 Welcome everybody to yet another OpenShift Commons briefing as we want to do on Fridays. We're going to talk about some aspect of transformation, organizational or otherwise. And today, once again, one of my favorite guests, Jay Bloom is here with us from Red Hat's Office of Global Transformation. And we're going to talk a little bit about something that sounds kind of highfalutin, but it's actually something really, really all should know a little bit more about social practice theory and transformation in the context of technology. And I'm going to let Jay explain and talk about that for a while and then we'll have live Q and A at the end and probably as always, hopefully a wonderful conversation about the topic. So, Jay, take it away. Cool. Thank you. So if you guys want to tweet about this, I like tweeting SPTX, so social practice transformation. I'm Cytane. If you guys want to find me, be happy to chat on the Twitter's afterwards. Really quickly, this presentation has a lot of material from my dissertation. I'm getting a PhD. Luckily for me, part of my dissertation is working with people to help them understand these ideas. In fact, part of the requirement for my dissertation is that I show that I have shared the materials with practitioners and potentially change their behaviors. So, please, this is material that I would love for you guys to use. However, it's very important that I get attribution for the PhD. We don't want any confusion about the source of the materials. So, everybody should attribute everyone always because it's a good way of maintaining a meaningful, purposeful community. But in this case, please be careful with the materials if you use them. Thank you. So, I have the presentation broken into two pieces. Just theory as an explanation. So, like, what is social practice theory? What does it explain? And then theory of change. So, if we accept the social practice theory, what would the theory of change be? How would we change this thing that we're pointing at? So, first step is just social practice as a theory, social practice as an explanation of something. What is it explaining? What is it pointing at? What can it help us understand better? So, I'll start with a very convoluted quote, and then we'll try to get simpler. So, a practice is a rootinized behavior. So, it's something that you do routinely. It's not something novel or new, something that you do regularly. And it consists of multiple elements that are kind of connected together. So, it's not just an activity, right? So, it is an activity, but it's not just an activity. So, it's not practice as in the thing you do. But it's also a set of material things, objects, and things like this that you use when you're doing the activities, and a set of kind of knowing, right? A set of understanding and having a reason for doing the practice that is motivational and potentially has some emotional content to it. So, there's some interesting pieces here, right? Like, practice isn't just sitting down and playing your violin in this frame. Practice includes the violin and the reason you're playing the violin and the knowledge you need to have in order to play the violin, all of those things are considered part of a practice in this frame. So, a simpler one to kind of like make it easier to kind of grab onto. A practice is a social phenomena. So, the thing that was missing from the last piece was just maybe a little bit more pointing at social. So, this isn't something, a social practice isn't something that an individual does without other people. And I don't mean that other people have to be present for the practice to happen, but the reason you're doing the practice, if it's a social practice, is because it has a social context and meaning that makes the practice purposeful. So, there's social phenomena and there are performance, right? That's the way in which it's social. You're performing for other people in some way with expectations and things like this, right? Same way you can think of being on stage, you're performing, yeah. And then it entails the reproduction. So, there's this idea that cultural meaning and skill and tools here, all those things need to be constantly reproduced, recreated. So, practice is the reproduction of those meanings, skills and tools, yeah. And the skills are learned in a social context, so you have to learn them from others, yeah. And then there's common tools, technologies, products where the common points again to shared, right? Like that they're not your private tools necessarily, they're common tools. They're shared tools. And we'll talk about a little bit about the way in which all of this has a lot of wiggle in it in a second. But just to give you an idea, right, we're talking about kind of three big pieces here. We're talking about meanings, skills, and materials, yeah. And so, Shove kind of says this is what a practice is made up of and this is called the three elements model. She says that a practice is the kind of interconnection between materials, meanings, and skills or competencies, yeah. And so, you can think about it this way. When you perform a practice, what you're doing is using your competence with manipulating material things in order to create meaning, yeah. Where meaning again could have a social aspect to it, where the meaning is something that you learn from other people. And the materials are not necessarily just physical objects. They could be anything that has, that matters. So it could be policies, things that are sticky and don't change easily, yeah. And then skill, again, is your ability to perform, your competency. And, you know, pointing at that competency, it's really the ability to do something where when the social group that you're interacting with, when they look at it, they judge you to be competent. In other words, they think that you did a good job manipulating the materials in order to achieve the meaning that they expect, yeah. So, like a practical example, a lot of social practice theory is, frankly, from work that people are doing on sustainability. And so, there's a lot of social practice analysis of practices, social practices that are unsustainable, or in their current shape are unsustainable. And so, this one is drying your clothes, and or laundering. And so, what you can see here is that it's not just one material, one procedure, or one meaning. It's a set of them that are interacting, right? And you can see, like, obviously, there's all sorts of different types of materials that are involved in reproducing line drying, right? And then there's frameworks and procedures and competencies and like time, right? All of those things down at the bottom that tell you when it's appropriate to do things, what time you should do it, what the conditions should be, what the laws are, all those things, right? So, procedure or skill has to do with negotiating all of those particular aspects. And then, finally, meaning, right, is why do we launder? Like, what's the why of laundering, in a way? And so, what we get is this idea of, like, in different cultures, these meanings could be different, yeah? So, you could say that, like, laundry is clutter, it's on your floor, you need to smell good in public, you need clean clothes, it's a sign of status to have clean clothes, all of these ideas are why we launder, right? We launder for these reasons and the skills that we use to interact with the materials allow us to achieve those meanings. And part of, like, the important piece to notice here is that we can swap bits and pieces out of a practice and still have the same practice. So, line drying could be done in different cultures for different meaning or could be done with different materials or could require different skills because of, for instance, different regulatory frameworks or different expectations of time. So, there's this kind of wiggliness to it where a practice is identifiable because it involves similar things but it doesn't have to be explicitly the exact practice. So, you know, one way of saying that is, like, social practice is not best practice, right? Like, best practice would be highly, highly defined what all of these things would be. On the other hand, best practice can be a social practice. So, you could use best practice as a way of reinforcing and creating a social practice. Maybe it would be brittle but we can have other conversations about that. So, an individual's behavior, then, is a performance of a social practice, right? So, again, it's the ability to negotiate those various constraints. And also, like, I like to use jazz for this, right? Like, there's a materiality to jazz, your instruments, other people involved, a club, things like that. There is the skill, including knowledge of arcane scales and the way of improvising and things like this. And then there's different meanings that people create from jazz, of course. So, but the important part of it is not just the idea that jazz is a social practice but that social practice is