Unknown: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a

podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,

knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SK il framework.

Matt K. Parker: And one of my co workers, so I told you, I'm

gonna go try and interview there, he stopped me and said,

Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't you know, they Peer Program?

Don't you know you have to share a computer with somebody else,

right? It's crazy. It's, it's like agile on steroids. It's

nuts. Don't do it. I was like, Well, I'm miserable. And I have

nothing to lose. And I went and did it. And I loved it.

Jason Baum: Everyone, it's Jason Baum, Director of Member

experience at DevOps Institute. And this is the humans of DevOps

podcast. Welcome back. Thanks, as always, for joining us. The

great resignation. We've all heard the term. We've discussed

it on this very podcast. You've heard various takes on the why.

Well, let me just read you the numbers. In 2021 47 point 8

million workers quit their jobs. Yes, you heard that right. 47

point 8 million. Many believe that number could be higher in

2022.

According to a February Pew Research Center survey, workers

who quit a job in 2021 gave the following reasons. low pay, no

opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected at

work.

What are the numbers telling us now 84% of workers are

disengaged at work. Nine out of 10 employees would donate 24% of

their lifetime earnings to have more meaning at work. 60% of

workers mistrust their CEO.

Now, let's revisit that term, the great resignation.

Other terms that are being used today to describe this

revolution includes the great reimagination the great reset

the great realization,

these descriptions talk not of the act of departing, but more

of the mindset and the culture shift behind

how we're re examining the role of work in our lives. That's

something we're exploring. Now, it's up to the organizations to

do the same. And to learn.

What can we do differently? How do we reimagine? How do we

reset?

My guest today is Matt Parker, author of a radical enterprise

pioneering the future of high performing organizations. Matt

is a writer, speaker, researcher, and third generation

programmer. Over the last two decades, he's played a variety

of roles in the software industry, including developer

manager, director and global head of engineering. He

specialized in hyper iterative software practices for last

decade, and is currently researching the experience of

radically collaborative software makers. He lives in a small

village in Connecticut with his wife and three children. And you

can contact him and Learn more by visiting MattKParker.com.

Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, thanks for having me. Jason. B y the way,

that introduction you just ran. I mean, you should be writing

books that was like filling. I got chills listening to Oh,

thanks. Really amazing.

Jason Baum: I appreciate it. I numbers. I mean, the numbers,

the numbers, really, I mean, do all the talking. Right. All I

did was read them. Those numbers are our I mean, it says it all?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, no doubt.

Jason Baum: You know, when we were first when I was first

looking at the book and learning more about you, there is there's

a line on the back, I believe of the book, the fastest growing

most competitive organizations in the world, have no

bureaucracy and bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit,

which I love. But it like made me like, I am a visual person.

So it instantly put me back in my like, I'm 17 years old, I'm

in a punk rock band. I'm the one drawing the giant A's on my

notebook. And, you know, I'm pretty sure it was a no effects

lyric, you know, that that was that was me. And then you you

grow up and you become jaded. And you go along with the you

know, I mean, we did a our last podcast was about generation

generations. And we talked about Gen Z, and we talk and I'm

always like, the boomers are the most fascinating to me, because

these were the hippies. And now they're the ones basically

telling you what to do. So it's like, okay, is it just age or is

it generation what is it? But I just love the concept and I

wanted to say that but also say, is this real?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, it sounds Yeah, the the

tagline for the book sounds revolutionary to some extent,

right? Like, oh my god, like what's going on? Like no bosses,

no bureaucracies no bullshit like, whoa. And at the same

time, right it's it's not like you know, the punk rock band up

on the stage that's being very loud and obvious about

everything right? This is like a quiet revolution that's been

happening, right. And over the past couple of decades, right?

We've seen the number of companies that fit this bill,

which I refer to as radically collaborative. By the way,

that's not the only term in that you can find and organizational

science, literature and elsewhere, they can be

everything from teal to whole kradic, socio kradic, self

governing, self managing, etc. Radically collaborative is

another name for them. It's the one I chose. And I'll tell you

more about why I chose it later. But anyways, the number of

companies that fit this bill have grown from one to three to

now a percent of companies around the world, roughly, and,

and it and they have demonstrated that that through

that growth, what's happening is that there's very clear sort of

outsized economic results from this type of company compared to

other more traditional organizational archetypes, which

explains a lot of their growth, right? It would be one thing to

say like the sounds good, but actually, it turns out, it

doesn't matter economically, but the actual the two things are

actually strongly correlating right, these companies which are

very focused on creating environments, which supercharge

intrinsic motivation, passion, engagement, meaning purpose,

fulfillment, right are also leading to some very clear

economic results. And a lot of what I'm doing in the book is

trying to both trace this sort of development and explain it.

