 and welcome to another OpenShift Commons Briefing. Today is Transformation Friday and as we are want to do on Fridays, is we pull somebody that makes us think big or little ideas and help them share some of their insights. And today, I'm really pleased, we're going to have a great talk, hopefully, and an introduction to awardly mapping, which I think everybody has heard about, but not everybody has used. And we're going to try and apply it to a few things that are near and dear to my heart, but to drive us through this conversation and to challenge us a little bit. I think Ben Moser from Hired Thought is here, and I'm going to let him introduce himself, and then we're going to fly through some interesting things. It's going to be a very different kind of briefing. And if you see in the chat, there'll be a little link to a new piece of software for all of us. So yeah, it's a total experiment today. We're going to try using Muro to drive this conversation as well. So take it away, Ben, explain yourself, introduce yourself, and let's do some hand waving and chatting and figure this awardly thing out. Fantastic. Yeah, explain yourself. Hi, everyone. My name is Ben Moser. I run a little website called learnwardlymapping.com. And I'm super excited to share a little bit of awardly mapping with you today. So kind of like the basic idea of the session, I think, is I'm going to give you my somewhat unorthodox introduction awardly mapping. I'm going to do it in Muro. And then maybe Diane and I will do a little bit of mapping. And then maybe we can explore this bigger question of how do we make sense of sort of technology ecosystems and make sense of is kind of the key words there. Like, we're not trying to find the answer. We're not trying to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. But if we can make a little bit more sense of the way everything is sort of fitting together, maybe that'll help us make good decisions. So anyone who is watching on the live stream who wants to or like is in the blue jeans call, like, feel free to join us in Muro. You can go to lwm.events.osc. And as you're kind of following along in the conversation, what I'll say is please feel welcome to add your questions in the sort of like a section up here with all the sticky notes. We'll kind of circle back around and find time to answer those as we go along. And if in the worst case, you can always email me and we can talk about that later. So all right, maybe it's time to get into this worthy mapping thing. So I'm going to go straight into worthy mapping. So the person on the left is a gentleman by the name of Simon Mordley. My friend Kat Swatel says that Simon is someone who lives in a swamp in the UK. Kind of like a wizard. And he made this interesting kind of technique that's Creative Commons. And we'll talk about more in a second. Simon is supposedly chaotic evil. Whereas I've decided this morning that I'm just chaotic. So you can find Simon on Twitter at Swordly. You can find me on Twitter at HiredThought. And the two of us seem to care a lot about this like thing called strategy. And maybe to sort of help make sense of who we are and where we are, like there are the big three, the big strategy consulting firms, right? And on this two by two of kind of like orthodox ways of teaching and orthodox ways of doing like thinking about strategy. Simon and I are both on the unorthodox side of how to think about strategy. Whereas maybe the big three are more orthodox. And in terms of teaching strategy, I tend to be a little bit more unorthodox. And like maybe Simon has like some more orthodox ways of like thinking about how to teach in particular his method worthy mapping. So like, and just to be like super clear like opposites like that are not like good and bad, they're just kind of like different dynamics of continuum. And one leads to the other. And it's just an interesting kind of way to create a tension. So I lean more towards the unorthodox side of both of these things. And so we'll explore what that means a little bit more. So the orthodox sort of approach to worthy mapping. So the standard way of teaching it is to talk about the strategy cycle. And the strategy cycle is this like five phased loop that kind of maps to John Boyd's Uda. I'm not going to go through all the jargon here. You can read a book if you want to learn the jargon and we can talk about it later. But roughly speaking, the idea is you kind of get your head in the game. Like why do we exist? Why are we doing the things that we do? And then you make a map. You make a model of the world that you're a part of in order to make sense of it. And so you have something that talks about the context. And then you can use that thing, that artifact, to have discussions about the things you don't have choice over, the things that you do have choice over, and then the actions that you can take in order to impact the world and change that context actively. And then the loop repeats. So basically it's understanding things and then taking action and seeing what happens and repeating that cycle. In worthy mapping, there are these things called worthy maps. And it's basically a diagram that describes the parts of the system, how they relate to each other, and then what makes it a map is that the placement of those parts has meaning. So in particular, what we'll talk about is this idea called evolution. And what we'll describe is how from left to right encodes different ways of meaning in terms of how evolved the things in our organizations, in our markets, and sometimes even in ourselves are, and what that implies that we should do. But the thing that's important to notice is that this whole system adds up to something that produces value for humans, for people, for users of these systems. So the idea is we anchor our position, or we anchor our understanding of the model on the people who are serving, who we're producing value for. And if you're following along inside Miro, there's this lovely link to a talk by Simon. This is kind of like the fully fledged introduction. If you want the full, worldly experience, go watch this talk crossing the Ripper by Feeling the Stones. And then Simon has also written a free book, so you can go learn about mapping that way. The method is Creative Commons Attribution Share Like, which means we can all learn it, we can all build on it as long as we give credit where it's due. And I highly encourage you to go through that kind of experience of learning mapping. But today, I'm going to do the unorthodox version of this kind of thing. So let's kind of dig into it. All right. Whenever we're working together, I think that the systems that we're looking at, that we're thinking about, that we're changing, that we're interacting with, in all of our heads ends up being this big entangled mess. And that creates certain kinds of conditions. I think it creates conditions for misunderstanding for accidental decision-making, where you and I might have different versions of what the system actually looks like and the way that it behaves in each of our heads. And so we're actually conflicting implicitly. So we'll be in a meeting and we'll be talking, and we'll be trying to make a decision, and we might even be agreeing about whatever decision it is that we're making. But the words and the concepts the ontology of the space about which we're making decisions probably conflict and we probably don't realize it. And so what I think worldly mapping is all about is helping us first take this big mess and try to disentangle it and break it into smaller ideas. So from a big mess to at least some littler messes, some littler ideas that we can then give names to and refer to and make sense of. And what happens is we start to recognize how these little ideas are related together so that we understand how an intervention in one little idea has a cascading effect on several other little ideas. And if we have this shared language with this shared vocabulary for making sense of a space, then chances are implicit conflicts will turn into explicit conflicts. We can actually resolve those differences not so that we all have the same exact vocabulary and have the same exact meanings in our heads because literally we're looking at different parts of the system but so that we can start to have coherent vocabularies. So I might have different words. You might have different words. But together the words add