a lot like jazz because it's almost always improvisational. The idea of being competent with materials to create meaning, part of the competency is the ability to reproduce the practice even though the material or meaning might change, right? So, that's why you have competency is because if you were given the exact same things in the exact same condition over and over again, you would still have some competency in theory but it wouldn't be particularly challenging. And nobody would particularly be interested in watching you do something exactly the same way over and over again. The interesting part about jazz and music and things like that is the way in which the context, the particular audience, the particular club, the particular group interpret the music and therefore the performance, like the performance of the social practice, is contextual and it's bound to the particular materiality and meaning of the time and space that it is kind of enacted. So, the important part is to think about this, that stability and routinization are not the end points of normalization, rather they should be understanding as ongoing accomplishments in which similar, not the exact same, similar elements are repeated and linked together in similar ways. So, again, a social practice doesn't have this idea of narrowing to a specificity, it has this idea of the loosely coupled relationship between these three ideas, these three kind of components, and the way in which those things come together creates a closure that allows the performance of the performance, of the practice, sorry. I like to talk about it, I have a friend, Mark Bergauer, and when I talk about it with him, one of the things that we talk about is kind of fried eggs or scrambled eggs, and Mark lives in Edinburgh, or outside Edinburgh, and he flew over one year and stayed with me and I'm said to him, like, do you want to have scrambled eggs in the morning? He's not sure, and so I made scrambled eggs the way that I was taught, so again that points to that like social learning part of social practice, and so I made something that I call, that are called scrambled fried eggs, right? So you basically fry the egg a little bit and then you scramble it, and you know, I used a pan, I used a spatula, I used a bowl, I used eggs, I used a stove, you know, all these things, but Mark when he was watching me observed that's not how I make scrambled eggs. The interesting part about it is, to me, is that he still recognized that it was making of scrambled eggs in that the meaning of the meal was being closed still, so like it was a different set of materials, a little bit different as in like it wasn't on his stove, but it was very similar, similar ingredients, things like that, but it was a different skill, so I had mutated the skill in a way that he didn't recognize, but I was still using the same materials to achieve the same meaning, yeah? So this is wiggliness about it that allows it to be recreated and re-performed, I think of it sometimes like they're like heuristics for the relationship between the three, and in the way that you don't necessarily always have to have explicit rules for heuristic to work, you don't have to have specific materials, meanings, or skills, you just have to have a relationship that makes it appear similar. I, by the way, went and stayed with Mark and he makes like a French style scrambled eggs like very, I guess I think of you in my head as European, they're very wet and loose, and we had a great conversation about how he was literally using the same things with a different set of skills, low heat, long period of time, constant movement, very different than the way the skills that I deploy to make the scrambled eggs, but then we sat down and had a meal together and enjoyed the eggs that we had made, same meaning, same outcome, and then we also had to wash the dishes and all the other social practices that go along with making eggs, and many of those were very similar, right? We performed those the same way. So one of the things to think about when you think about social practice is that you're often not explicitly taught a social practice, you're just kind of like you watch other people in a social context and learn how to do it, and the result of that is that often when we talk about things, we talk about practices, social practices, we don't really recognize that other people might do what we're saying in a different way. They might implement the practice or perform the practice differently than we do. And so you get weird things, right? Like, different people do TDD differently, but it's for the same purpose, yeah? And one of the ways that you can kind of generally judge that someone's competent is if they're doing TDD for the right reasons as opposed to doing it with a specific tool set or doing it with a specific process, yeah? Instead, it's more about does the way they interact with those things achieve the meaning behind test-driven development is one way of thinking that. So anyway, so there's something else in here about social practice that's kind of important, and since we're talking about transformation and technology and work transformation, you know, one of the important things is kind of kind of structure in a work environment. And one of the questions is, like, what doesn't an account of a good work day entail, right? Like, how do you know that you had a good day at work? And I think there's this, you know, hopefully a lot of you've seen this before. I will not be able to say his name correctly, Chek Mahay Mahele, his theory of flow, and on the left is the one that most people see the most commonly, you know, on the right is a more complicated version of it. But the idea of it is this, that there's things that you have an opportunity to do, and then there's capabilities. And of course, like, one of the things I'm going to point out here is that capability is the same type of capability that we're talking about in a social practice context, right? It's the ability or the skill to do something. And so opportunities and challenges in the social practice theory come from changes in materiality and changes in meaning. So the reason why those things change is kind of orthogonal. It's not important for right now, but those are the things that change and therefore give you opportunities and therefore give you challenges, yeah? And if your capabilities grow, your ability to perform in different contexts in a way that people see you as being competent, those grow, right? And so you can see in the model, there's this like tick-tacking idea where a flow state or where a good day at work means that you kind of moved through a process by which things have changed without tipping you too far into anxiety and without staying so similar that you become bored. There's like a tick-tacking process up there. And I think the model on the right gives you a subtly different version of those things where the relationship between flow and skills and challenges becomes a little bit richer. So it's not just that you can be bored, it's that in fact you could have high sets of skills that have low challenge and give you great relaxation. And you could have medium amounts of challenge and still feeling control, both of those being not necessarily in that perfectly good day at work feeling, but in ways that allow you to feel like you are in control. On the other side of it, of course, is when your adaptive capacity, your ability to perform the needed skills in order to close the practice in a way that is recognized by others as being competent, that when you're incapable of doing that, you start kind of moving from being aroused or aware of your inabilities to being anxious, to literally not being worried about maybe being caught or not being able, not being seen as being competent. And extensive amounts of this can cause you to worry. It's a nice way of thinking through the emotional interactions that one has in an everyday context at work. And the way in which social practice is the everyday experience at work where one is in a flow state, where one believes that they're performing in a way that is socially accepted, socially meaningful. So to be competent is an evaluation of the ability to create the closure of the constraints that arise from the interactions between material conditions, social meaning and action. So what I mean by the constraints that arise from is just when the material conditions change, when the social meaning changes, when you're asked to do things in a different way, new policies, except like that, those create constraints. Those make, those force you to change your behavior and to create closure means to change your behavior in a way where you can realign these three things again and therefore continue to produce the practice in a way that's considered competent in your social system. So one other thing about social practice theory, I think there's only one other thing, I might have more, but social practice theory also