Right. And I might, as you said in the introduction, right, my

own background is in software engineering. And so I'm not an

organizational scientist myself, I am just sort of trying to

research, synthesize, and really, you know, piggyback off

the work of psychologists, sociologists, organizational

scientists, economists, etc. To help explain why this thing is

happening, right? To point at it to say, here's how it's

happening. But here's some of the why behind it. And in that,

I end up arriving at sort of these four primary imperatives,

I call them these four things that seem both present and all

these companies that are really succeeding with this way of

working, and also probably very necessary to that success. And

just that a nutshell, they're called Team autonomy, managerial

devolution, deficiency need gratification and candid

vulnerability. So anyways, I can go into all that too. But at a

high level, that's sort of what this book is about, and what it

encapsulates.

Jason Baum: Yeah, and thank you, and you know, what I should

have, you know, I have a habit of going all over the place with

these with these interviews. So just so you're warned, but what

I did just there was I went right into the middle of the

book. But I think sometimes, when you hear things that are

that sound radical, right, you kind of need to go to the middle

to understand it to kind of break down your initial wall.

Because I think when you when you say, an organization of no

bureaucracy and or an organization with no bosses,

instantly the wall goes up. I mean, it did it for me, and I

support it. You know, it's just because well, that's not what

I'm used to, how do you, but then you go back to those

numbers. And when I was when I was, you know, putting the intro

together, and I was thinking about it. All I keep coming back

to is, well, gee, it's not working. It's clearly not

working. So yeah, maybe maybe a very drastic approach. And just

saying, Okay, we're going to pull the, I mean, maybe that is

the way to go. But you need kind of start there, right to make

any progress. You need to kind of go to the extremes. And so I

appreciate you kind of just jumping into the middle with me.

And now let's back up and kind of go back to the beginning. And

tell me, first of all, why did you write this book? What was

the wall of why did you feel like, like you said, you're a

software engineer. Why did you feel like this was something

that you had to write?

Matt K. Parker: Okay, so I'm a software engineer. So it was my

dad. And so it was my dad's dad. So I'm a third generation

programmer and growing up, and I sort of looked up to them heard

their funny stories about working in software, I heard

early stories about what it was like to carry punch cards around

and, you know, hand them to the operator and come back the next

day and the operator did tell you, your program doesn't work.

And that's literally, you know, the whole error statement. They

say, What's wrong, you know, anyways, I looked up to them

growing up, I had this image in my mind of how awesome it was

going to be once I started to get paid for programs. Right, I

didn't really start learning programming until I was in high

school. But, you know, it was just such a connection for me so

much passion I had for it. And then I went into industry, and

very quickly realized that what I thought was going to be the

case was not at all the case, right? Like, I thought I was

going to love doing this job. And it turned out very quickly,

I started to hate it, right, because everywhere I went,

whether it was a large financial enterprise, or a small startup,

it seemed like I was, I was in an environment in which people

had said, Hey, how could we take all that fun out of programming

all the creativity out of it? How could we, you know, put

people together and make them work on something for two years,

never deploy it, and then throw away? Throw it away at the end?

Like, what would that do to their souls? I don't know. Let's

try it. And like, I just kept having these dystopian

experiences in which I started to not even want to program

anymore, right? I didn't even want to touch a computer, the

second I left work, and I really even got to the point where I

thought, okay, maybe I just need to pick a new industry, maybe I

need to reevaluate my life. As this was sort of coming to a

head, I got an email from a recruiter that worked directly

for a little company called Pivotal Labs, which had a few

offices in the States at the time, this was late 2011. And

she reached out to me and said, Hey, we saw some of your open

source work. You want to come interview? We're right around

the corner from you? Yes, I do. I'll come interview and all I

really knew about them was their Pivotal Tracker, really, you

know, product management software. And one of my co

workers who I told him, I'm gonna go try and interview

there, he stopped me and he said, Don't do it. Don't do it.

Don't you know, they pair program? Don't you know, you

have to share a computer with somebody else, right? It's

crazy. It's, it's like agile on steroids. It's nuts. Don't do

it. I was like, Well, I'm miserable. And I have nothing to

lose. And I went and did it. And I loved it. Because the

experience of actually making software with others on a basis

of partnership and a quality, the experience of having

autonomy of backlog of going after a goal. But as a team

having the autonomy to figure out day to day, what are we

doing to get there, right? To put software in the hands of

users to quickly validate or invalidate what we thought was

true, to turn that around into something else, right to go

through that learning cycle over and over again, and to see some

pretty amazing results, right? To not only feel good, like,

Hey, I'm having fun programming, again, with people I work with.

But also, we're doing some pretty awesome stuff. And we're

quickly getting results like that really turned my life back

around. It made me it sort of made me reimagined so many

things were possible in the world of software development.

And that experience of radical collaboration I had for many

years, I played many different roles, as you alluded to. And I

began to eventually ask myself, why did this work? What made it

work? What's good about it? Why did it feel good for me? Why did

it lead to good things for customers? And is it just

software? Or is this experience happening in other industries,

right, and through a lot of trial and error and eventual,

like a lot of research and going out to companies and

interviewing them and in a reading my eyes out and trying

to synthesize all that back together, I eventually sort of

stumbled into this whole world of radical collaboration, all

the research around it, how it manifests in many different

industries, and a lot of sort of the, you know, theories about

what makes us all sort of fit together, tie together and lead

to the result that it does.

