We are just back from The Value Flywheel Effect book launch at DevOps Enterprise Summit organised by IT Revolution with Gene Kim and crew.

Learning Sprint

The first thing I did was a learning sprint. I did an hour on creating a cloud strategy with Wardley mapping, which I thought was interesting. I used Ben Mosior's Wardley map canvas from LearnWardleyMaps.com. And it was great taking people through that. Once people start connecting the elements of the value chain, they can start to ask why is that over there and not over here? Then you're into a nice conversation.

People can get very micro at the start. And you say just pick one and keep moving. Just keep pushing through, because you can always add more later. You are getting people to move quickly. And you are giving people a couple of steers. But the first 20 minutes is complete confusion. What are we doing here? And then once you draw the map out, people go 'Ah right!'. And then when you start to plot movement and inertia, that's when people get really excited. And it becomes crystal clear.

Creating the Value Flywheel Effect Talk

I deliberated on what to do for my talk because I wanted to do something different. So I decided on 'Creating the Value Flywheel Effect' looking at how came up with this stuff. So I did an intro to the book. And then I told the story through maps, similar to our Map Camp talk.

I started with one of the drawings we had done five or six years ago. Which was a scribbled messy drawing of a map. And I contrasted with the map in the book to show the evolution of the map. So it was a nice mechanism to tell the story. It's important to remember that the map is not important. It's the communication! And the interactions. The maps are always wrong at the start. People try to go out of their way to create the perfect map. But that's not the point of the exercise.

The Value Flywheel Effect Book Signing

There was a huge queue and I was there for two hours signing 200 books. Propelo sponsored our book signing and they were great.

It was fantastic to see Dominica DeGrandis' comments on LinkedIn. She wrote the book: 'Making Work Visible'. It is a brilliant book about visualising flow. She has a couple of posts about our book: 'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And she popped up a maps from her LinkedIn called 'Mapping Psychological Safety'. It was the name of the post on her blog: DDeGrandis.com. And she said that it had never occurred to her to map psychological safety. I thought that was insightful.  Psychological safety is usually the base or foundation of the map.

It's built into the flywheel. You need an environment where it's safe to challenge. And having safety to challenge requires psychological safety. It's cool that it's resonating with people and they're starting to zero in on those sorts of things.

DevOps Enterprise Summit was a great event. Look up the slides on GitHub. All the videos are on videos.itrevolution.com.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube