Have you ever wondered why DevOps, Continuous Deployment, canary releases, microservices, chaos engineering and reducing Technical Debt work so well? Why it works at all? These and many other concepts all have one thing in common. They are affected by a hidden force: antifragility.

3. Becoming
Antifragile is more
important than ever
in disruptive times
Geneva, February 24th
Hydra animation: Robert Ireland
by Jan de Vries

4. Enterprise DevOps
working group
In kaart
brengen
van
Organisatie
in beweging
brengen
Product snel en
zonder waste
naar de markt
Jobs, Pains en
gains
Seeing things early
&
Connecting the
working
groups
agile scaling,
agile
Areas

5. Support Staff in
Agile/DevOps
Environments
• DevOps & Control
• Lean Agile HR
• DevOps & Compliance
Smell of the
PI Planning
• Do's and don'ts
Antifragility
Coherence
Tour
• DevOps
• Business Analysis
• XP
Research, publishing
& speaking

6. Is your industry at risk?
3 indicators:
• how much waste is there in your industry?
• how much money do you currently earn from opacity?
• to what extent do you force your customers into standard products
that are not entirely in line with their wishes?
2 aggravating factors:
• the closer to the customer, the more vulnerable
• the simpler the product, the lower the barrier
Source: Wegwijzer in het Digitale doolhof, Annet Aris

7. •US auto technology has been relatively static since the passage
of the Federal interstate-highway act, in 1956. Now the
synchronous arrival of Tesla (2003), Uber (2009), and
autonomous vehicles is creating chaos. When it’s over, a new
equilibrium will emerge
•Landline operators (1850) were massively disrupted by cell
phones (first in 1973), which in turn were upended by the
introduction of the iPhone, in 2007—which, in the following
decade, has settled into a new stasis, with handheld computing
changing the very nature of interpersonal communication.
Punctuated equilibrium

8. Risk
Theatre

10. Why we need antifragility

11. Disorders in IT
• changing existing functionality
• implementing new requirements
• supporting new business opportunities
• Unintended ways of usage by end users and other
systems

12. Not fragile
• Robust
• Resilient
• Antifragile

13. Source: Sogeti
Success
Time

14. Fragile

15. Fragile in IT

16. Robust

17. Robust in IT

18. Resilient

19. Resilient in IT

20. Antifragile

21. • Latency monkey
• Janitor monkey
• Conformity monkey
• Chaos gorilla
Antifragile in IT

22. Antifragile layer

23. To get more antifragile
Chaos engineering

25. Variable
Gain
Pain

26. Variable
Gain
Pain

27. Variable
Gain
Pain

28. Asymmetry is key
Definition:
• anything that has more upside than
downside from random events / shocks
is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
• to judge the (anti)-fragility of a system
is to ask whether it is accelerating
towards harm or benefit
Nonlinearity
1

29. Variable
Gain
Pain

30. Variable
Gain
Pain

31. Variable
Gain
Pain

32. Variable
Gain
Pain
Concave Convex

33. Variable
Gain
Pain Concave Convex

34. Frown or smile

35. Number of
deployments
per month
Gain
Pain
CONTINUOUS
DEPLOYMENT
IS ANTIFRAGILE
IT example

36. Number of tasks
coordinated
in a software project
Gain
Pain
SOFTWAREPROJECTSARE FRAGILE
IT example

37. Definition:
– an option is a contract which gives the buyer the
right, but not the obligation, to do something
Asymmetry is key
Optionality
2
– financial options are usually expensive
– non-financial options are usually free or cheap,
but.... we don't recognise them.

38. The Unicorn Club

39. Experimenting in IT
The third way, continual experimentation and learning

40. LinkedIn app - opt-in

41. LinkedIn app - opt-in

42. Time
Change
in
value
Antifragile experimenting

43. Time
Change
in
value
Fragile experimenting

44. Time
Change
in
value
Fragile experimenting
Reducing the downside

45. Via Negativa
Decrease your downside: things, people, actions,
habits, or systems that make you vulnerable to
volatility and risk:
• hand-offs between teams (Spotify)
• politics, fear and ego (Spotify)
• technical debt = what you feel the next time you
want to make a change (Gene Kim)

46. Technical debt
backlog
Improvement
backlog
Tasks
The 4 colour backlog
Product
backlog
Defect
backlog
Technical
Debt
backlog
Improvement
Backlog
Source: Brian Teunissen, Inspearit
www.linkedin.com/pulse/measuring-velocity-producing-milk-shoveling-dirt-brian-teunissen

47. Source: Brian Teunissen, Inspearit
If you ask your customer
www.linkedin.com/pulse/measuring-velocity-producing-milk-shoveling-dirt-brian-teunissen