Jason Baum: I'm not sure if you're a fan, but as you are

describing the early days there of your experience in the

software industry. There's one movie in particular that comes

to mind. I think that Mike Judge is probably one of the smartest

filmmakers, television creators of all time. And he had the

movie back in the 90s office space. And and they they capture

that what you're describing, I think perfectly. You know, did

you put your cover on the TPS report and like to find 10

different bosses ask you did you put the TPS cover on your TPS

report? And like, yeah, like you're saying like, needless,

like, senseless bureaucracy that, like, doesn't make it's

there to drive you insane. I think that's its only purpose. I

think that's, that's so great that like how you just described

it. So tell me more about collaborative organizations,

radically collaborative organizations. You know, what

are they and why are they growing and preference

prevalence around the world?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah. Okay. So what are they? They are

organizations that I think broadly speaking, we can say,

they've sort of looked out and said, Wow, people can do really

amazing things when they actually care about what they

do, and they love what they do and they enjoy doing it and

doing it with the people around them. It's a How can we design

an organization in which we are you know, supercharging this

power of intrinsic motivation, right. How are we creating an

organization in which we are supercharging the ability for a

group of people to come together and collectively innovate in

ways that no single person could have done on their own. Right?

And what stands in the way of that? Right. So a lot of

companies around the world have come to the conclusion that

there's fundamentally two things that stand in the way that that

most traditional companies have. And it's domination and

coercion. Right? Most companies are structured in what

sociologists refer to as a dominator hierarchy. And that's

really just a statement for a system in which people are

ordered by rank, right in which power privileges, resources,

judgments, etc, are privileged and distributed by that rank and

concentrated at the top. Right. And so that static sort of

privileging of that power leads to an important corollary, which

is coercion, right? It gives people within that hierarchy

coercive power over the people beneath them in the hierarchy.

Those two things are what sociologists and psychologists

refer to as a growth inhibiting environment. They're an

environment that actively undermines security, autonomy,

fairness, esteem, trust, belongingness, meaning purpose,

right, just by design, they're there every day, inhibiting

those things. And those things are really what stand at the

human level, the human sort of foundation of radical

collaboration, right? environments that are rich, and

trust, security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, etc, are the

kinds of environments that we want to create, because those so

strongly correlate with these outsize economic outcomes with

innovation with collective performance, etc. And so these

companies have said, Okay, what does it mean to create an

organization, which is still structured? Right, and yet, it's

not structured as a hierarchy? Well, the term for that is

called a heterarchy. Right? I heterarchy. The difference

between heterarchy and hierarchies, hierarchies are

structured on a basis of linking, as opposed to a

hierarchy was structured on the basis of ranking. Right. So how

are the roles within the organization linked together?

How are they complementary? What does success mean for any given

role? And what does that roles domain have authority? In other

words, what does that role have autonomous decision making

rights about? There's a lot of thought that goes into? How do

we create that for each role within the company? And how do

we make sure these roles are complementary, not

contradictory, that they're clear that anyone who accepts a

role within this organization or organization has a clear domain

of authority that empowers them to make meaningful decisions

because that's what autonomy it is. Tanami is the process of

making meaningful decisions having choice. That's what it

really boils down to, both for individuals and for teams. Okay,

so then what you end up seeing sort of at a high level on the

structural side, in these radically collaborative

organizations is Team autonomy and managerial devolution team

autonomy is probably what it sounds like, to all of your

listeners, right is is teams that have autonomy, a backlog,

right teams that are going after a goal but decide day to day how

they get there, right? It's teams in which authority has

been pushed to information, right, the people on the

frontlines getting all the information about what's

working, and what's not also have the appropriate domains of

authority to make decisions based on that information,

instead of running it up the hierarchy and flagpole and

hoping somebody at the top makes a decision for them. Okay? And

then managerial devolution really refers to a process of

decentralizing those power structures, really taking the

process of how do we iterate on this business, right? And the

business of how we do business, right? How do we iterate on our

structure, on our roles, on our relationships, on our teams, on

our practices, processes, et cetera? How do we do that in a

way that's not based on domination and coercion, but

based on partnership and equality. And so there are many

different ways these companies have developed and experimented

with decentralized forms of governance. And so at a high

level, that's sort of what you can see. And I just want to give

you a couple of companies as an example. Yeah, it'd be great.

