slightly more complex loop. It could be a nested loop with connected reinforcing loop by balancing loop and reinforcing loop grouping all these loops together. So if you, as I mentioned, if you start thinking about Kubernetes, it's a system in the loop diagram displayed like this. So let's say imagine the components that appeared here, Kubernetes cluster, monitoring observability tools, department strategies and resource management, containerization, developer feedback loop. And let's imagine some possible loop from these components for reinforcing loop, containerization loop. Containerization loop enables consistency and portability of application. This positively impacts resource utilization and deployment strategies by providing a standard environment. And the developer feedback loop, effective communication and feedback changes between developers and operations helps in resolving issues and improving application performance within the cluster. And that's a reinforcing loop. The next one, the balancing loop, restore resource optimization loop. Proper resource management ensures it affects the use of cluster resources. If resource utilization is too high or too low, adjustment can be made to optimize performance and cost effectiveness. The next one, deployment strategy loop. Different deployment strategies impact resource usage application performance by carefully selecting and fine tuning development strategies. Organization can strike a balance between stability and agility. In this way, it is important to take into account the various interrelationship and their actions and reactions in complex cloud-based systems. The system thinking loop diagram is a valuable tool in the context of platform engineering for several reasons. So there are the reasons. Actually, one of these has a detailed reason explanation, but we don't have the list enough time. So if you are interested in this explanation after this session, please talk to me. So I hope that you have found the system thinking useful in platform engineering. I told you that psychological safety is important in the beginning of the session. Do you think system thinking can help with psychological safety? I can say the answer is yes. You can imagine how well these two go together given the relationship between learning zones and the learning organization. So understanding interconnected factors, system thinking encourage people to look at bigger picture and see how different things are connected. When it comes to psychological safety, this approach helps us understand how various factors like how we communicate, how our teams work together, how our leaders behave. And overall culture of organization or interact. By understanding these connections, we can figure out that might be causing issues with psychological safety and work on fixing them in comprehensive way. And next one, it's a root causes. Think of a system thinking like detectable looking for clusters. When it comes to psychological safety, this approach helps us dig deeper to find out why there might be problems. Instead of just dealing with obvious signs like people not feeling safe to speak, we try to figure out that's causing these issues in the first place. It's like getting to root of the problem. By doing this, organization can make smarter chance that we are fixing the wrong time. And open communication, systems thinking is like being detective for how we talk to each other. When it comes to the psychological safety, it helps us look at how information moves around in our organization. We check to see if there are any problems that stop people from sharing their thoughts and their ideas openly. Once we find these issues, we can come up with plans to make sure everyone can talk more freely and honestly. It's all about making communication better so people feel safer to speak up. Actually, I have, we have some reason, explanation, right, two more, three more. The rest of time is not enough, so I will skip it. But let me explain this one. I will, I love this, encouraging collaboration. Systems thinking is like saying that we are all in this together. When it comes to psychological safety, these approach help us to see that we need different people with different ideas to solve problems. It's like having a bunch of experts from different fields work together on a puzzle. When we include lots of different perspectives, we can come up with better solutions and really make sure our environment is safe and welcoming for everyone. So this is the takeaway. So a whole of this session, as I told you, the value of psychological safety to platform engineering has open communication, risk taking, running culture, and innovation, and collaboration. And the value of systems thinking to platform, platform engineering has complexity management, feedback groups, the root cause analysis, adaptability, and optimization. And in summary, psychological safety creates an environment where teams can communicate openly, take risks, learn, innovate, and collaborate effectively. The systems thinking complements this by providing a structured approach to managing complexity, identifying feedback loops, analyzing root cause, adapting to change, and optimizing platform engineering processes. Together, these concepts contribute to advancement and success of platform engineering efforts. The technical aspects are naturally important for the platform engineering because platform engineering deal with a variety of technical things, technology, and tools. However, it is really important not to forget that a team that is psychological safety and capable of effective learning will be able to leverage technology more efficiently. That's all I have today. Thank you so much.