Critical Review: Freckleton, I, Q.C., 2020. COVID-19: Fear, quackery, false representations and the law.

Critical Review: Freckleton, I, Q.C., 2020. COVID-19: Fear, quackery, false representations and the law. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 72, p.101611.

(Originally submitted as coursework towards my Masters in Global Public Health at the University of Manchester)

In this paper, Ian Freckleton Q.C. argues that depictions of previous epidemics and pandemics in religious texts, literature and television, as well as fictional depictions in books, film and video games, heighten and exacerbate fears related to the Covid-19 pandemic. He also suggests that this state of heightened fear and anxiety can cause people, particularly laypeople, to be more vulnerable to exploitation by ‘quackery’, or “the promotion of unsubstantiated methods that lack a scientifically plausible rationale” (Barrett, 2009). 

To conclude, the author posits three key recommendations to combat this problem.

  1. Provision of calm, “medico-scientifically, evidence-based” information to the public about effective treatments, and warnings about ineffective ones.
  2. ‘Cease and desist’ warnings against those promoting unproven treatments or making exaggerated claims. 
  3. Robust, well-publicised and assertive legal action against those who sell unproven and/or harmful treatments or prophylactics against Covid-19.

The paper begins with a vivid description from poet Ieuan Gethin of his 1349 experience of the plague, which killed him later that year (Alchemipedia, 2009). This sets an emotive tone which continues throughout the paper. The focus of the paper then is largely on the fear caused by the emergence of a pandemic-causing disease, particularly that felt by lay people who may not be able to “exercise medico-scientific discernment”. Arguably, Freckleton’s stance is a privileged one; he appears to adopt a deficit mindset, which considers lay people deficient in their ability to make rational decisions about their own health. He positions the emotionality and ignorance of lay people in stark contrast with the cool rationalism of the scientific ‘experts’. 

Freckleton’s lack of empathy with the ‘deficit lay people’ creates something of an irony in his failure to acknowledge the barriers they may face in accessing scientific information. The journal this paper was published in costs $35.95 to access, unless you happen to have access through an academic institution. An alternative would be to publish in an “Open Access” journal, which would have bolstered his stance by making sure members of the public are able to access it. Furthermore the language of the paper itself seems at times deliberately inaccessible. For example “The diathesis stress model is useful in this context. It postulates that if the combination of predisposition and stressor exceed a threshold, this can result in the development of pathology” (p. 4).  Even for those used to reading academic texts, the language is opaque. When asserting that lay people are more easily swayed by scams and quackery, it might have been illuminating for Freckleton to reflect on why people consume and trust information that they can access easily.

Another trap Freckleton seems to fall into is that of assuming causality. He spends two pages listing pandemics and diseases in ancient history, theology, literature and film, using this to assert that “a variety of influences can combine to generate high levels of fear and anxiety,” (pp.4). Whilst this may be true, no causal relationship between these influences in literature, films or video games and the lived experiences of those during Covid-19 is demonstrated or referenced.

Freckleton’s conclusions are similarly problematic. His first conclusion assumes that the provision of calm, “medico-scientific, evidence-based” information to the public about effective treatments, and warnings about ineffective ones, will result in reduced harm. However, no evidence is offered in this paper that communicating “medico-scientific” information would have any effect on the likelihood of people being able to discern a proven treatment from an unproven one. It is well documented that it can require much greater effort to refute falsehoods and misrepresentation than to create them, a phenomenon known as Brandolini’s Principle, or “The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle” (Williamson, 2016); it is easy, for example, to claim a teapot exists on the surface of Mars, but it would require much effort, including missions to Mars and accurate teapot-detection equipment to refute such a claim. Brandolini’s principle is highly relevant to claims of Covid-19 miracle treatments, and as shown by Vijaykumar (2021), combating these claims is not as simple as providing evidence-based information to the public. In some demographics, a “backfire” effect has also been shown, where “corrective” evidence-based information strengthens beliefs in falsehoods (Lewandowsky et al, 2012).  Provision of “medico-scientific, evidence-based” information to people can solidify the belief in unproven treatments via confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998). The same confirmation bias, created by an “epistemic vacuum” left by a distrust in modern science, the pharmaceutical industry, or western medicine, can lead people to believe that the “evidence based” information is the falsehood, strengthening a belief in false or unproven claims (Pierre, 2020).

It may be that Freckleton is suggesting that evidence-based information needs to be presented to the public before they see misleading information. This would align with other studies which show that once people are exposed to misinformation, such as conspiracy theories, evidence refuting them is ineffective, whilst being presented with evidence prior to exposure can “inoculate” against those beliefs (Jolley and Douglas, 2017). However, the practicality of this is questionable, given that even pre-social media, “a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” (Pratchett, 2000). In the age of the internet, false news spreads faster still (Vosoughi et al, 2018). To get in front of false news, with true, appropriate and accessible evidence in order to combat falsehoods would be challenging at best.

Freckleton accuses “laypeople” of being unable to apply proper scientific discernment, failing to recognise his own confirmation bias in the assumption that people, including himself, make objective judgements grounded upon evidence-based information. A single positive research paper for homeopathy can convince someone of its effectiveness, whilst thousands of papers showing otherwise will be ignored (Chirumbolo, 2013). Ironically, Freckleton’s conclusion that “evidence based information will result in people making the correct decisions” is not evidence based at all.