Yeah, so I was gonna say, what, what is the like real world

application? Yes. Doing this? Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you an

example of a large company for so hire is the number one

appliance manufacturer in the world and they're increasingly

the number one smart home appliance manufacturer in the

world. Ha, i e, Rs, how they're spelled higher. They're actually

the parent company of GE Appliances. That's how big they

are. They own GE Appliances. Okay, so higher over the past 40

years, went from a very command and control top down and very

ineffective bureaucratic organization, to a pioneer and

radical collaboration, right. And the way they structure the

80,000 people that work at higher now is through something

that they refer to as micro enterprises. So they took those

80,000 people and they said, actually, what we need to do is

to break all of this up into small teams of entrepreneurial

units, right micro enterprises, teams that own their own p&l,

right teams that own their own balance sheets, teams whose pay

is derived from the value that they generate, right and that we

need to create a sort of marketplace or a sort of

incubator for being able to spin up these micro enterprises.

Their CEO refers to this, by the way, as a host of dragons

without a leader. He says that every, every micro enterprise is

like a dragon. And the dragon is the mightiest animal and Chinese

culture. And all of these teams can sort of start their own

products and services on this internal marketplace, right

without the guidance of a leader. And he says that's the

highest level of human governance. And that's what they

all have created at higher. Okay, so that was the process of

getting there. By the way, since they didn't start with it was

like all over the place, right? They tried many different

varieties of organizational structures before eventually

pioneering this approach. One other example that I'll give you

is a company called Morningstar. Now, Morningstar is quite

different. But it's still radically collaborative, unlike

Haier, which is all these sort of autonomous micro enterprises

that can relate to each other at will, or go outside the company.

And, you know, it's sort of almost like a mini free

enterprise, right? Or an internal free enterprise.

Morningstar is quite the opposite. Morningstar has a very

specific thing they do. They take tomato, raw tomatoes, and

they turn them into tomato products, like dice to moves,

puree, right, all the kinds of stuff that eventually winds up

in like your Heinz ketchup bottle, or your Canada tomato

sauce, probably came from this company Morningstar, because

even though they were only started 30 years ago, they were

start. They're the number one tomato processor in the world,

the largest tomato processor in the world by volume.And their

entire structure is radically collaborative. The founder

started it with the belief that all of these companies out there

doing tomato processing were overly bureaucratic, were not

giving people any sort of autonomy or sense of equality in

the job, not letting people make meaningful decisions. They said,

Guess what? We're all going to be equals. And we're all going

to start every year without titles. And every year, we're

going to say to ourselves, how are we going to take this year's

tomato crops and turn them into products for our customers,

dyes, tomatoes, puree, etc? What are we going to do? Who's going

to do what what commitments are we making to each other? He

said, we can all do this in the real world. We are all adults

out there. We're all buying homes, having families doing all

kinds of things, buying cars, right? We're all collaborating,

cooperating or competing with each other, right? Through

autonomy. Well, why can't we do that within our company, it

turns out you can and they became the number one tomato

processor in the world by doing this. They call them Colleague

Letters of understanding. That's what they write every single

year. And they've maintained them throughout the year two is

their understanding of what they need to do changes. But they're

basically encapsulating the commitments that each individual

makes to some other individual or group of individuals in the

company. Here's what I'm doing for you this year. And that's

how we're going to make this happen this year. So anyway,

it's a very different sort of structure for radical

collaboration. But I think it just sort of paints a picture of

the breadth that we have in this whole spectrum,

Jason Baum: and very different companies that you just gave

examples. Okay, I look, I want to say this. I think this is

fascinating. And I am I love this. I am a fan of this. Now

let me put the host devil's advocate hat on. Okay, so it's

it's a company where everyone's kind of in the same same boat,

leadership wise, they're all the same level. They're all working

collaboratively. And there's not necessarily a hierarchy yet. I'm

assuming they're like you said, there's a CEO. So there's some

type of hierarchy. This sort of sounds like communism, Matt.

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, I can see. Yeah, you know, and I sort of

had these. I guess you could say, fears going into it, like,

what is this office really, and, and what I came out was sort of

the opposite. I think a lot of I mean, like, actually, I think

what you could say is Morningstar is sort of the

opposite of communism. It's like libertarianism, right? Hire, as

a company said, hey, you know, what's awesome about the free

market, its ability to scale. And its ability to do that

without any centralized command and control, right? There's no

five year plans, there's no like, you know, crazy budgeting

that goes on to run a free market, right? It's actually all

these autonomous agents that are contracting with each other

competing with each other collaborating all at will,

right. And it's leading to these amazing things that we see

around the world. Can we take that? Can we take that sense of

freedom, right, that sense of agency, ownership,

accountability, that that we see in those sorts of systems,

right, those sort of free enterprise systems, and can we

bring them down to our company level? Right? And so I know why

you would, you would say like, Hey, this sounds like communism.