isn't just one practice at a time. And this again points a little bit towards this idea of being competent. And what I mean by being competent in this kind of frame is that teams and people and interactions between teams, interactions between or even organizations rely on kind of interpredictability. That means that I should have some expectation about what you're about to do in relationship to whatever we're working on together. And you, if you perform to my expectations within reason like from what I observe or what I think is important, then I will think that you're predictable. I can modify my behavior based on what I expect your behavior to be. Doesn't always necessarily have to be positive behavior. Maybe the interpredictability is that you'll do something poorly, but as long as I can kind of predict what's going to happen, I can coordinate behavior between different organizations and different individuals. And of course, this points at this idea again of the way in which attitudes and actions, so that's again that collection of meanings and skillful coping, create common ground meaning of knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions in order to create this kind of facilitated, co-ordinative action. So one way of thinking about this is that social practices create the stability for a social system to evolve out of it. So one of the ways you could think about this is like cultural expectations are built on these same structures, right? That you will do certain things at certain times of the day with certain types of materials. And if I see you doing those things at certain times of the day with those certain types of materials and you produce some outcome that I can look at, I will think, yeah, you're pretty predictable and that's great. I don't have to pay a lot of attention to you because you seem competent. On the other hand, if you do things at the wrong time of day, according to my viewpoint, or with the wrong materials, or with the wrong process, or you produce something that I don't expect, we kind of reduce the social network or challenge the social network. And that's important to kind of think through when we think about social practice. So again, another wall of text from Chotsky, but an important part of this is that it's not just like a social system that's networked together with social practices, it's actual practices that get networked together. So again, I pointed out when we talk about frying eggs, like frying eggs, cleaning dishes, eating a meal, setting the table, all of those social practices are kind of like a network of practices that are interrelated around common themes or meanings and skills and materials. And so there's three ways that Chotsky says that these things kind of interact with each other. They either interact through understandings. So these are, again, I think what we would call expectations of what people should know or that common ground that we pointed out earlier, through explicit rules, principles, and instructions. So literally, the practices hold together by people creating rules to define how they interact with each other. And then finally, through what he calls tele-effective structures, and tele-effective structures, tele-o-effective means future feelings, yeah? So things, our expectations are things that we think should happen and how the practices should relate together to achieve tasks, purposes, projects, ends, goals, things like that. So the network is stabilized by these three types of things. The network of practices is stabilized by these three types of things. So what you can think of when you think of nexus of practices is that you might have one practice and there's some stabilizing factors on that practice and some destabilizing factors on that practice. So the stabilizing factors are the things we just pointed at, understandings, policies, tele-effective structures, expectations, things like that. And that stabilizes the practice. The expectations of what a good performance of the practice would look like are structured by those things and stabilized by those things. Now, there's destabilizing where you could think of them as challenging parts of things to a practice, and those would include things like the environment changes and the materiality of the system changes, other associated practices change because of some environmental change or material change, and then changes in those tele-effective structures or changes in expectations that cause the social network or the social practice network to start discohering from itself, kind of coming apart. And the other thing is that you have these kind of interesting relations that the practices are related to each other. They might share material, they might share meaning, they might share policy or procedure or skill, and the sharedness of them makes them into this kind of fabric or network of practices. Maybe one might call it a complex of practices. The final thing to point out really quickly here is that all practices, again, produce outputs. So they reconfigure, change, modify a material condition in a way that achieves or does not achieve an outcome. So the kind of back and forth there is the recognition that practices change materials, the material conditions, and B, the change in material conditions is going to be judged by some social system, that's the whether or not you're competent or not, and then the feedback from the social system about the output and outcome modify the practice itself as well. So we've got a couple of different ways of thinking through kind of practice as an individual practice, as a network of practice, as something is stabilized and destabilized. The implications here though are important, right? The implication is that the focus is of what we want to focus on, so the focus is of what we want to focus on. The focus of the analysis that we want to do when we're thinking about transformation is going to move from individuals to shared behaviors. We're not going to analyze what an individual is doing, we're going to analyze the material conditions, the competencies, and the meanings of a particular practice to determine how it's stabilized, how it's recreated, how it's reproduced, and then if we want to change it, we're also going to look at those things and ask how to change those things, not specifically how to change the individual involved. So why is that? There's this weird version of it that we need to kind of point out really quickly. We're trying to get this weird balance between two different kind of theories. With social practice, we're trying to avoid a completely atomistic theory. What I mean by that is the idea that each individual in our organization is completely autonomous, can act however they want, can access kind of atemporal, non-contextual logic that will drive their behavior, and that is represented by kind of homo economicists, this kind of theory that there's a rational decision maker involved. So social practice doubts that. Social practice is suggesting that that individual doesn't really exist, can't really exist, because it doesn't explain any of the normative expectations that a independent person would have. How do they get the normative models? How do they understand what's desirable and not desirable? How do they model their needs? All those things seem to be not explained well by somebody who's completely rational. So again, a completely rational individual could be completely modeled in a computer and therefore would not have any needs, it would simply be calculative. On the other hand, we've got this thing that we're trying to avoid, which is this behaviorist theory of involuntary action, where the individual seems to be being controlled completely by the environment, that the only thing that we're seeing is the outcome of a kind of calculation by an organism in relationships specifically to an environment. So that the behaviorist model also kind of like vacates the space in which a person performs, because there is no performance, there's simply a reaction to the environment. So it's involuntary action, kind of versus independent action. And what we're trying to end up at is this idea that we have this embedded action where environment and context and historicity and time become important to how the individual interacts with the environment himself, herself, and the social system that they're in. So we're trying to avoid those two extremes and get to this middle thing where we have environmental influence, the influence of logic, but more normative logics than absolute logics. And we want to end up in this kind of middle spot. All right, so that's social practice theory really quickly. Now let's talk about like a theory of change for transforming social practices. So instead of talking about social practices directly, we want to talk about how do we change social practices, yeah? So the first thing to point out is like, there's this idea that transformation can be an event, that it can happen like, I