up to something that makes sense as a whole. So there's this weird idea from Chris Argerus and it's discussed in the fifth discipline field book by Peter Senge and it's this idea called the ladder of inference and basically if you look at the world as a camera would observe it we cannot literally select enough of reality to make sense of it. So in other words when I get up in the morning and I look at the world around me there are certain things that I'm actually just completely ignorant of. Like I'm not paying attention to the ceiling tiles. I'm not thinking about the cars that are going by on the highway. It's like the fish in water kind of syndrome. Like I can't see the water around me because it's so like omnipresent that I almost ignore it. And frankly like if I did literally observe every single thing in the universe at every single moment in time my head would explode. And so part of being human is selecting data from all of the observable data and experiences in order to then add meanings to it make assumptions based on it draw conclusions and beliefs from it and then take actions based on those beliefs and more the mapping kind of like points at this selecting data part and it's instead of it happening kind of like automatically let's let's do it a little bit manually a little bit carefully. And one of the ways I like to talk about this is by describing the romantic and classical modes which is something that I take from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's an interesting book that talks about these two ways of appreciating reality. The romantic mode which is like appreciating the whole of reality all of the potential data as a whole experience and then the classical mode which takes that whole and cuts it into little parts and tries to categorize those parts and sort them and make sense of them and analyze them. And when you do that though you kill the romantic notion of the work the business the things that we're doing every day our experience we kill the romantic notion but then we birth something new by taking it apart by analyzing it by understanding it in all these different ways we actually create the opportunity for a new understanding a new romantic appreciation of the whole and so we create parts and then we create holes and we create parts and we create holes and it's this back and forth cycle that helps us create new kinds of meaning. Okay so what does all this have to do with worthy mapping? I promise this will make sense in a moment. I like to say that worthy mapping is three basic things it's a visual way of making sense of systems and how those systems are changing it's then a body of knowledge which is evolution which we'll talk about here about like a specific body of knowledge about how those systems are changing inside capitalism in particular and then third it's a strategic thinking framework which we'll talk about in a moment that leverages those visual approaches and leverages those ways of understanding how capitalism is changing our everyday life. So evolution is this thing that Simon went and researched he basically studied a bunch of publications learned how people talk about things and with thousands of data points basically put together these basic patterns and the basic patterns are hey everything evolves under supply and demand competition and as they evolve we can kind of identify specific stages of that evolution and depending on what the thing is that we're considering so activities are like what we do practices are how we do it and so on depending on which stage those things are in we can give them different labels that sort of match those stages. So for example practices are really like interesting because when they first exist they're novel like nobody's ever seen them and we don't even know if they're valuable but as they start to have known value they sort of shift into this emerging stage stage two where like we don't quite have them fully formed but we're starting to kind of understand the value and like we're able to reproduce the value in like custom ways in each context that we try to try to use it and then over time it becomes repeatable value becomes a good practice right and if it survives long enough and it becomes ubiquitous then it can turn into a best practice and so the basic assertion is that everything is evolving in these ways and so if that's true then the characteristics of those things are changing as they evolve and like I love this table because it is so overwhelming like I want I look at it and want to have a panic attack but like I just slow down right and I have to actually like see what's what's happening here so like we can zoom in right okay there's some familiar things from the last slide we got stage one two three and four okay activities data practice knowledge that was something we just talked about okay what are these things along the left hand side okay these are characteristics interesting ubiquity certainty the market user perception and I see how in each stage I have different things that I can read to learn about how those characteristics are occurring I think my favorite personally is this one right here failure in stage one failure is assumed like it's gonna happen but in stage four it's exactly the opposite we're surprised by failure and like everything is about efficiency and efficacy so like things shouldn't fail and so I can think about the things in my life that I encounter every day like power the fact that there's a wall outlet with electricity I kind of view this as a stage four thing because like failure surprising it's widespread it's commonly understood in terms of use so I can try on these descriptions of the characteristics of the thing to see where power fits and right now it feels like it's a stage four thing it's a commodity or really probably a utility okay but I can also think about worthy mapping itself right I think that worthy mapping feels more like a stage two activity it's like the domain of experts and we're trying to change that right we're trying to make it more accessible by having calls like this and by sharing with everyone and there are lots of different ways of thinking about like how it can fail and how it's a found value and how we're constantly trying to make it better and how it's got this you know potential for future like awesomeness and so that's kind of like the basic idea of evolution but like okay bunch of words bunch of theory I'm going to need Diane's help to make this real so Diane I asked you if you could think about something like a context that matters to you and I was kind of wondering if like we could do like a quick really really high level map of a space and so like what did you think of when I asked you like of a context that matters to you like what kind of context would you like to talk about well this is actually a good question because this is what I you know I watched a bunch of Simon stuff and a few of your things over the past couple of days to get ready for this and what I was trying to figure out was what are good things to map yeah and let me explain what I mean is like so I work in different open source communities the OpenShift world and OKD is the open source side of that and we've just done a GA release of that and for one of the things that I was trying to tease out is this idea of usually when Simon's talking about this he needs an anchor all right so for me the anchor is the community or the customers that are in the community so who is the anchor for us and so the trying to determine that so teasing that out is that the anchor you would in a production world you'd say those are the customers or I would say for in our world it is the end users of of the of OKD or of Kubernetes or OpenShift or whatever it is so figuring out who is the anchor here because one of the things that gets confused in community development a lot are the end users versus the contributors people who are the engineers and the documentation people and the trainers and all of the contributors to the community and then there's another whole level on top of that which are the people who build things that run on it so integrate integrators people who add things which we would call partners that maybe create an operator that runs and adds a service to OKD so there is you know there's a whole lot of people so maybe the thing to map here is trying to and I'm not sure this is a great thing to map