But I think actually, when you look into it more and more, you

realize it's sort of the opposite i Here's another

example. By the way, Matt Black systems is a small case study

that they do in the book, and they are a small manufacturing

company. They make instruments that go in like the cockpits of

airplanes, right and they went through their own radically

colaborative transformation, they were trying all kinds of

stuff to turn the business around, they tried lean, they

tried agile, they did all these things they brought in all of

these consultants, nothing was working. And they sort of came

to the same realization. Like, what if it was just very clear

to everyone the value they created, the commitments they

were making to each other. And what if the money they took home

with them at the end of the day was related to that, right there

related to their ability to all collaborate and create,

ultimately value for our customers. And so they created a

fractal organization that's yet another sort of radically

collaborative organizational type. And so at matte black

systems, every single person is a virtual company, every single

person has their own individual profit and loss statement, every

single person has their own balance sheet. The second they

did this, by the way, the second day, just distributed a balance

sheets into the company, the workers got together and said,

Wow, you know, what we should do, we should sell off 50% of

the manufacturing equipment on our work floor that's just

sitting there collecting dust, because as long as it sits here

on our balance sheet, right, we have all this debt hanging over

us, right, we should sell it off. And we will all be more

profitable as a result, right. And so you can think about like

that as sort of making it very clear, and giving a lot of sort

of both decision making power, but also making it very clear

with what the consequences of a decision is, to people right to

a group at large.

Jason Baum: The tools we use as a team have a direct influence

on how we work together. And the success we create. We built

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range.com/devops To learn more, and try arrange for it.

Anyway, I think that's fascinating, you know, when a

company gives you like shares, for example, that's their way of

saying, Well, you have a stake in the company, and it's like,

okay, but it's gonna take you four years to be vested, you

might not get that there's a percentage taken out of this.

And you know, when we go public, it's not going to be. So that's,

it's like, that's always a nice to have, but it's not like I

don't think anybody's gotten a share. And it's like, I own the

company. You know, but your own balance sheet. Yeah. And all of

a sudden, you're thinking, how can I save us some money, like

there's some ownership there, because there's some true

ownership there. That's, that's, that's really interesting. I

also love that you are giving examples of companies that are

larger, because the thing that was always said to me when I you

know, sometimes I I talk too much. And I'm like, sometimes

the one who like says, oh, we should do this. And it's like,

some align those so told to me once is Do you know how long it

takes to turn a cruise ship. And it's I, I get it. But the fact

that you are giving these really like these, in hires case, like

these enormous, massive companies, and they're doing it

to me, there's no excuse why? No one can say, well, yeah, that

works for maybe a small company that can be lean. But you know,

for a big organization that doesn't a big company, I can't

really work. So I, you know, gosh, there are so many places

we could go here. Because I think you're making this sound

much more real to me, which is, which is good. So how do we make

people understand this? How do we get more companies to say,

you know, do more people need to leave jobs. I actually said

once, when we were first talking about the grit break

resignation, I'm worried that all these people leaving the

jobs that they hate are just going to these new companies

that just lost someone because they hated their job. And now we

are just constantly going for back company by company by

company. No one's actually changing anything. So how do we

change it?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, well, all right. So this is a question

that I tackle in the book. I mean, on the one hand, we can

say, why has it grown in the first place? Right? How why have

we gone from 1% to 8% of companies around the world,

somehow fitting this bill? Right. And I think there's many

different things that we can point to. But I don't want to

undersell the fact that a lot of this ultimately does come back

to the fact that these companies are economically successful,

right, that they are actually having outsize sort of outcomes

in the marketplace, right? That they are out competing, much

more traditional and much more slow competitors, right. So that

alone, right, I think leads to an an element of growth, because

all right, people may be stuck in their ways. People may want

things to be a certain way or don't want to give up certain

sorts of sorts of power. But at the end of the day, companies

want to succeed, they want to compete, they want to make

money, right? They want to grow, right? And so if you care about

those things, you are naturally going to be looking at certain

competitors coming at you and saying what Are they doing

different? And when one of those competitors is hire, right, or

Morningstar, or you know, any other company, like even some

smaller, like startups, right, that are doing these sorts of

things, too. And suddenly having success in the marketplace in

bigger companies are like, what are we doing wrong? You know,

you're going to ask yourself those kind of questions, and

you're going to either start to emulate what they're doing, and

thereby trying to like, have the same success that they're

having, or you're going to just continue to see your

marketplace, your position in the market, erode, etc. So

there's that aspect to it that I think is just working in our

favor. That being said, I don't think it's enough. And you asked

me in the beginning, why did I write a book? It's partly

because I don't think it's enough, right? I think

conversations like this books like the one I've written,

which, by the way, is just one of many in this whole genre,

looking at this sort of phenomenon that's happening now.

Right, but I just want to make my own contribution to it and

point it at my own peers, right. I've talked about manufacturing

companies and stuff so far, but I also looked at many technology

companies that are doing this, and trying to understand what it

what makes it work in the world of technology, right? Not just

the one I came out of but and others that are doing radical

collaboration as well. And and I want people to be able to look

at those take inspiration from it, and be able to start to

begin radically collaborative experiments and transformations

within their own space. Yeah, I'll stop there.

Jason Baum: Ya know, it's, I keep going, I hear you talk

about this all day. So where I want to go next is to my

question, because you said, you know, companies, it's the money,

right? It's if the money it's talking, though, listen, you

know, obviously we're capitalists. At the end of the

day, if you're a capitalist communist doesn't matter. Right?

