Serverless Craic Ep36 The Value Flywheel Effect Book Launch

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

We are just back from The Value Flywheel Effect book launch at DevOps Enterprise Summit organised by IT Revolution with Gene Kim and crew. We had a great week doing our book launch. It was great to see the buzz and the content. But getting handed the first copy of The Value Flywheel Effect book made it very real! There was a shelf full of IT Revolution books in chronological order. Like DevOps, Enterprise Handbook, Accelerate, Team Topologies and all the Mark Schwartz and Dominica DeGrandis books. And The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. It was unbelievable to see our book sitting alongside all of those books.

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 LearnWardleyMapping.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. Once they get beyond the terminology, notation and syntax, they are asking interesting, challenging questions. The canvas is a great way to get people thinking quickly. They start gaining insights and seeing what they may not have before using the canvas or map. And you can give them tips. People deliberate over who is the exact customer. Or the actual customer and their needs.

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. Some people think that maps come out fully formed. But they never do. There is lots of variation and challenge. We always challenge each other. And we revisit, rub stuff out and draw it again. When we validate certain things we always go back to the map. It's not the map. 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

I did the book signing in the main theatre. There were 4 different book signings. So you hope to see people queue up because you don't want to end up standing on your own. But there was a huge queue and I was there for two hours signing 200 books. People were really nice and they were really excited. And lots of other speakers queued up as well. Propelo sponsored our book signing and they were great. So now the book is in the wild with 200 plus people! So we're starting to get feedback from people who weren't in the early previews.

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. We would map stuff like that all the time. There's no boundaries to what we map. Psychological safety is usually the base or foundation of the map. Mapping, safety or challenge are things that are quite hard to see. But they are the most important thing for everything that comes above it. The thing at the very top, which is the need, is usually the least important because it is the end product.

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.

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