call it the big switch theory, like we just pull a switch and the transformation occurs. And all the things that we've just pointed at point to the idea that that can't be true, and also that you can't simply change what's in people's heads and expect the transformation to occur, right? Because what you should be able to see is behavioral change in a way that what you would think of as your habit, so the way that you work every day at work, the flow state that you get into will be made up of different practices or will be made up of newly configured practices that have new material meanings, etc. So transformation is not going to be this kind of switch that we turn on. It's going to be the mutation of individual practices and the network of practices that we've been talking about. So one of the principal implications of the theory of practice is that the sources of behavior change lie in the development of and the relation between the practices themselves. So in other words, behavior change from a social practice lens doesn't occur in the individual. It occurs in the modification of the social norms, the materials, and the competencies of a social network, not an individual. And therefore, the practices of the locality of change, not the individuals involved, which is not to say the individuals don't perform those things, but it's just to say that's not the unit of analysis that we're looking at. So this is a crazy slide to try to talk through three different places in which you might think of intervening if you were doing a social practice-based transformation. And so the first one might be to reconfigure the network of practices. So you might determine what practices you want. For instance, you might determine that you want to do CICD. And in order to do CICD, you decide that you also need to have better test-driven development and a better source code control evaluation and a little bit more kind of pure evaluation of written work and things like this. So those end up being a network of practices that you want to reconfigure. You want to change the configuration of the practices in order to enable that CICD continuous deployment style. So you have this network of things that you want to change and you want to reconfigure and you want to be conscious about the relationships between those things and how they might work. I think when you think through that kind of theory, the reconfiguration of a network of practices, I like to talk about my brain is not going to produce the thing that I want to say right now. A maturity mapping. So maturity mapping which you can look up online really quickly is focuses on that particular type of change. You might want to reconfigure the practice itself, so that might mean you currently have your ticket system is currently JIRA and you want to move to Rally which means you're going to change the materiality of the system while trying to preserve the skill and meaning of the system so you might reconfigure the practice to new materials, you might reconfigure the practice to new sets of skills with the same materials, things like that, and you also might replace the practice. So you might try to eliminate a practice and repopulate the space in which it was with a new practice. So you might want to move from Gantt charts to Kanban boards and one of the ways to think about that is that if you don't remove the materiality of the Gantt chart like the little literally physical object of it being around and replace it with the physical materiality of a Kanban board, the likelihood of people drifting back to the skills and meanings that they associate with the and already know how to perform competently with the Gantt chart means that the adoption of the Kanban board is highly unlikely because that will require that they be challenged and move into those anxious states that require actual modification of skill and potential performance of incompetent performance of of the skill required to adopt the new material to close the current set of meanings. So when we think about kind of the ways that those might happen, we could think about the idea that the relationships between things can be undesigned. The materials could be undesigned, in other words removed from the system. You could redesign the materials and the interactions as in reconfigure them, modify them, kind of do, you know, any sort of Kaizen or Kaikaku style of change there. But that is the improvement or the additional like design as adding, additive, progressive as opposed to undesigned removing. And then when we look at meanings, we could like denormalize something. We could say we used to believe that, we don't believe that anymore. Or we could renormalize something by adopting a new practice and trying to change the way people think about the current set of meanings that renormalize around a new set of meanings. And finally like skills, which I think frankly are the primary interaction point for most transformations, like the idea that we need to modify skills is a significant one. This, we could automate the skill, therefore making the practice lighter, or we could develop the skill, right? So this is not meant to be comprehensive, complete, it's just suggestions that places to kind of look at the way that this might change, yeah? So one of the things to kind of think through here, again, is are there other people who have tried to kind of think through transformation like this? And Shook has this model that he uses to describe how things worked at NUMI. And one of the things that he points out is that like the traditional transformation or change model starts with the idea that you need to change the culture, and then it will change the values, and it'll change what actually happens, what people actually do. And in Shine's version of it, which is similar, and where the pyramid frankly comes from in the first place, you have, you know, what we need to do is change the assumptions, and then we can change the values, and then we can change the artifacts or the outputs of the system, yeah? And for Shook and Shine, what they both eventually arrive at is the idea that you can't start from the bottom of the pyramid, you have to start from the top of the pyramid. So I think the interesting thing is that social practice would say that neither one is wrong, but neither one is complete, yeah? Because what we do and the artifacts are related in a social practice, and how they relate actually creates the things lower on their pyramids, right? So this schism between the two is problematic from a social practice point of view, because it says yes, you do need to start with competency, what we do, and you do need to start with artifacts, materials, and then you can maybe modify meaning, but it misses that, I think. So part of that, I think, is because of the way that people make their work lives meaningful. And so this is called the hermeneutic loop, and the really simple way of saying this is just, you have a worldview. You have an idea of what the world's like, the whole world, your whole world, everyone has a different world, by the way, that's a whole other conversation, but in a way that worldview describes what is meaningful, yeah? And it also describes what you should pay attention to and what intentions you should have about the world, right? And the result of that is that it drives through your skillful interaction with the world and experience of the materiality of the world, and when we loop those things together, what we get is a constantly reproducing system where your experiences in the world inform your worldview and your worldview informs your experience of the world, yeah? And the interaction between these two things, these three things, and between these two polarities, the part and the whole, are what create, I think, an experience of having a sense of history, a sense of identity, a sense of being skillful and being talented at work. And so modifying any of these things requires modifying or incrementing against all of them. And again, to me at least, the most important intervention point is in actual experience, so down at the bottom here, and as opposed to trying to change the meaning at first, because changing the whole just means that one's experience of the world becomes completely contiguous. You don't understand how to experience the world anymore because all the meanings that you used to have that were related to your skills, the materials that you're used to become meaningless, and therefore you have no skill to interact with the materiality of the world anymore. So one last point, and then we can chat as much as you guys like. When we think about kind of organizations as open systems, one of the things we can think about is that they become more and more complex, they become more and more heterogeneous internally. In other words, there's more and more social practices involved, the social practices mutate and change a little bit, and therefore that network of social practices become more