We're all motivated by by capitalism. So and ourselves to

write those numbers that I read at the beginning, why do people

leave? They're not getting enough money? There are is no,

no advancements, no opportunity for advancement, and they're

feeling disrespected. Okay, feeling disrespected. I think in

some ways with this, we can understand how that would

change. Right? opportunities for advancement? Well, that's

certainly taken care of, what about the pay? So in these these

types of structured, where we're so used to you climb the ladder?

If the ladder is not there anymore? How do you climb from a

PayScale? Because I'm still interested in climbing. I don't

necessarily care if I'm called a, you know, Chief, you know,

creative couch potato, but like, how am I making money? You know,

like, is that still part of it?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's a great question, too.

And it's one that I devote a fair amount of words to in the

book, because when when you look at systems of domination and

coercion and traditional companies, a lot of it does

revolve around the way people are paid. The way people get

raises, or don't get raises, right, the way compensation

happens, and performance reviews around etcetera, etcetera,

right. And promotions, obviously, are tied up into it.

So many of us want to climb the ladder, because we need more

money, we want more money for our families for a better life,

etc. send our kids to a better college, all that kind of stuff,

right? And so, if you if you eliminate coercive forms of pay,

right, then how do you actually grow your own pay within a

radical collaborative company, if it's not pretty pleasing the

boss and trying to win that promotion right over your peers?

Right? So you get a bigger piece of the pie? What is it? All

right? Well, actually, there's many different answers here. One

of them I already sort of have pointed to, right, when we talk

about backpack systems and hire, they both have forms of pay,

that are very tightly correlated, and they're

essentially a function of the value created either as

individuals or as teams, right? Either as a fractal company,

right, a virtual company of one like in the matte black systems

example, or as a micro enterprise, right, a small team

who's basically saying our pay is derived from the amount of

profit that we can point to that we're generating on our own sort

of internal free market. Okay, so that's one form of pay, but

there are many others. Who Gore's another company I should

mention, right, it's, you know, 15,000 people around the globe.

Now, it's doing several billion dollars worth of revenue every

year. They're the people behind like, coretec, waterproof

fabric, glide dental floss, elixir guitar strings, right.

They're an innovation and r&d, manufacturing innovation

organization, right? They've been doing this since 1958.

Guess what they were started by four chemists who got together

and said, We hate working for this big bureaucratic company

that we work for. They're they're squashing all of our

innovation. Why don't we get together and do something

different? And why don't we make a company that makes innovation

and supporting that, like the goal here, right? They got

together and they made a radical collaborative organization. And

it's really one of the longest lived experiments in America

that we can point to in this way of working. Okay, so the way

they do pay is that your peers decide your pay. Whatever team

you're on, you decide your peers pay and they decide yours.

That's how they do it. It's called peer set salary. Right?

That's their approach to doing it. Here's another approach to

self manage pay grant tree. For instance, in the UK, which I

talked about in the, in the, in the book, as well as peer group,

are both companies that do self managed PE, where essentially

you say, how much money you want to make you say openly to the

rest of the company, you give yourself that amount of money,

you give yourself a raise if you want to, but you do it

transparently. Right? Keep in mind, too, that the checks and

balances within these companies are real. And many of these

companies hiring and firing have been devolved into the

organization as well, like nirsoft. Now, calling Corp is a

great example of this. Anyone in the company, right? Any team can

get together and decide this person's gotta go, and they can

fire you. Well, okay, so if you're standing there and

saying, I'm going to make a million dollars, now, I deserve

that kind of salary, your peers could turn back to you and say,

ha, you're done. Now, that's insane. You can't do like being

in a co op. It is. Co Ops, co ops, are another form of radical

collaborative structure that is gaining prominence now in the

world. In fact, one of my friends who used to work at

Pivotal Labs left created his own consulting company and has

turned it into a co op. Right? And so he and all the other

consultants in the company collectively own it. Right. So

anyways, there's all these fascinating approaches. One more

I'll mention by the way that your audience might find

interesting is called the Deming taste system. It's named after

W. Edwards Deming, right, the forefather of lean

manufacturing, and certainly a progenitor for systems thinking.

Right. Really fascinating thing here. Well, one of the things he

thought a lot about was pay, right. And based on his approach

to thinking in systems, he said, Actually, we shouldn't pretend

that our companies are a meritocracy, right, we shouldn't

pretend that we can figure out what it is that we can say this

person's contribution is due to them this amount, and therefore

they should make this amount of pay. He said, actually, a bad

system will be a good person every time. Right. And so our

focus has to be on improving the system. Right? That has to be

our primary focus, let's create a pay system that reflects that

primary focus, right? Let's make sure that everyone knows coming

in how much money this role makes day one, what, how much

raise you get every single year that you're in that role? Right?

