DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2022

In her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, Carlota Perez shows how past technological revolutions led to an explosion of financial capital that funded innovative startups that disrupted entire industries. Those revolutions also created new frameworks for managing people and work, including Factory Systems, Taylorism, and Fordism. As we move into the next revolution - ‘The age of Digital and Software’ - we again see a new way of managing begin to emerge. One that supports Continuous Learning.

We posit that Continuous Learning is the new management framework for the Digital Age. It creates the necessary environment and culture to support the product development and innovation practices based on Agile, Lean Product Development, Systems Thinking, and DevOps. This includes creating inspirational and motivating goals for teams to achieve, an environment for teams to self-manage and self-organize to deliver innovative products, and a culture that understands failure is an important part of the learning process.

We highlight examples and success patterns where organizations have established a learning-based culture and connect this new management framework with Lean, Agile, and DevOps development practices. While learning is not new; establishing it as an intentional management framework helps organizations let go of the old way of working. This is even more challenging for products that include hardware and other long-lead-time components, which we address in this talk.