complex, but also the network of social practices becomes stable. So that if you're in an organization that's not stable, that quote unquote does not work, then it will not last for a long time. So in any organization that you're in that's been around for any extended period of time, despite your beliefs that it may or may not be a group of incompetent people who don't know what they're doing, and or that there's no way it could possibly survive, if it's surviving, then it is at a steady state. It is a network of relationships of social practices that reproduces itself every day when you show up at work. So one of the things to say about that kind of network of social practices and one of the things we might think about is that what we end up having is more and more these kind of bubbles where it says inside, these are these bubbles of practice, and that inside each bubble of practice is a set of social practices that are meaningful inside that bubble, but may or may not be meaningful to other parts of the organization inside their bubbles. However, because of the network of social practices, some of those social practices end up being in the in-betweens, they end up being shared social practices. So these I call boundary practices and they're the practices, the social practices that bind together multiple social groups in a way where their interdependency and their interpredictability becomes useful and stabilizes the system. So what we should expect in any organization is to be able to find a set of practices that are meaningful to a certain social group and a set of practices that are meaningful between any number of other social groups. So we can talk about this quickly, but the idea here is that devs and ops, just as an example, create a boundary. They have a place in which they negotiate practice together, and that negotiation of practice is what causes the closure of the social network and causes a kind of interweaving of the social practices across the two groups in a way that they can both achieve the meaning that's meaningful to them and their social group, meaning meaningful to the developers, meaning meaningful to the operators, but also that they share whatever meanings are required to create a social practice that allows for these things to occur. And that's what we might call a boundary. And so what we're looking for in a lot of cases in minimal viable boundary definitions, a way of creating these shared social practices. And this I think requires a concept of a social spanning role or social spanning system where the internal complexity of the system gets to a point where someone needs to be actively engaged in identifying these social practices that are shared and helping the individuals and teams involved with those shared social practices actually negotiate the way in which they evaluate the competent performance of those practices in order to increase the interparticability of the system and therefore increase the resilience of the system and the performance of the system. So when we talk about transformation, we want to be able to identify, establish and maintain and remove boundaries. Again, all of those boundaries I think are made up of social practices. And in relationships with this ability to transition is a process by which boundaries in organizations, how those boundaries are decided, who lives in those boundaries, what the implications of them are, the ability to do those, discover those boundaries and make sense of them is what enables a transition from one form to another, therefore enabling a transformation. I talked a lot. Thank you for listening. Wow. Okay. Wow. I think I had an epiphany a minute and that was how many minutes that was 35 minutes. That's a lot of epiphanies, Jay. So thank you very much for today. And I'm going to unmute a few other people too and some of the usual players and let them chime in as well. But just even going back to the very beginning of this whole conversation, the laundry diagram, so the first one. And thinking about practices and breaking them down in that way. And I know where the Global Transformation Office and Little Idea, aka Andrew Clay Schaefer and everybody is all about dev ops or John Willis is all about dev sec ops. Well, I'm all about community development and maybe community development ops and the toolings. But it really illustrated for me the different pieces of a practice very nicely. So I and what popped into my head immediately when you put the laundry thing up was code contributions. The practice of especially hanging out laundry to dry, the simple task of that you can put up a line between two trees, have couple pegs, not even pegs, just throw it over a line and you could be able to do code, you know, dry your laundry. But the complexity of something like making a code contribution to an open source project and all of the pieces and parts that go into that. And I know there's a lot of people on the call too that are probably having their minds blown right now. But the way and I think dev ops is a great example of the coming together of trying to transform some social practices within technology organizations. I know in my little way what I'm trying to do is transform community development practices from some what I consider archaic static art forms doing it by your gut to using some real practical data driven you've seen the the jellyfish diagram and you know, but it's also it's really you think you very succinctly broke down some of the problems that I have because I think if I show people these tools, they're just going to use them, right? And it's just it's just not that or if the other thing that popped into my brain at one point was I always try and model the behavior I want to see in other people. Yep. And that's sort of the atomic atomic automatists, atomists, whatever that that that word, it's not atomic. It's I don't and I go atomic people don't adopt the thing that I want. And it really given us I think a very nice way to see how to how everything breaks down in in practical ways not breaks down as in fails but how to break down when you want to affect change. So I'm gonna have to watch this like five times until I get everything out of it. But it was pretty pretty amazing to me I think and the and the concept and maybe if you could talk a little bit more about the boundary practices because what what I look at and I know I've shared with you the jellyfish network analysis stuff is what I've been trying to do is make that piece that overlaps you know it's interesting to account and sales managers where everybody's playing in which projects and it's interesting to community development people because then they can know who's in their community and it's useful to product development folks because they can see what I think and like in my little head and I'm sure I'm just you know I feel egotistical about it but I think I found the little thing that overlaps all of these different things and trying now to show each of them the usefulness to bring them together to change the way we look at community development and I wish that we could be so successful doing that as we've done with dev ops and other practices too and maybe that would do it so zip and see if anybody else wants to chime in too because I know maybe it's not just my mind that's been blown but a few other folks as well so and as I pop into everybody else's little worlds here I know there are a couple of folks I've done that and I didn't see any actual questions but Mike and Barbara if if you want to add in anything there and I see Diego's there as well hi Mike how are you the microphone's working in all of that but I really think that one of and I'll keep talking if nobody else is going to jay because you've you've really kind of hit on a lot of things I have so many notes here too but the idea that we can create best practices and codify them and write them down and share them with each other but transforming them over into social practices was another thing and and that I really kind of is is inspiring me to think about how to to leverage that you know better you know I think when we think about a couple of things one of the things is like always try to like you think about it as a network and then one of the things you try to do is like try to figure out what practices share the same materials and then you can like think oh if I change this material here's the network of practices that will change around it right same thing with meaning like what what skills and practices are involved in creating this kind of meaning um and I you know I I use all sorts of weird versions of this to kind of explain to somebody but like uh I have a friend in my phd program who comes from Pakistan and he said the first time he kind of came the United States he couldn't understand toilets they didn't make any sense because he looked at them and he said you know the the the rim of the toilet kind of looks like you could stand on it but that's not anything that he'd ever seen before and his point being of course uh he he used squat bodies right like so you stand over the the the trench pop toilet so you're supposed to stand while pooping they're not supposed to sit um and so he was trying to negotiate how to do this and of course like again cleanliness was important in both cultures but in his culture you clean yourself with water and it's actually part of kind of it has religious connotations and all sorts of things and and you don't use toilet paper right so you like walk into a bathroom to perform defecation which seems like something that everybody should be able to do but the material configuration does not allow you to achieve the meaning that you think is important in the world and so like understanding how those things kind of interact to enable or disable people's ability to achieve their goals is an important part of understanding like when you change the infrastructure and organization when you when you go in and try to change the what is meaningful for an organization when you go in and try to insist that people need to adopt new skills without changing the meaning or the materiality of the of the organization all those types of transformations are almost certainly going to fail because the network of meaning and skill and materiality the network is stable and will remain stable until someone actually intervenes in these multiple ways as opposed to focusing on one particular way so the the other thing that well there's so many things like I said one a minute at least and one of the things that you talked about was the interpredictability and and when we when I think about that in terms of team building or like building teams across multiple silos within red hat or something like that and the I think the phrase you use was that joint activity assumes a basic compact to facilitate coordinated action and how many times we don't have that basic contact compact like at red hat we have the open organization compact right which we assume everybody believes in and and does but even within silos we have different basic compacts so you know and and I think that one of the key things in transforming organizations is is teasing out what those basic compacts are and our assumptions about them you know we you know because like things like we have like how people are metriced we are I think we're just achieving now um we don't have open metrics like I don't know what what someone else in another organization or business unit is being metriced on or maybe we do but I haven't figured out how to get to the mojo page where it's hidden so yeah I and on daily basis I don't know but so the all of the things that affect our basic compacts within an or an enterprise organization or within a community of developers working on an open source project there are so many assumptions that are left unsaid or undiscussed and I'm wondering I know with DevOps we created this whole sort of culture of explaining what DevOps is and teaching it and all of that sort of stuff but um how you get people to tease out what that basic compact is everybody has together so I mean I think a couple things one I like one of the things I always like to say about DevOps kind of early in the conversation is that I don't think DevOps is a culture I think it's a way of changing a culture um and and what I mean by that is this I think good DevOps makes better developers by letting developers understand how their code works in operation that makes better operators by letting operators understand how developers create code yeah and like it's not trying to create more developers who can operate their stuff which I think is a is like that's the no off theory and I think it's it's a miss and I also don't think it's about making operators into developers although I do think it is definitely about making operators understand how to apply software practice to operations the different different thing but I think there's always yeah good so as DevOps the basic compact right that is the thing that we're sharing across all of these different um user types of persona user personas within organizations so coming to it may not be a culture but it's a practice that's it is a practice it's a set of practices and to me again the transformation activity if you want to do DevOps is to sit down with the development and operations team and figure out what they share you don't want to transfer you don't want to homogenize the organization you don't want to say all the developers have to be operators now all the operators have to be developers now you have to know you have to have the complete understanding of either sides activities and knowledges right that's not what we're trying to achieve what we're trying to achieve is we're going to say there's certain things there's certain materials who share there's certain skills that you have to perform together in order to achieve meaningful outcomes if we can identify those things and focus our DevOps transformation on those things without like trying to change the whole way everybody works we're going to be much more successful because it's going to focus on those defining of boundaries so again part of the weird thing that I was pointing at when I pointed at the boundary formation in DevOps is to say literally DevOps is not about removing boundaries it's about creating a boundary that can be negotiated that's what DevOps is and that that that shared compact is the negotiation of an agreement about meaning skill and materials yep that's what the that's what the compact is it's the negotiation of that and to the extent that teams learn to negotiate their own compacts you keep the you keep the the system kind of fluid and decentralized and to the extent where the teams can't do that you start to homogenize and and create hierarchy where somebody at the top says what's meaningful and that comes down right so you can you can think of it like there would be like good meritocracy and bad meritocracy then because good meritocracy would be the way in which competency is judged at that kind of horizontal peer-to-peer level and bad bad meritocracy would be people telling the organization what values are meritists or not yeah and and the difference between those two the way that you can use meritocracy to centralize value as opposed to decentralizing value I think that's teaching people to do those negotiation skills and to establish those boundaries themselves is what allows you to have judgment at the at the edge as opposed to judgment at the center and that I think that's really important okay well meritocracy for me is such a touchy subject so even bringing it up here we could go on for another hour and and one of the things like going back to the laundry thing that's when the meritocracy bit is there is um the different parts of the infrastructure and the skills and the other things and the you know the privileges and all of that um the baggage that comes with you know measuring success and and what I liked about going back to the laundry and probably the toilets and the bidet conversations is by breaking these things down um we we can start to see where the inadequacies in our judgments on people's uh and for me for code contributions and things of that ilk break down and we we kind of hide behind different versions of the conversations around meritocracies in order to rise up through organizations or get credit for efforts that we put in I know um Barbara just turned on her camera and she had a point and she was struggling a little bit with the conversation around um meaning so hi Barbara so hi jade so this is where when I'm dealing with these situations this is where I have and let's use the laundry example again so if I for me when I come from a perspective of understanding the whole system is important to me not just that you know for a professional laundry it's about doing doing it in the fastest most cost effective fashion right and for other people I know it's just about clean clothes just I don't care I don't care how much it costs I don't care how you did it and so reconciling or creating the boundary around those three perspectives within this this system of laundry is is where I'm struggling because I can't really think of a way to find the common ground necessarily do you know what I mean so I mean you know like your your relationship with laundry and your laundry mats relationship with laundry would have to close at a meaningful level in order for you to continue to use that laundry facility does that make sense so there's like yeah the ways in which they overlap and yes I think like the efficiency argument that you're pointing out is more about skillfulness than meaning uh because the laundry is trying to do the job that you expect them to do and that expectation is a form of meaningful creation of meaning right um and to the extent that you um you know to the extent like when I'm at home I wear the same pair of shorts for like a week and I don't care because