And let's also take profit sharing and distribute that

equally. So that quarterly dividend distributed equally to

every single member of that organization? Right, okay. Well,

despite the fact that he won, like the one of the Coppa

economic freedom medal from Ronald Reagan, right, he not a

lot of companies were keen on his idea around pay at the time,

right. But companies now a lot of companies are doing this.

They're creating their own versions of the Deming pace

system, they're making it open and transparent, and

collectively also deciding the numbers themselves. Here's what

this rule makes, here's how much raise you get every year, we

don't pretend like we can look at you and say what your

performances and give you a raise based on that we're

actually focused on the system itself. And that's how our pay

works.

Jason Baum: I love that version, what you just said it actually

and the fact that you, you kind of ended on that one is, I'm so

glad because I was actually going to go back to the

performance review real quick. But also, before I get that

pure, manage pay, that's terrible. By the way, my peers

are going to tell me what to me. I don't know, I better be very,

I guess it encourages you to be be nice to everybody. That's

what that's what that will do. But the performance review, and

kind of what you just said, like being told, Hey, you're doing a

good job. Well, I think if it's kind of, you're either going to

be doing a good job or a bad job a bad enough job that you're

going to be let go. So I think if you're still there,

obviously, you're doing a good enough job I think in a world

like for so this is DevOps, right? This is humans of DevOps.

In a when we're encouraging blameless culture, we're

encouraging a culture of incidents are okay, they're

going to happen. You know, like, it's how we learn. It's, it's,

it's, it goes back to I always compare this to parenting,

because it's like, how would we talk to our child? It's like,

accidents are okay? Like, you're allowed to make mistakes, how

are we going to grow if we don't make those mistakes? So when you

when you have these reviews, and it's like sometimes they're just

literally, you know, can checklists that you have to go

through when it's what are you really gleaming from them? I

personally don't like doing performance reviews or having

performance reviews because I don't think they accomplish

anything other than it's just another form of bureaucracy. I

think you need to have immediate check ins you you constantly are

in the loop as to what's going on. When you have these daily

check ins or weekly, bi weekly or whatever you're style is, but

continuous feedback, right? It's the continuous feedback. So

there's nothing no surprises, there's no quarterly surprise

coming your way. And when pay is told to you upfront, this is

what this position makes. You know, there's no $50,000 scale

or something when you're, you know, getting talking to the

recruiters or whatever. And then when you're there, yeah, this is

how much is increases every year. And you can expect that it

takes away so much of the pressure that we have on

ourselves to know what we're going to be dealing with every

year. Totally.

Matt K. Parker: Yeah. I mean, yeah, no, I actually, you know,

you said, I don't think these performance reviews, do

anything. I think they do do something. And I think it's very

bad, right? I think ultimately, right? Performance reviews.

They're based on a very outdated, antiquated and

debunked theory of human motivation. It's called

behavioral ism, right? It's turned back in the early 20th

century, when people started studying behavior in rats. And

then they began to extrapolate a lot about what they learned

about rats to people, right. And then from even the scientific

statements made along those lines, which are no longer even

considered valid science, right, we have then taken a version of

that a warped version of that into pop culture right now we

have pop behavioral ism. And so it systems of management in most

companies and pay systems of pay and most companies are based on

a belief that you have to use carrots and sticks to get

performance right. And this is actually been debunked by the

last 75 years of research into behavioral science. Broadly

speaking, we can refer to two basic theories about human

motivation. One is called Theory X. The other is called Theory Y.

Right? Theory X is a pictorial mnemonic, by the way, imagine a

worker holding their hands up and the next in front of them,

what are they saying, screw, I'm not going to do anything unless

you force me to. I'm lazy, I'm recalcitrant. So unless you're

putting a pretty big carrot in front of me, you're not gonna

get performance out of me. That's Theory X. And if you

treat your workforce, as if they all conform, that theory acts as

if they're all lazy and recalcitrant. And you whip them

with disincentives. And you you know, carrot them with pay

incentives and stuff like that. The thing is, what we've

discovered is that although they started as human beings with

intrinsic motivation, you turn them into human beings who can

only be who will only perform based on extrinsic motivations,

theory acts as a self fulfilling prophecy, theory wise, another

pictorial pneumonic, imagine a worker holding their hands up in

a while like this, what are they saying? They're saying, Yay, I'm

glad to be here. I like working right. I like my job. I'm

passionate about programming. For instance, I want to do that

I started as theory Why, what did I become after 10 years in

our industry Theory X, right? I didn't want to do anything

anymore. I was so demotivated by everything. Right. And I'm not

the only one, you said in the in the introduction, 84% of people

around the world are disengaged at work. And by the way, a fair

number of those are actively disengaged, they're actively

creating toxic situations for themselves and the people around

them, they are so upset with the way things are, right. That's

the kind of thing that we create with old school ideas about

people about behavior and about motivation. And that's what we

have to change. And that's part of this radically collaborative

revolution.

Jason Baum: I think that is an excellent place to kind of to

stop, I want to keep going. So I think we're going to have to do

this again. Maybe in a Twitter space, maybe another another

venues, the more that we could, I would love to continue this

conversation with you. I think this is absolutely fascinating.

