Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim: Hello. In my opening remarks yesterday, I shared the advice that Dr. Richard Cook from the safety culture gave this community. He had mentioned that there are certain types of stories that you will not hear on stage. Instead, you hear them after the conference, maybe after a few drinks, and underscored that great practice comes from experience, but experience comes from bad practice.

And that is what results in this DevOps Confession format. My thanks to Cornelia Davis, who shared a confession yesterday, and for today's confession, it will be me reading it to you. And so my thanks to the person who spent so much time writing this up so that I may perform it for you today. It begins.

DevOps Confession (read by Gene Kim)

Maybe I'm not supposed to be here anymore. Maybe my days here are coming to an end.

These are the thoughts I was thinking after years of frustration, unproductive conflict, and feeling sidelined. And what was so difficult for me to believe was that this was the company I had started, and I felt like I couldn't change anything. I was stuck.

This shouldn't be happening to me. This shouldn't be how it ends for me. This was my damn company.

In the early days, I felt like I could make a difference, like I had room to run, get things done. When I had an idea or made a decision, I could make it happen, but not anymore.

We had gone through a lot of organizational changes in the last five years. We started with a business with more of a general manager model, which gave people like me a lot of autonomy and a broad span of control. However, in recent years, we had moved towards more specialized roles with narrower areas of accountability.

It seemed like a good idea as we grew. It allowed people to focus and become experts. What we didn't realize was the need for integration and alignment with the team, and the impact of not having it, because now nothing could get done. We operated in silos and in stovepipes. Collaboration was low, friction was high, and the results in our business showed it.

Eventually, I realized that not only did we not have the integration and the alignment we needed, but the reason we were missing them was because the values and vision that I had weren't shared by the other leaders I needed to work with.

I remember describing the situation to a close group of colleagues, outside the company, of course, and asking them for advice. I asked, "What do you do when you feel like you can't get anything done and you realize you don't share the same values with the people you work with? I don't feel like I can leave, and I don't know if I can stay either."

As I expected, there weren't any easy or obvious answers.

All of this was having an effect on my team, too. They knew what I believed and the values that I had. They had the same ones, which is why they were on my team. They saw and felt the friction and the conflict with the rest of the company, too. The effect on them weighed heavily on me.

We tried some things within our team to work the way that we wanted, creating a small culture bubble around us. It helped a little because at least we were trying to make things better for us and hoping that our better ways of working would rub off on others. But in a way, it made things worse because it just put a spotlight on the fact that we were different and had limited influence on others to change.

At the low point, I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory. It told me I matched their burnout profile. That's a profile you really don't want. I was high on exhaustion, high on cynicism, and low on professional efficacy. That's not a great combination for feeling engaged at work, and it was not actually a surprise at that point.

After having conversations with others I trusted, taking the MBI, doing a lot of thinking and soul searching, I finally decided that something needed to change. I couldn't tolerate the status quo anymore. It wasn't good for me, it wasn't good for my team, and it certainly wasn't good for the company.

So a few weeks later, I shared my perspective at a strategic planning meeting with the other senior leaders. After a lot of preparation, I was able to tell them I believed that the company was at a crossroads. I told them I believed we had different values and visions for the company that were fundamentally incompatible with one another.

It wasn't that one or the other were necessarily right or wrong, or that one was better or worse. They were just different. We could go down one path and we could be successful, and plenty of other companies have shown that that's a valid strategy. Or we could go down the other path, and plenty of other companies have shown that's a valid strategy, too. But we can't pursue both at the same time, and that's what we've been doing for the last several years.

Either way, I was personally not willing to live with the status quo anymore, and we all needed to choose. And if we decide to go down one path, then I will opt out of that because I don't know how to be successful down that path, and honestly, it's one that doesn't excite me to go down.

However, if we go down the other path, then I do believe and I know how we can be successful, and I will be so excited for that journey. But we needed to make a decision.