but it's what I'm going for and maybe we'll tease out what the problem is from that the operators of clouds so Google would be someone Azure you know those those communities of people too so there's partners cloud hosts and all of those kind of people so awesome that sounds like a a wonderful place to start like we we like that's really one of the first questions most of the time in mapping is like who are we who are we serving or who who are we most concerned about right now that we want to understand their needs the most or understand the system that fulfills their needs the most so would you like to do the operators is that right yeah and I I think that's I think the operators are easy in my humble opinion they're they're like they're Google they're Azure they're AWS they're IBM cloud they're and then there are people who and then there are all there's another whole category of people who are running on cram kind of too so but it's it's kind of where it's also the answer to the question where are end users using our thing or in this case OKD or OpenShift right so they're using it on prem as well as on bare metal and stuff like that but there are some of the cloud operators are people who are in our community that we have to engage with so that's one one thing to tease out the other thing is most of those operators are not currently contributing in a real way back to the project we just need them involved so that when we want to go and test on their thing we need a connection to them so we need a contact so we kind of do need in the community we need at least one from every one of those areas so that we can test and make sure that the stuff runs on there so we always need a clean contact there yeah so let's start let's start with like a really high level version of this and like my goal is going to be in the next couple minutes for us to make a map with like only five parts and like this is totally ridiculous right but but it's to prove a point that like you can always go deeper and like the something I was thinking about this morning is like the there's like a really problematic way to start which is like you go too wide and you get too detailed and you get overwhelmed and then you stop right and I'm gonna and then language is also a really important thing so I'm gonna stop because right now by calling that operators um we're confusing it with another area which is another bunch of participants so I would call that cloud host instead of operators nice okay great we've made our first like we just had a moment right there yeah right I caught that yeah you said cloud hosting providers yeah cloud host just so you can just host for short awesome okay cool excellent so yeah like we just had this awesome moment where we actually got to create a shared language where we're like are we gonna call them operators no we're gonna call them cloud hosts because that reduces the ambiguity so like we could have made a ton of decisions without like without knowing that this was an important sort of bit of terminology to adjust so so let's let's think about the cloud hosts and like let's make a sort of quick list of like like a couple maybe five things that cloud hosts get value from what are what are things that that are like of concern to us as in we we want to pay attention to them that produce value for cloud hosts I think this is my interpretation of what cloud hosts think are important excellent I mean that's the point and the cloud hosts might have another idea so what cloud hosts want end users to do is consume their resources okay they want people to deploy stuff on their clouds that creates revenue for them you know research consumption is that a good phrase for that you think I think so yeah because they make that's where they make their revenue from and so okay cool okd or open shift or kubernetes or running kubernetes on a cloud hosts or that gives people gives end users reasons to use a cloud host if I'm thinking in the way I mean so that's so that would be yeah so what would you call like the things like okd open shift etc like the reason to use the cloud what is there a word we can maybe make up for that I'm gonna make up a word and someone can correct me later yep maybe service enablement you know it's the thing we are we are we enable people to more easily consume their resources I mean I'm trying to get a little above like the technical thing that yeah this is perfect and like part of the fun like one of the exercises I always do when I run workshops is like I try to get people to like take things apart and like it's amazing like I'll say take apart a pen and it's amazing how many different ways people slice it which things they call which parts and like people always make up names for things and like that's a critical skill here so service enablement seems like a solid first pass right at what is probably a very complex set of things that are happening but like we can always come back and make it better so resource consumption is happening service enablement is happening what else is happening that's like coming together part of the system that's coming together to create value for cloud hosts so I think the other thing is then they can upsell them other services so if you think of like Google cloud has a lot of data different specific data storage is that they think are better than like the generic ones that come with you know other things so they they will upsell their other other services okay so they and then the more people we bring to their cloud we bring people who love OpenShift to their cloud then the more people you know that that will buy their other services yeah in the upselling like I kind of have like so resource consumption I'm thinking like okay someone's getting API keys and they're like spinning up instances of things and service enablement is like okay they have a particular use case like they they want to run OpenShift or they want to run like Kubernetes or whatever like and then upselling though like what does that work look like is that like sales people on calls or you know that's that's I think you know where it would be lovely to have like five other people here doing this with me because I think I think of it is so every cloud host in my mind has a value add is something they think about as special is that maybe it's they have more regions than you know like you know AWS has server farms you know all over the world but maybe someone has one that's specifically tuned for machine learning and AI okay so that that's where I think is that then you know whatever their special sauce is they okay they can sell that special sauce yeah and like what I'm doing right now is kind of I'm prioritizing capturing the words that are coming out of out of your head in order to that like one of the the ways people get stuck with worthy mapping is like am I am I writing down the right thing yeah and the answer is don't worry about it don't worry about it yet because like the important thing is to capture a handle so a word or a set of or a phrase that like captures an entry point to a whole phenomena or a whole phenomenon that like you can then go talk about more and you can refine it and like make it more clear and more specific and get it into the worthy frame or whatever but just get the words onto paper okay like let's find one more thing so we got resource consumption we've got service enablement we've got upselling and then we've got like the value add that is being upsold so what is one more thing that we can put in the system that is producing value for cloud hosts awareness to our our end users you know so I'm just doing because there's this interesting dynamic because I'm coming my headsets always community development right so what I want is to make the cloud hosts feel like they should contribute to the community they should not just contribute but they should participate in the community and the the reason for that is that people will use their services and what I need from them is to make sure that the people who are contributors and testers on in in our community have access to the right images on their cloud hosts that you know if it's okd you know the fedora chorus images are there to be more technical or if it's open shift then the rel images are there like all the right bits and pieces are so there's things that we need from whether it's product or community we need the cloud hosts to do with us and we can