48. For your customer's own good
www.linkedin.com/pulse/measuring-velocity-producing-milk-shoveling-dirt-brian-teunissen

49. Bite the bullet
www.linkedin.com/pulse/measuring-velocity-producing-milk-shoveling-dirt-brian-teunissen

50. Asymmetry is key
Transferring fragility
Definition:
• if one party has the downside and
another party has the upside, fragility is
being transferred from one party to
another
• The reverse: skin in the game -> a person
has something to lose in a given situation
3

51. Skin in the game missing
(silo's)
SILO'SARE FRAGILIZERS

52. Source: Nijland and Berghout, 2002
Skin in the OPS game missing
(projects)
PROJECTSARE FRAGILIZERS

53. Skin in the game missing
(Top down management)
• It is easier to macrobullshit than to microbullshit
• bureaucracy is a construction by which a person
is conveniently separated from the
consequences of his or her actions

54. Command and control
is not fast enough
• Push authority to the
information level in stead of
pushing information to the
authority level
• Make sure that people who
are closest to the
information
• are technically competent
• have organisational clarity
• understand priorities

55. Decentralise decision-making
• Centralise strategic decisions: Infrequent, Long-lasting and
Provide significant economies of scale
• Decentralize Everything Else: frequent, time-critical, require
local information
Source: Scaled Agile
Skin in the game missing
(Top down management)
TOP DOWN MANAGERS
ARE FRAGILIZERS

57. To get more antifragile
Reducing Technical Debt
Continuous deployment
Decentralised decision-making
Chaos engineering

58. Inoculation

60. Canary releases

61. AB testing
• facilitates small
experiments to a
system.
• reducing risk by
low doses
Source: Khalid Saleh

62. Microservices
• The reduction of big decisions into smaller,
frequent decisions that are all up-side.
• Rewrite if they turn out to be down-side
Time
Change
in
value

63. Milk is cheapest
in BIG cartons
Software is
cheapest in
lots of small
cartons
And small
cartons of
software reduce
risk
Source: Allan Kelly
Economies of scale

64. Software development…
• Does NOT have economies of Scale
• Development has DISECONOMIES of scale
Source: Allan Kelly

65. Autoscaling
• Programmed to respond to change.
• indispensable in chaos engineering

66. Focus on MTBF or MTTR?

67. • Antifragile systems assume that failure will happen
• Focus on MTBF: only for space hardware and embedded
medical devices
• Focus on MTTR: everything else
Focus on MTTR !
Source: John Allspaw

68. To get more antifragile
Reducing Technical Debt
Continuous deployment
Decentralised decision-making
Microservices
AB testing
Autoscaling
Focus on MTTR
Canary releases
Chaos engineering

69. Via Negativa
Decrease your downside: things, people, actions,
habits, or systems that make you vulnerable to
volatility and risk:
• hand-offs between teams (Spotify)
• politics, fear and ego (Spotify)
• technical debt = what you feel the next time you
want to make a change (Gene Kim)

70. Via Negativa
• hand-offs between teams
• politics, fear and ego

71. Via Negativa -
organisational debt

72. 'Any organisation that designs
a system will inevitably
produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the
organization's communication
structure'
Melvin Edward Conway, 1967
Blocked by Conway's Law

73. 'Any organisation that designs
a system will inevitably
produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the
organization's communication
structure'
Melvin Edward Conway, 1967
Leveraging Conway's Law

74. •Adopt scientific measurements to break jobs
into series of small, related tasks and develop a
standard time for each task
•Use systematic methods for selecting workers
and training them for specific jobs
•Establish clear division of responsibility
between management and workers, where
management sets goals, plans, and supervises,
and the workers execute the required tasks
•Establish a discipline where management sets
the objectives and the workers cooperate in
achieving them
Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1856 - 1915
4 principles of Scientific Management
Ending Taylor's era (1911)

75. Source: Project to product Source: Carlota Perez
2000-?

77. Source: Project to product
• organisational charts and enterprise
architecture are unable to support the right
decisions on software investments and staffing
• for the majority of the world's organisations,
the combination of scale, complexity, legacy
and dated managerial paradigms is making a
digital transformation impossible to achieve in
a time frame that ensures survival
Via Negativa -
organisational debt

78. Via Negativa -
organisational debt
• In the Age of Software Value Stream Networks
are the new infrastructure for innovation and
make the black box of IT transparent.
• replace project-oriented management, cost
center budgeting and organisational charts
with flow metrics to connect technology
investments and business results.

79. Source: Project to product
Flow metrics

80. Business Information Technology
Strategic
Tactical
Operational
DevOps
Don't lecture birds how
to fly
rigorous automation of
operational processes
Push
Pull
9 square model

81. Business Information Technology
Strategic
Tactical
Operational
High heel organisation
DevOps
Don't lecture birds how
to fly
rigorous automation of
operational processes
Push
Pull

82. To get more antifragile
Reducing Technical Debt
Continuous deployment
Decentralised decision-making
Microservices
AB testing
Autoscaling
Focus on MTTR
Canary releases
Chaos engineering
Reducing Organisational Debt