As a community, we’ve learned so much from the military context — we’ve had the privilege of learning from David Silverman, one of the co-authors of Team of Teams, who was a Lt Commander in the US Navy SEALs, who taught us about how one achieves goals across vast network, which seems so familiar and so relevant to us in the DevOps community.

Last year, we learned about leader development from former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson — he taught us about how to develop leaders so that we can radically delegate to fully unleash the full creative and problem-solving potential of people at the edges of the organization. And he is doing a workshop tomorrow with Captain Emily Basset.

But as interesting as that is, the purpose of the next talk is not about the military context — instead, it’s about a much bigger problem.

If you’re like me, you’ve been shocked and horrified by what is happening in Ukraine on the European continent — it’s a huge problem on so many dimensions: sociopolitical, economic, and worst of all, it has created a humanitarian crisis, creating nearly 10 million refugees.

If you’re like me, you’ve wondered how you can meaningfully help — and based on a series of conversations with some supremely talented and dedicated people, an incredible opportunity presented itself —

The next speaker is Andy Nicklin from the UK Military, whose remit includes addressing and solving some of these incredibly important humanitarian problems, and he will talk about things that matter to all of us.