do the same exercise with you know with contributors we need them most a lot of the contributors come from our end users and so we need to make sure that the features and other pieces of the world that they're they're living in you know are there so the prerequisites I think is a is a good thing there so the prerequisites is a good word for that yeah I think yeah ok prerequisites are running the yeah prerequisites for is it for the service enablement stuff yeah and like what we've just done is we've created a basic ontology so like an ontology is like what are the things and what are the like relationships between the things and like we've talked about relationships and what we're gonna do on this calls we're gonna make something called like a minimum called a minimum viable worthy map and the difference between a minimum viable worthy map pause you just for a second because Barbara yeah put in a really good one in the chat here that's scaling and maybe that's a subtopic under resource consumption but skip throw that in there for a minute now awesome scaling is on the board excellent yeah so like the difference between a minimum viable worthy map and a conventional worthy map is like we're actually just trying to get our draft to zero on the board right so and we're knowing that we can always make it better one of the things that can get like newbies really stuck when it comes to worthy mapping is trying to fiddle with all the relationships and so one of one of the things you can do just as a cheat to sort of get through the process once and then so you can make it better later is to forego defining relationships now in worthy mapping relationships are about dependency so what depends on what else so you could argue that cloud hosts depend on upselling right they want revenue and the way that upselling exists is through like service enablement so fulfilling value for customers and then service enablement depends on things like scaling or resource service enablement depends on resource consumption you could draw a bunch of dependency like sort of relationships between these parts and like that's super valuable you should definitely do that in fact knowing those dependencies can make you aware of certain strategic options that are available but for now we just want to get through draft zero so what what I want to point at too is that each one of these things that we've listed could be a whole set of maps unto themselves so we can we can make a whole set of maps around end user brand awareness like we could talk about content writing we could talk about Twitter we could talk about just like Google like SEO for like different kinds of support topics we could talk about support and customer service and things like that like there's so many different activities that could fit underneath here we could talk about having folks attend transformation Fridays hey and talk it with you and like there's so many things that could fit inside here that could be their own map right or we could zoom all the way out and make a map where all this stuff fits under one as one component like it's just one thing on somebody else's big map so I just want to point at that so now let's talk a little bit about this messy thing called evolution so I'm going to like I'm going to copy all these things over to this part of the map over here so we got our cloud hosts our users at the top of our minimum viable worthy map and I'm going to just like put everything in stage one for now because we don't know where everything belongs yet so I'm just going to make a mess here so so here's the question we just want to make sense of the space at first so how do we decide how evolved everything is and the answer is we use cheat sheets so if we scroll up I tried to keep things pretty like easy to find and we're there's there are two ways to go about like putting things along the evolutionary axis and worthy mapping and one way is like really deep and really slow and the other way is like let's just get it on the board and see what happens so we're going to do that way to get it on the board and see what happens and so Diane if you can go up here and reference this table right here the everything evolves and there's applying them in competition and just think about these labels so Genesis custom product commodity novel emerging good and best just try these on for each of these stickies and take like a guess of just a first gut feeling guess about which stage it's in we can always go read and do research to like confirm our assumptions here but we're just trying to get the parts on the board so I'm going to count down to five in my head for each of these things and like you're just going to tell me a number does that sound good all right let's let's start at yeah so the value add is probably still in the Genesis side or mix excellent Genesis all right I'm going to change the color to note that we've we've placed it in Genesis all right end user brand awareness one two three or four that is maybe two scaling scaling is probably three it's big problem you probably once once it's installed and everything I would think maybe three okay awesome so again just for everyone following along we're just like frying on these labels to see what fits and so if you're in the in the mirror you can sort of follow along um and see see what all that's about so okay all right for requisites for service enablement so kind of fits along with the service enablement thing just take a thing that I think is one of the harder things to figure out and go back up to your top for a minute so I see the categories again here yeah let's look at this that's it so wait's a genesis custom I feel like Trump you know person woman man whatever the thing was he screwed up the other day on his test cognitive test go back down again so I think it probably is is this a cobra or is it a bear I'm sorry I think it's a two I think it's an elephant all right I think I think and I'm gonna I'm gonna prerequisite pre thing this is for okay D this is not for OpenShift so anyone who's okay good this later OpenShift is probably in the product side so I'm gonna talk about use this and not offend anyone in sales or marketing anywhere oh it's perfect we're just like refining which assumptions we're putting on the board and like we can have a talk we can have a conversation with everyone about it later about how it's wrong but like for now we're just gonna drive to zero on the board right and service enablement I would put again in in two and again everybody said no one screams at me later this is about okay D4 which if you go to okayd.io you will find out that it was just released you know two weeks ago for GA use so that's why this is is this I have to say this otherwise someone somewhere will come back and go all right we'll have them in the map and then we can we can we can have a discussion that's gonna be great and so I think upselling I would say the relationships aren't built quite yet for for upselling okayd there's not enough awareness at any of the cloud hosts of okayd itself so let's just say so that's I would say that's still in Genesis we're still doing outreach to all of them the fedora coro s community is doing good stuff resource consumption we this is this is a tough one because and I would say this is still this is a two we're not nothing here is a utility yet yet maybe in another month it would be but we need all of these other things to happen the resource consumption it is a utility that this is where maybe I'll bounce this off you at the cloud hosts their resources are utilities pretty much now yeah so we just make need to make sure that that our stuff runs on their utility so the resources at the cloud hosts are pretty my aws Google cloud Azure all those things are utilities it's us the okayd stuff that's still blushing out how to make itself useful and available in all of these places and known which is the end user awareness stuff you know I don't think end users really know that yes I would guess for cloud hosts right now this might be the state of the union for there and upselling is a real difficult topic because okayd is the free open source version of OpenShift and so there there's a conflict there that we will use out of you know we at Red Hat really want people to use the product version so there's some conflicts here with what product versus the open source version and awesome so I just like threw a