it doesn't have any meaning to me when I go to work I don't right because I know that I have to show up wearing different clothes every day or people will go what's wrong with you right so wandering and and and and social presentation of dress and all these things are related in a in a set of meanings yeah and and I think the important part is the common ground is to say we talked about this a little bit last time I think what we chatted it's requisite coherence where requisite means minimal right it's not because the requisite coherence has to be balanced by requisite variety because it's the tension between the two that allows kind of like an exploration of the of the space by more people or another way of saying an exploration of space is it it if you only have one way of making meaning then everyone is forced into that way of being yeah as opposed to having multiple ways of being that are only loosely collected by common ground where common ground again means when I bring my laundry to the laundry mat I have an expectation of what the laundry will look like when it comes out and to the extent that they produce that then I when we have an inter predictable relationship but I'm more likely use them yeah um yeah does that make sense yeah mark and by the way mark used ironing as a metaphor in his maturity mapping presentation so you two should get together and give a complete laundry picture we like to do cooking yeah but I'm easy to understand a showering is a good one too in that like how do you how did you learn to shower how do you reproduce your showering like most people can't remember being taught like you know and taught the shower in school usually um but the material conditions of the shower really stabilize your relationship to it like if you have shampoo and soap and all these things those those like tell you what to do I need to soap I need to shampoo I need to see if those things weren't in there you wouldn't necessarily do those other things you wouldn't think to do them and this is one of the reasons why it's really hard to destabilize and change some systems is because to the extent the social practice is private or is isolated in some way um like making out trash uh showering cooking things like this uh there's there's less judgment there's less judgment at the competence on it and therefore it becomes more difficult to modify those behaviors so from a sustainability perspective the reason people study those things those particular practices is because those are the practices the the everyday practice of the way of being in the world of a modern western person is what is causing the system to be unsustainable and it's not like um you know one practice that needs to change it's a bunch of them and so that's really kind of interesting just one really quick last point around meaning right one of the things that comes out of sustainability practice and one of the reasons why you can't just change meaning that's shown by these studies is that if you if you if you convince uh me to recycle I do recycle but if I didn't and you convinced me to and you gave me a bunch of environmental reasons for why I should be recycling and I accepted them um and I started recycling so you changed my behavior the correlation between my behavior change around recycling and showering and laundering and electric use is non-existent in other words you can convince me that environmentalism is good but you will have to convince me again to change each practice because the practices don't change by themselves just because meaning changes this is just too easy to modify the practice to achieve this the same meaning basically so they're uncorrelated and it's what it's why I think like when you look at something like agile manifesto which is great but it's literally a set of values and principles and you wonder why so many organizations have a hard time transforming to them there's your answer because you can convince people it is better to be agile as in the ways to find in the manifesto and have everyone accept it and still not change their practices so that brings up an interesting thing that you also talked about in the boundary practices segments of this conversation um about social social spanning roles um you know because we have things like agile coaches and you know dev dev ops coaches and dev rail people in communities and the people who span those things and the importance of those um those roles um and um the other idea about the boundary practices stabilizing the system um and I wonder if you can talk a little bit I know we're going over time so and and we're fine with I'm fine with that if you're fine with that and just cut me off when you need to go do something like walk the dog but um you know whatever that is but um what you know what I see the role of like community development people like myself or an agile coach or you know the folk you guys up in the gto office is as you are the people who um it's not that you're um heaven a higher level view of things but we actually see what's going on in these different areas of practice and I'm I'm kind of interested in um these social technical practices and how they can be applied to change help change um regular practice you know technical practices as well or behavioral I I was thinking of the more in organizational behavior um than practices but they kind of interrelated yeah so I think um I'd love to come back and do it to talk with you guys about social technical systems design because that's a whole another long set of theory that I think is really interesting and useful but boundary spanning roles I think is one of the most important implications of it um and boundary spanning is um so the way that I usually describe it initially is just is pretty simply um agile coaches tend to work inside of teams and they work to create interpredictability between between teams by making the teams do the same rituals and do do things the same way right it's not necessarily best practice but it is about kind of like everybody has a general shape that they're in and they all generally do the same thing and then if you get to like maybe you get to scaled agile safe stuff and then you have big room planning and stuff like that all about which is all about kind of predictability and conversations about being predictable and all that type of stuff it's let's say I'm not a huge fan but it's neither here nor there uh if I were going to talk about boundary spanning role though I would think of it as a coach that sat literally in between teams and so the first thing to think about is that this often in an organization ends up being the manager because the manager is the person that connects the two teams together yeah but of course the problem is the power differential just like you have you don't make your boss your scrum master you don't you know you don't make the boundary person uh your boss because they don't there's no way to kind of disarm your boss enough to have these difficult conversations so it is a coaching role that specifically sits in between teams a and b it specifically is there to modulate the boundary and to keep it flexible and negotiated so what I was to say that is this often in organizations the way that boundaries are negotiated is that the boss person creates a set of policies in order to keep people from coming into their office and harassing them about the interaction between conflicting teams yeah so okay so we're going to have a policy about that now and of course you get the classic uh wall of confusion policy wall problems going right which is that the relationship between the teams becomes highly transactional you must perform this ritual with this outcome in order to transact with this other team not in order to negotiate with them but in order to satisfy their particular requirements yeah so again the result of this is things like what causes DevOps which is developers create too much code they break the operators uh uh system that they've been using for years to deploy every six months by asking them to deploy every two days the operators get all pissy because they get called all the time and the code that they're getting they think is crappy because it doesn't have any operational consistency to it and so their lives are being ruined while the opera while the developers are off having a party because they're releasing new features all the time yeah so what do the operators do the operators and the operators bosses erect these huge policy walls that say you have to jump through 16 hoops in order to deploy which slows the developers down but that doesn't actually solve the problem it just makes bigger and bigger piles of change that all of a sudden slosh through and cause huge amounts of problems uh uh every three months as opposed to small problems every couple days now what if instead of having that policy wall in that transactional relationship you had a more reciprocal relationship where you had someone who was coaching the