Breaking hero behaviour with systems thinking
What follows is my script for the brief Ignite talk I gave at DevOpsDays Toronto 2019, with relevant slides injected. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtLT3KMkfHU My goal today is to firmly convince you that hero behaviour is actually an anti-pattern. It should not be praised or rewarded, but rather be viewed as a warning flag signifying greater systemic problems. I’ll show you the result of my own hero efforts, and how until I was introduced to systems thinking, I never realized that I’d been missing the forest for the trees. Most importantly, I’ll show you how you have complete control to change this. A number of years ago I was working at a software company that was struggling with siloing, production fires, long deploy times - all the stereotypical issues you’ve seen before, or perhaps experience today. A colleague and I took it upon ourselves to guide the dev teams to freedom and very hastily built a prototype pipeline system to replace their