comment on there because that's like that's like a whole conversation we could have and what's funny is like I know basically nothing about this space right I think I'm I used to be a systems administrator but I have not Kubernetes anything other than like local Docker stuff sometimes but like I know basically nothing but you and I just created a vocabulary and we we put our assumptions on the board and we defined like at least two conversations that need to happen right now one is okay what is with this gap between the way that OKD is treating resource consumption and the way that resource consumption is expected in terms of the cloud hosts and then second you're like there's this conflict here right we like there are ways that open source can make a ton of sense as a way that enables product sort of plays but like right now it's just a conflict and so like we don't want to be in a situation where it's like the community versus the like the sales part of this right so like we should figure that out right so we could have a conversation about that and that's that's the whole point so first I'll mention for those of you who have done more of the mapping before you're probably confused about like what's going on with the y-axis here and what I'll say is like first of all in this minimum viable map the y-axis has no meaning we're not doing we're just doing a basic sorting where left right has meaning but not up down the second thing is the y-axis is a lie and if you see me after class so we'll talk about that but like what we've done I'm gonna say one word about the upselling the reason the way that I mostly resolve it is is that the open source side of of OpenShift which is OKD is the pipeline for product fails so once people get used to it they're running it on an open source and they want support they want all of the other value add speech things the way that I as a community person hopefully make the account managers and sales people happy is that by people using OKD they learn about the need for support and all of the other value add things that they become so that's so it's it is we position community in some ways as the pipeline for sales and that's a really awesome point because it also makes me think about this brand awareness and community patient thing which I think you were when we first wrote this we were talking about cloud hosts but it makes me think of a whole other set of things which is how do you make sure that when someone downloads the open source project they become immediately aware that if they need help they can go get it and like that's a whole brand awareness thing of its own I think as well so like having these conversations is like the whole point of making the maps so that we can actually come together and have a shared intent about each of these parts like most of the time like the orthodox version of strategy at large is like an executive somewhere makes a decision and like hopefully it's the right one and it may or may not be validated by like the reality that we're we're a part of like maybe it's just gut feeling maybe it's just like heuristics that have worked for them in the past this is more analytical and it's a model enabled analytical way of approaching strategy and if we create these artifacts we create conditions for good conversations and the longer I look at this the more I want to tweak it so we should move on excellent well that's how you know that we've succeeded right so what I'll say is like we've already identified like two or three opportunities here to go explore but there are a whole bunch more we could we could like really dig into so for those of you who know about worthy mapping there's three buckets of things so climatic patterns which is like the things we don't get choice over doctrinal principles which is the things that we choose that we believe are universally appropriate and so it's things like think small or maybe maybe don't build everything when there are things that we can buy instead that would help us focus more on our unique value props so like and then there's this last thing called leadership which is about gameplay moves and so what I've done here is like in this board like there's just this little like table full of seven things that's just kind of a mishmash of some of those and you can go down and read more about them here but if you did if you hadn't found opportunities already discussions to have actions to take etc by going through the map and just having discussions around it you could then go through each item in the map and prompt it with these kinds of questions like for example like are we treating this part of our map differently than the rest of the world and if so is that good or bad is that a valuable thing for us to do or is it a waste like is are we are we actually benefiting by uniquely paying attention to this in this way or should we just buy it or should we just outsource it or should we just adopt it right and so it's like those kind of hard conversations that need to happen explicitly instead of either happening accidentally or implicitly so that's my little rant about strategy now the reason I think Diane that you want me to talk about worthy mapping at all was so that we can make sense of a technological ecosystem and so I want to make sure that we have time to talk about that I also want to make sure that we have time to sort of get any questions sort of answered if there are any doesn't look like there are so if you haven't joined the mirror board already you can go to lwm.events slash osc and you can go explore here and play lwm.events slash osc and a lot late last night I wrote you didn't try so so let me let me set the stage of why I asked and if you zoom in on that diagram there that you're trying to do and so if anyone hasn't looked at the landscape diagram for the CNCF which is the cloud native computing foundation which is what Kubernetes and OpenShift and Red Hat as you know are participants in this landscape and there's different ways to view this this is an interactive site if you go to landscape.cncf.io you can see it and and yeah so so that's kind of you know that's the world that I live in as a community development person and pretty much every one of those squares on that thing is another open source community or something related to that so it's crazy if I take you back a step to okay D if you find I don't even know if you can find yeah you can see the little tiny Kubernetes thing there on you know go back to your landscape screen in there there's a one Kubernetes thing looks sort of like the blue hub cappy thing on the corner Kubernetes has about 80 distributions of it right now so 80 different organizations that are putting out distributions of just that one open source project of which OpenShift is a productized version of which okay D is the open source side of that productized version so you get to see the crazy ass world that we're all living in and try and and Kubernetes has dependencies on Helm and I'm trying to pick the ones that you can and using service mesh and all these projects and linker they all have interdependencies and so as a community to development person on the outside not sitting on the CNCF TOC just making sense of this and all the relationships is basically my job and making sure that if there's a feature I need for okay D that Fedora and Fedora is not even on this map it's just crazy ass one of the problems about this are not the problems things that things like technical oversight committees have to decide is who gets added into this diagram yeah and we have a wonderful process it works pretty good of incubated graduated and sandbox projects and you can propose a project to be a sandbox one and then it can move from sandbox to incubated and then it gets a little more resources and a little more love from the CNCF and then graduated means it's mature and it's got a good community around it and a healthy user base and there's probably more things and I'm skimming fast here but deciding which thing it should be added which thing should be graduated and incubated is a real big problem and then as a Canadian I have to put in one more metaphor is where is the hockey puck going something new coming into this thing that's going to disrupt it that we should be aware of where are the disruptors the new things and when things need to be I should I say it retired right there's no longer a need for it something