And, Matt, you're not off the hook just yet. Because we always

like to close with 111 more question. I don't like for this

to be a gotcha question. But I kind of do it. It's always a

little more personal. This one's This one's not necessarily as

personal. What's one question you wished I'd asked you? And

then how would you answer it?

Matt K. Parker: Okay, well, this, I wish that we had had the

time to talk about one of the imperatives actually two of the

imperatives that we haven't really covered at all. I'll pick

one deficiency need gratification? Here's how I

would answer it. If you had said What the heck is that? Here's my

30-second Answer. Human beings are different from other

animals. We don't just need water, food, shelter, right? We

need love, security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, trust,

meaning, we are meaning beings. We're not just physical beings,

right? The companies that I profiled in the book, right, and

that I talk about a lot of their practices, a lot of what they

have thought about is how do we create environments that are

high in what psychologists refer to as deficiency need

gratification, right high in environments in which people

mutually satisfy each other's need for those human needs for

security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, etc. Right? And they

have little practices that they do every day. They have big

practices that they do once a year, and everything sort of in

between for maintaining a culture. That feels good, right?

All the Ellen with us, psychologists like Abraham

Maslow, Carl Rogers, Romae, many others in the sort of mid 20th

century, they were all saying, We believe that what is good for

people will also be good for organizations. And we wish these

companies believed us. And we wish they would focus on

creating great environments for people, because I think it'll

help them be great organizations. The truth is,

they didn't know they didn't have the empirical data to say

for sure whether or not that was true. That's no longer a, maybe

it's true, it's a definite truth. Now, we have lots of

empirical data that says there is a strong correlation between

between environments that are good for humans and environments

that are good for organizations and results that are good for

organizations. So I'll end with that. It's just another aspect

of this whole dimension that is really important to consider and

explore. If you're going down this path.

Jason Baum: it's

We're gonna change up the structure of this podcast,

because I'm so motivated now. And inspired. So I have a follow

up to this, too, that we spent a lot of time on my, on my

conversation last week, on generations, and we talked about

Gen Z, and what motivates them. And this is they are, I think,

in many ways the millennials are are value driven, certainly, but

not as passionate. Gen Z, is value driven, and they're gonna

be in your face about it. Do you see Gen Z? Like everything else?

I think, do you see them being as they get into the workforce,

and they learn more about the structures, and they're vocal?

Do you think that there's an opportunity here with Gen Z

coming into the workforce for this to really take off?

Matt K. Parker: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it's being

referred to now as the passion paradigm, in sort of behavioral

science, literature and organizational literature,

exploring this sort of explosion in the value placed on having a

job that you're passionate about doing work that you care about,

that you find meaning in, right, it's growing and growing and

growing. And I don't know, I, I personally don't have the data

in front of me to say that, truly, there is like a

significant and meaningful difference between the way this

was expressed in the previous generation and the current

generation or anything like that. But the fact that it's

growing, his true nonetheless, right. And maybe it's growing

across the board for everyone alive today. Or maybe it's just

a small segment of it. But it is a meme at the end of the day,

that that is captivating, more and more people. And it's

spreading that meme, right? That that I think is part and parcel

of continuing this quiet revolution in the way we work,

right? I'm using meme not in the sense of, you know, pictures on

the internet. I'm using it in the original sense that Richard

Dawkins proposed it right. A meme is a unit of cultural

propagation. It passes from person to person, it's how we

spread our culture, right? And the fact that that's spreading,

and it's finding more and more currency in the world.

Absolutely. Points to there's something big on the horizon,

right? Like this great resignation, right, as you

mentioned, in the beginning, right, is actually about

creating a world in which we have more meaning and purpose in

our lives, right, in which we say, enough is enough, right? We

are not going to take it anymore, we actually deserve

better, and we can create better. I'll end with this. A

coworker a long time ago, he looked at me one day, and he

said, We're adulting wrong. And he sort of was, you know, he

didn't really explain it at the time. But I think that his

statement, we're adulting wrong, encapsulates what so much of us

feel, but the flip side of that is, why not adult right? We can

make any sort of world we want. There's nothing about this world

that, that, that and especially the human side of this world,

that is necessary or final, right, we can get together and

change what we do, what we experience, how we experience it

together and make it what we want it to be. And I think

that's what this was all about. And, and as much as Gen Z is and

it's sort of on the forefront of expressing this potential.

Absolutely. We should leverage it and run with it and follow

Jason Baum: We are adulting wrong. Matt, thank you so much.

their lead.

Matt Parker, Matt K parker.com. And I think this this was such a

great conversation. I had such a good time. I hope you did too.

Radical enterprises the book, Matt, thanks again. And thank

you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much. And thank you

for listening to this episode. The humans of DevOps podcast,

I'm going to end this episode the same way I always do

encourage you to become a member and join us in the community at

DevOps Institute DevOps in the wild, to get access to even more

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