Many months later, I had told a friend about that moment, and he said that it was a fearless conversation, and he was right. I didn't have any fear. I'd made my peace that I would be okay with either choice, and yet I certainly wanted one choice to be the one that everyone chose. I really hoped it would be that one, but I would be good either way.

That conversation at that strategic planning meeting was a crucible moment. It set into motion a series of discussions and decisions that led to a lot of changes. Changes I'm happy to say that still have me working at the company and that have positioned the company for success in the future. And yet, not everyone at that strategic planning meeting can say the same. There were a lot of changes at the top, and the team of senior leaders looks very different today than it did then.

Those changes took almost one year to implement and required a lot of personal perseverance. It was an emotionally draining experience over a long period of time. But it wasn't blind perseverance. We knew the direction we were going. We knew what our values were. It was a vision that we all believed in, and I was seeing progress towards it, and that made all the difference for me.

Early into the process of making these changes, I had a conversation with someone at the company who asked me why they should stick it out, why they should stick around. I told them that six months ago, things were bumpy and hard and difficult, and I didn't have any hope that things would actually change. However, now things were bumpy and hard and difficult, but I do have hope that things will change. I genuinely believed they would.

The way I feel today is 180 degrees different than how I felt a year ago. I have more excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism for my job and the company's future prospects than I've had in years. I feel like I can make a difference again, and a big part of that is a team of senior leaders I work with now. There are some new faces who brought in with them new thinking and new perspectives, and values more in line with my own.

In a recent interaction with one of my new colleagues, I had to ask them for some time from some of their people, and when I asked her, her first response was, "Sure, just tell me who you need, and I'll have those conversations."

Honestly, I was shocked at how easy it was. I've been conditioned to expect pushback, nos, and ignored requests, and this was a refreshing moment and a refreshing response, to say the least.

So here's the lesson I learned, or maybe relearned, through all of this: I had choices the whole time, and chief among those choices was to speak up, share my perspectives, and give people the opportunity to make a choice, too.

That was a risk, and I was vulnerable, but I was feeling burned out. The Maslach Burnout Inventory agreed with me. However, it got to the point where the choice of continuing to live with the status quo was one that I could no longer accept.

Either I was going to be part of changing my company back into a place where I felt engaged, and I was fully prepared for the level of commitment and perseverance that would be required to actually do that, or I would find someplace different where I could feel engaged again.

So I realize the story has a happy ending by me staying at the company and making all these changes, but I realize that it could have gone the other way with me leaving the company, too. And given where I was at the time, from my perspective, that would've been a happy ending, too.

Gene Kim

Gene Kim: So thank you to the person who wrote this up so that I could read this to you all. I will make a couple of personal observations.

Reading the story, this could've been me almost 12 years ago during probably one of the most challenging times during my 13 years at Tripwire. Things that were once easy became very, very difficult. And I do believe that had I known then what I know now, I could've been more effective, more influential. I could've maybe changed certain outcomes.

Even in the years following, I even found myself reliving certain conversations, wondering if I could've argued them for a different outcome. And I even knew what hand gestures I would use to get people to see what I saw. But as each year went by, that happened less and less.

And so looking back, I realize that leaving and closing certain doors behind me opened up a whole bunch of very interesting doors that were in front of me. In fact, it was leaving that allowed me to work full time, finishing up "The Phoenix Project," and there were certain elements in "The Phoenix Project" that certainly could not have been written without that incredible trying time in my career behind me.

In fact, so much of Sarah, the villain in the book, was a synthesis of many of those experiences, and many of those experiences shared in this confession.

So my particular lesson was this. At the end, I was probably at my most effective because I had, like this person, gained a certain indifference to outcome and a fearlessness that allowed me to say what I really thought. And near my last days at the company, I had actually acquired a reputation of being one of the bravest people, who always would say what people thought when many people would not do so.

So again, thank you for the person who wrote up this confession, and I hope this resonates with you.