new has come out so is there a possibility of retiring something from this so there's lots of things that that we and so and there's so many things in here it's hard to figure out what to pay attention to yeah that's that oh wow yeah I mean quite by the nature of it being an ecosystem it basically means that it's so big that there and there are so many like individual parts that like are all coming together to create these emerging like behaviors of like what partnerships are occurring what integrations are happening which startups are like existing all of a sudden and which ones are not existing all of a sudden and it's like how do you keep track of it all and the answer is like no one person can actually keep all of this in their head and so the value I would say of making a like a model of this like this is to at least know what the parts are to at least know what the degrees of freedom are in this big messy like emergent entangled thing and why would consider paying attention to like using a model in particular like wordly mapping model is the evolution part of this the evolution part of this and the anticipation part of this so so evolution is fun because it tells you or at least gives you the opportunity to sort of like guess what the characteristics of each of these little logos are and if you really want to understand each of the logos you can you can dig in you can go read the press releases you can in fact like part of what I explored in this article is like my basic process for trying to make sense of an ecosystem and it has a lot to do with like similarly to how we were just trying to get words on the page like for the most part I'm trying to see what words are already exist about these things and so one of the kind of breakthroughs that I have when I was going through the the giant like landscape was there are categories of things there are there are high there's a hierarchy and like some like I there was like app develop app definition and development for example or or a monitoring and observability or something something like that right so I was trying to figure out what the parts were and what I ended up realizing is that the categories weren't like the right ontology for me to use to make sense of things I had to go one layer deeper and actually blow out the detail and so like that's what that's why I ended up with this but even this might be the wrong way to go about it because it's it's almost like too much to deal with all at once and so the way that I like highly recommend approaching an ecosystem question is to like know what the big high level boxes are but then like piece by piece explore each thing and learn about it and just like what what are the words that people are using and I've been doing some work with like John Cutler recently and he's taught me a lot of like really useful methods for exploring a space like like just doing an image search or what diagrams people are making about like service mesh or cloud native network and then like you start to see all the models that people have made and all the all the words that they're using to describe those things and when when you get though like a space like this when you get a couple of those things on a map suddenly you're like you find that you're asserting certain things about the qualities that they have so if I say that like monitoring is stage four then I'm asserting that it's an established thing in the ecosystem that like it's ubiquitous like that's what that's what a stage four thing is it's ubiquitous yeah so I would say the projects around that monitoring and this is again everybody is listening Diane's opinion Prometheus Grafana those are pretty stable and that those would be the things that I would think would be graduated projects so you can actually filter on that landscape diagram and pick all those graduated things and those for the most part maybe I wouldn't say they were utilities yet but they would at the very least be in stage three you know yeah and some of them would be in stage from this direction yeah somewhere there yeah and people would debate me with this on different things and then so the things that are interesting to me are you know in terms of the hockey cup conversation what is the disruptive what are the new things that have just come in like the operator operator framework is new and so that's a new thing here the operator framework is very new it's and the operator pattern is on the cusp of becoming yeah somewhere over there but so that's that's almost an exercise that I'd love to do with a bunch of people from the cncf and or just interested parties you know where are you know arguably maybe operator framework now is being incubated so maybe incubated at stage two you know and the operator pattern is probably somewhere between two and three right so and these and kubernetes hopefully is at least at least to I would say kubernetes itself is probably in four they you know it's probably in four right now it's a utility it's available on pretty much every cloud hosting provider has some flavor of it now everybody wants a cube and everybody can have a cube and there are 80 different cubes so you get a cube and you get a cube and pick your cube and amazing yeah what will happen if you have those conversations is the conversation will there will be conflict actually like that's the only guarantee I mean opinionated is part of is one of the words if you google this cloud native opinionated is what you know opinionated versions of cloud you know anything yeah you're very opinionated and one of the values of having an artifact to look at like even even this right like so like having a bunch of logos to look at at least lets us agree on what the things are and when we start to add something like worthy mapping where position has meaning where like the left right and it's actually like mean something and like says a lot about our assumptions about it what will start to happen is like we'll have conflicts over like hey I think it's in stage one no it's in stage four what are you talking about and like that's that's the whole point is we can we can argue about the artifact like I don't have to attack you and obviously Diane your ideas are bad like no like each of us has this like awesome expertise and it's the value of all of our perspectives in the room collaborating on this artifact to like get our assumptions on the table and to actually have nuanced discussions about the thing in order to like have productive conflict as opposed to like problematic conflict we can come together and actually like start to make decisions about what what we think the world is like and one of the big things that will come out of this is you'll have to start breaking these things down like you know if there's a conflict over something you'll have to recognize that okay operator framework this is like a specific instance of a broader thing and what is that broader thing made of and like then you'll start to realize that that broader thing has components in Genesis in stage one and components in commodity in stage four and like there's a disposition across the entire evolutionary spectrum that all adds up to like some position maybe but like we can't have a nuanced discussion about it until we actually know what those parts are and then recognize that oh this is it's messy under here and actually that's okay yeah it is really messy under here and then that's you know and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the landscape diagram other than it irritates the crap out of me on a daily basis trying to find stuff on it but if you learn to use the filters it's really great filters are great yeah and and people have forked it and done there's a a landscape diagram for open data hub which is you know they've used the same metaphor and everything but one of the things I think that's that's interesting to me and and if you can go over we can go over the hour if you don't have time so we can help you this this whole landscape metaphor is something it is it is a mature thing yeah that's something that can be reused right like once it once it exists you're like oh landscape is an idea we can we can make our own and build new value on top of it like yeah also there's lots of aspects to this and like someone's going to say well why didn't you put helm in the maturity you know into four and I would put helm over by k by kubernetes is another thing