two sides to negotiate on practices and expectations and outcomes and with the recognition that all of those things probably need to not be defined upfront but in fact evolve over time because the materials and skills need to change in order to achieve the agreed on purposes that we agree on and those things can't happen tomorrow just because we want them to we have to actually practice the practices right so like one of the things I like to point out to people that like is a great study is the study of adult computer use in the United States and if you ask most people like how long especially people like us who have used computers how long does it take to learn to use a computer and I don't mean like program I mean like open a browser and send an email how long is it take to do that and the answer is for a completely naive human who's never seen a computer before it's about two years to become competent and the reason is because like we look at all the visual metaphors on our screens like folders and trash cans and all that kind of stuff and they have meaning to us they have the material has a meaning and a skill associated with it we can get we understand it but for someone who doesn't know what any of those metaphors mean they can't even interact with the computer right they can't work with it and so you get like in a lot of places like people talk about like well we want to we want to make job helping people find jobs easier and when we're going to put a job board up and we're going to give people access to a computer in a library well they can only use the computer for a couple hours at a time and there's people waiting so they don't get enough practice time so they never learn and so everybody who uses computers all the time is just like why can't they figure out how to use a computer it's simple well no it's not simple you're competent and they're not competent that's not a judgment on their ability to become competent it is an expectation that you already have of them it's even deeper than that it and I think this touches on the meaning piece of it as I took my then 85 year old grandmother to the library and just to get a book right and there was a whole bank of computers and this was she's uh she's long since passed but she's German and all you know she loves orchids so I said hey let's sit down over here and let's go to the website as soon as I lost her as soon as I said for the orchid garden place we're going to go to in Florida next week I sat her down and there's a keyboard attached to a terminal and I said okay let me and I'm typed in something on the keyboard and the website came up and she looked at me and said how come it's not doing anything because she saw the terminal as a tv right she had no connection that the keyboard was attached to that terminal right so the meaning for her was so far away from the meaning it wasn't even about trash cans or browsers or anything it's like the actual physical thing that the computer was wasn't even a concept in her mind and it that was my first user experience user design epiphany about you know what it really means to know nothing at all about the objects that we are so deeply embedded in our lives and devices that there are whole generations cultures of people that have no experience of how the keyboard which no longer even has a cord anymore to that it's like a wireless thing or it's attached to your laptop but it's like it's just and she just said no I'm not even interested if it doesn't move and where's the channel changer whatever it was but it was no was the thing so I think it was it's a lot about meaning here and sharing the meaning like another example of this because like it's a material meaning thing without without a skill that goes along with it which why I gave my I gave a relative of mine a computer and the reason I gave her a computer was because her mother was from Edinburgh and she had sung a set of traditional folk songs that this my my relative wanted to record and she thought it was important and her mother had recently passed away she just really wanted to write down all these songs before she forgot them which I don't think she would have because she still sings all of them but anyway so we gave her the computer and we were like you know here it is and she clearly interpreted the computer as a typewriter because what happened was we came back a year later for Christmas and she very proudly came out with a big pile of paper and said I transcribed all the songs and I I think this is all of them and it was a big I mean it was like a couple hundred pages I think um and I was like great can I have the files she was like what do you mean I was like well you know when you typed it you saved each version of like nope she printed them because it was a typewriter and then she turned the computer off and walked away she had no idea that the that there was a way of saving the text um and so it's it's you know when you you associate the physical materiality with some other thing and then you try to skillfully interpret it that way I I like to say the same thing happens with like uh machines VMs containers materially naively people can be like oh those are the same thing but if they do that they literally don't understand the skill sets that are required to effectively use a container because a container is nothing like a machine if you actually are using it skillfully in fact the whole point of the container is to make it as little like a machine as possible because that's the whole point of it I'm sorry I didn't mean to swear but anyway yeah VMs and cement boots and we'll have another conversation about that but I think there's like there's so much we could talk about here and you know I I I do want to respect everybody's time and and effort but I definitely want to continue a conversation about um like applying this to I guess I'm trying what I'm trying to do is these community spanning um social spanning roles um because one of the things as a community development person I span um product management sales marketing open source projects foundations all these things so I'm in this this I I think I believe one of those roles but um and I think there are a lot of other people who are in roles that are similar they might not be community focus but um how um like they're not empowered to do more than or to be listened to or to be coached and so there's another challenge to tease out in there is and I think what I like so much about this is it gives us that you're you framed a very nice way for us to talk about it and to explore it with some of the other folks and explain what it is we do and how we can help but also then getting management to recognize the people who are spanning these boundaries and empower them to have those conversations and I think those maybe there's a whole another there's always lots of conversations with you Jed but um to figure out how we identify and empower those people um and you know and then then don't turn them into power crazy people um you know that's that's the other the edge of the the the sword is you know how you do this and and do it well and you know I think that another conversation about social technical practices um and oh boy there was so much in this today so I truly appreciate um your time and effort I can't wait to read the dissertation I don't think I've ever said that about anybody else's dissertation so um uh and and please I think it's um like how much longer do we have to wait jade never ask that question never but I think one of the key things you you you talked about change and everything but the progressive accumulation of habits right and I want to continue this conversation with you because what I'm getting is a progressive accumulation of habits and understandings that are really helpful to me in terms of helping to transform communities within and outside of red hat and um boy um yeah social spanning uh there's a whole thing around the the network analysis and when we identify the people who are spanning those networks you know that I call them the connectors between projects the people that are connected to multiple projects how do we empower and train them to you know those are my targets for you know giving the skills to change um practices or to create more successful practices so there's a there's a lot in here yeah I think I have uh some interesting things to say about that so I'd be happy to come back and talk about that at some point for sure all right definitely so Barbara and everybody else thank you very much for your comments and everything again great stuff and um boy this is this is a challenge I'm going to be watching this one again I'll upload this to YouTube and I'll grab the slides from jave and tweet it out shortly so um thanks again everybody and do come back I'm not quite sure who we have on deck next week for Transformation Friday because I'm on vacation but we will put somebody up there and make them talk to themselves cool thank you take care guys