that's coming so helm just to make all the helm people happy but then I would like to talk about what happens just quickly here when something goes from being a utility to being a past tense and this is not on helm or anything but when something is no longer part of the ecosystem like one of the things I'm always like I do two things as a community development person I have another whole conversation that we should have about I use network analysis of who's contributing to which projects to see I have this wonderful diagram it looks like a jelly a whole bunch of jellyfish and each of the jellyfish have tentacles that are attached to each other so like when someone's working in operator framework and they're also working in kubernetes and they're also working in helm all of those three jellyfish at least have one tentacle attaching to each other and I can watch with these diagrams how people migrate from one project to another so it's almost like the engineers and the participants in the communities are telling me when they're leaving the technology and going to a new one right and this is this is key for a lot of things it's like then we need if it is like maybe it's at cd or or some and it's not so nobody worry about these things I keep saying this made my we need to make sure that engineer and it's a linch pin for our our whole ecosystem it has to stay stable but all the engineers are migrating away from it we have to look at that and make sure we pay people to stay working on it right so it's you know sort of like linux or something like that you need to have a stable of engineers who are always making sure that it's secure and growing even though it may not be and someone will slide me for this the sexy thing of the week it's not kubernetes everybody wants to work on kubernetes right so you know that's what the network diagram does for me it shows me when projects are being abandoned or when engineers are putting their focus on server lists or k native or something else so you know somebody just gave a good pioneers conversation yeah pioneers giving way to settlers that's a very good way of putting it and we have to make sure settlers stay in that project so that's so how do we represent or how or can wordly mapping help us see that happening yeah wordly mapping is so it kind of like goes one way right and the implication of things going one way or evolving from left to right is things either become invisible because they just become so baked in that we just stop noticing them or they disappear because they don't exist anymore and I think it's useful to differentiate between instances of a thing disappearing and the broader concept itself so compute is a classic example that that Simon wordly talks about it's like compute as what the first computers that were invented in in the Germany or whatever like okay that's an those computers were the instance like maybe an abacus was a computer it's like in one frame of it right not many people are using abacus's abacai I don't know to do compute computation right now and instead we've got serverless so like there's there's an evolution and a sort of like the general concept continues if it's a useful broad concept but the specific instances might go away and so it's it's useful to kind of like pay attention to that dynamic but the other thing to notice is that in general if something is shifting from stage three into stage four the implication is that there's going to be a giant death event and what I mean by that is when you shift from stage three where they're basically the the nature of the way stage three behaves is there's a lot of money to be made there's a like you the way that like where custom is like okay you have to custom implement a thing everywhere and so there's a lot of money to be made because of that because everyone wants one and they can't get one so you have to custom build it in stage three it's you're starting to operationalize the production of the thing you're starting to like repeatedly manufacture the same form of value and be able to deploy that repeatedly and so everybody wants one and so everyone can get one because they can buy one so the only way to differentiate yourself is with features or with like you know different different implementation styles or what customizations or what have you and then what happens is over time the value of that differentiate like eventually there are there are enough features we've got enough features we don't need any more features and the actual like the only thing we can compete on anymore is cost and that's when the race to the bottom begins and what you start to see is when things tip over into stage four the end state is going to be a couple players like there's no longer going to be hundreds of people producing these things or hundred hundreds of organizations there's going to be three or two and to the extent that it's possible they will try to keep themselves from having to compete on price but the nature of stage four is that you have to be operating at scale which means that your pricing has to be low and at volume and like all these requirements for efficiency and pretty soon the only people who can afford to play in that space are the ones who can afford to make it so efficient and to operate things at such scale that they can get away with that pricing so there's like that moment when you realize that there's a consolidation event and so to the extent you can be sensitized to that like it'll help you anticipate when that's starting to happen and I love how you're talking about sensing this by paying attention to engineer project migration it reminds me so much of like there was there's a practice like how do you know if if companies are doing murders and acquisitions in like the 80s and 90s you pay attention to flight numbers and which executives are getting whom which private jets are going to which cities at which times like and that but you just mind that information and pay attention to it and eventually you start to go oh these two companies are talking to each other a lot I wonder why that is and it's not because you come away with like they're going to merge it's like something is happening here and we need to pay attention to it that's the difference it's interesting because the network analysis tool that that I use I didn't use it to sense migration I was looking for connections like so if I had someone who was working on it started with open tracing and Zipkin and Jaeger I was looking for using the tool to see who from Red Hat was participating in a community and then I was trying to sense I would need a speaker who knew for a community event who knew both Zipkin and Jaeger and open tracing and you know trying to get a feel for who was in the community and that triggered oh I can see some migration from the Zipkin community to Jaeger and oh look at this guy Yuri who's at Uber and this was all pre CNCF donation by Uber of Jaeger to the CNCF as a project so it's like and that little epiphany of like looking at looking for somebody showed me where people were moving around in these things and the usefulness of this to understand the emerging new projects maturing project and projects where the pioneers were leaving and the settlers we needed to make sure that there were some settlers I love that you pointed that out that's so cool because you articulated exactly like the whole point of like strategy is like to build assets right like oh I mean maybe that's the whole point but like assets have such a key role to play by investing in something like contribution network analysis and pushing it to the right by making it like work reliably inside your organization yeah like it may have been just to be able to sense connections in order to find speakers but what happens is when something moves to the right it starts to enable other value like it can be used as a lego brick and a giant creation that you don't know could exist yet and so when that's a building block people are going to build stuff with it and so then you realize oh we have this asset now we can use it in these other ways we can build these other things with it and so you could actually maybe create like an early detection warning system for when a project is you know requiring some kind of investment maybe or something along those lines and that's that's pretty much what we've done and so and and the interesting thing about it is we've done it outside of the big company outside of Microsoft which owns get a lab and ensure that that they have something like this already baked into the back end and they can they can watch this from all of the millions of projects and we just started doing it from our community point of view because we needed to make sense of that landscape diagram and see because there's what happens for us is that the ecosystem grows so big there's no way that one person or even a group of people can know all the players and so exactly it was an unknowable thing and so these tools that we used to do network analysis helped us find these people because otherwise it was a needle on the haystack got instinct or asking favors of friends and now there's a real easy way for me and anyone else that you know who's using these this tooling and network analysis to do this and it has lots of other implications for other things but I I'm pretty sure that all of the a number of the other companies that are doing source code stuff have had this baked in the background I just never had it as a community development person before so we built it it's all open source we can talk about that another day that's cool that I was really interesting in watching some some of the wordly videos before was there was one story that Simon told about weighing paper forms to figure out the count yeah and I don't know I mean I probably won't get it right and I'll paraphrase it but basically they did this diagram and then they saw the whole middle piece that everybody was concentrating on was basically not necessary right was just this exercise in you know figuring out how much the paper weighs and if you went down and you really mapped the whole thing out the digital transformation was actually like let's wipe out all this weighing the number of forms that have filled out as pieces of paper to going to where they enter them on the website and just taking the count and that I think was a very powerful story for me on the value of wordly mapping is that once you do that then you really kind of see maybe that your idea and of digital transformation might not be what you know you think it is right and and I think that's the power this visualization technique is showing you sometimes the craziness in your chaos too yeah it really it gives us the opportunity to be humane in our organizations because like how how many people are working in jobs and working on projects that might be interesting from like a material stance like oh I get to learn this technology or I'm building this thing and I get to be a good developer or what have you but are in the grand scheme not like materially meaningful and when we when we find those those things like oh you're just like oh we have this whole section of the organization that's weighing paper to in order to get the count of pages why like how much how many wonderful different things could those people be doing and but then of course the problem is like in many cases we don't have like organizations that can teach people new skills so so part of like what really motivates me about sharing worthy mapping is it creates the opportunity for us to create more purposeful organizations but the the sort of implication is that we also have to create organizations that are organizations where people can learn and I know Andrew Clay Schaefer has some really good talks on this for example there is no talent shortage which points at this thing exactly it's like organizations that are creating the future become graduate studies in the kinds of futures that they're trying to create like anyone can come in and learn stuff and become able to able to do these kinds of things and so with mapping as a way to focus where we want to learn can really create more intentional organizations that are capable of producing better outcomes and I guess it betrays my my belief my fundamental optimism I think if people were just able to be more purposeful and if tools like this can help in that sense I think we do a lot more good and we'd have a lot more like terrible things in the world like children and cages and things like that so that's what motivates me about this yeah I think it's really interesting especially in Covid times in the middle of a pandemic we like internally everybody is shifting that for example from face to face you know summits and events where we all would gather in large convention centers and share I'd always walk away from there with a cold every time you know you shake hands with 18,000 people and we have whole teams of people in lots of companies that are event managers event planners and all of these folks and one of the things that is kind of wonderful about red hat is that what we're watching inside is the shifting of gears to a virtual world and a virtual reality and the retraining of people who have massive skills and events and stuff like that and understand the dynamics of you know good peer to peer engaged events and applying those skills and those understandings but also learning how to do all of that with new virtual platforms and like I can right now I'll see like having a conversation with you know within red hat about you know where are we at with this you know what could we do better and you know where you know where are we missing things you know and yeah and that's you know and I think pretty much every I think it I think you put the with the nail on the head or whatever it is or you hit the nail on the head around I think wordly mapping gives us a way to do it humanely and with purpose I'm not telling you what to do you and I are coming to a shared understanding of what is yeah and what needs to be you know and in some ways like the rise of AI and robotics is going to replace every human's job and you know no one will have worked or be employed you mean there's that fear factor of change right and and things like these tools really help us understand you know where the technology is where you know where the potential revenue could be worth and as I am a Canadian where the hockey puck is going so that we continue to go there and make the best of it and put our resources this I mean there's so many more layers to the wordly stuff as well I mean I might have to argue with you another time that there should be two axes here because I think one of the things that he talked about and you've done it here with this is like a map a diagram doesn't have any space you know it has no space component to it and the other other axes helps us put time and space together you know but we've got his time here but where they are I think there's another whole conversation about that you know we'll have to get into that yeah get into that one too so yeah so I just wanted to check we didn't it looks like we didn't have any questions so or at least unless you've seen something in chat yeah I've been taking taking some of the chat stuff and working them into my lovely awesome there you go there you go yeah everyone in the world who's watching this right now who wants to learn worthy mapping is welcome to direct message me on twitter at hired thought or if you want to email me another way you can find me is ben at hired thought dot com I am so grateful that Diana Diane invited me to talk about worthy mapping here if you want to learn more learn worthy mapping dot com is a website that I run I will help connect you with all the right resources please I love hearing from you I love hearing your questions and I'm writing about them too so that should be great and as I always say transformation make my week I love the ending on these kinds of conversations this is so it special and a wonderful way to to really you know we spend this technologists all week long trying to make things work and breaking things and and you know putting out releases and stuff like that and then what we really like to focus is focus on on Thursdays is how are we as organizations leveraging this technology and leveraging it leveraging it well in humane and sustainable and purposeful ways and thank you Ben because this has been really very very enlightening and we're going to have an ongoing conversation about and maybe I can coerce the CNCF into hiring you to do a group hug conversation I love hugs I can't do them now virtual hug here yeah thank you very much for taking the time today to be with us so Diana I'm so grateful thank you for having me all right take care take care get lots of thank yous and