Freckleton’s second conclusion assumes that cease and desist warnings against those promoting unproven treatments or making exaggerated claims will result in decreased harm. Most worryingly, he fails to differentiate between claims made as a result of intentional deception for monetary gain, claims that well-intentioned are largely harmless such as the use of vitamin supplements, and folk medicine recommendations where no money changes hands. Folk medicine, it is important to note, is not “quackery” (Barrett, 2009), and whilst folk treatments may be unproven, they can be founded on solid evidential grounds, such as the potential for Clove (Syzygium aromaticum L.) in treatment of Covid-19 (Vicidomini et al, 2021). The “medico-scientific” approach to health in the West and the increased distancing of the health system from the patients it serves has contributed to the expansion of folk medicine (Bakx, 1991). It would be inappropriate and counterproductive to include folk medicine in the realm of quackery.

Freckleton’s failure to differentiate between malicious intent such as those marketing bleach as “Miracle Mineral Solution” and well-intentioned modern, homeopathic or folk remedies belies his own bias. At one end of the spectrum, bleach is sold as a treatment that “can rid the body of Covid-19” (Mark Grenon in his letter to Donald Trump, in Pilkington, 2020), and at the other end, Ayurvedic practitioners suggest drinking warm water, moving (“yogasana”), breathing (“pranayama”) and meditating. It should be fair to say that one end of the spectrum warrants legal action, and the other end is at worst a harmless way to spend time. Where the line should be drawn is surely a question worthy of consideration, and Freckleton fails to recognise this nuance. 

Freckleton’s third conclusion implies that robust, well-publicised and assertive legal action against those who sell unproven and/or harmful treatments for Covid-19 will reduce harm. Here it is worth noting Freckleton’s position as a practitioner of law; arguably this conclusion is a case of ‘a hammer looking for a nail.’ His narrative is sound – he shows that in early pandemics, unscrupulous quacks would take advantage of the desperate in order to make money from treatments they knew would not work. He also explains that as society has progressed, so too have the legal mechanisms by which these charlatans and quacks are prevented from exploiting the vulnerable. Fines have been issued in Australia to firms selling “Miracle Mineral Solution” as a treatment for Covid-19, and thus courts successfully protect consumers from the actions of unscrupulous and unethical businesses. However, he has not proven, nor shown any correlation that would suggest such a conclusion, that increased legal action would be an effective measure. Indeed, it is possible that stronger legal action may only strengthen the resolve of those who believe conspiracy theories and do not trust the motivations of ‘big pharma’ or western medicine. 

In summary, whilst the author has provided in-depth context on representations of pandemics in different media, and posited potentially useful suggestions to combat irrational fear and harm from “quackery”, it’s clear that Freckleton is observing through the lens of his practice of law. Given this, it is no surprise he came to the conclusions that he did, however none have been shown to have any significant evidential basis in this paper, a point that is ironic, given the author’s belief that providing “medico-scientifically, evidence-based” information to the public will help people make more rational decisions.

 

References

 

Alchemipedia, 2009. Jeuan Gethin (Welsh Poet) d. 1349 Bubonic Plague. Alchemipedia.blogspot.com. Available at: http://alchemipedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/jeuan-gethin-welsh-poet-d-1349-bubonic.html (Accessed: 2 June 2021).

 

Bakx, K., 1991. The ‘eclipse’of folk medicine in western society. Sociology of Health & Illness, 13(1), pp.20-38.

 

Barrett, S., 2009. “Quackery: how should it be defined?”. quackwatch.org. Available at: https://quackwatch.org/related/quackdef/ (Accessed: 2 June 2021).

 

Chirumbolo, S., 2013. Homeopathy: bias, mis-interpretation and other. Journal of Medicine and the Person, 11(1), pp.37-44.

 

Jolley, D. and Douglas, K.M., 2017. Prevention is better than cure: Addressing anti‐vaccine conspiracy theories. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 47(8), pp.459-469.

 

Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U.K., Seifert, C.M., Schwarz, N. and Cook, J., 2012. Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological science in the public interest, 13(3), pp.106-131.

 

Nickerson, R.S., 1998. Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of general psychology, 2(2), pp.175-220.

 

Pierre, J.M., 2020. Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), pp.617-641.

 

Pilkington, E., 2020. Revealed: Leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus ‘cure’ wrote to trump this week. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/revealed-leader-group-peddling-bleach-cure-lobbied-trumpcoronavirus. (Accessed: 7 June 2021).

 

Pratchett, T., 2013. The truth (Vol. 25). Random House. ISBN 0-385-60102-6

 

Vicidomini, C., Roviello, V. and Roviello, G.N., 2021. Molecular Basis of the Therapeutical Potential of Clove (Syzygium aromaticum L.) and Clues to Its Anti-COVID-19 Utility. Molecules, 26(7), p.1880.

 

Vijaykumar, S., Jin, Y., Rogerson, D., Lu, X., Sharma, S., Maughan, A., Fadel, B., de Oliveira Costa, M.S., Pagliari, C. and Morris, D., 2021. How shades of truth and age affect responses to COVID-19 (Mis) information: randomized survey experiment among WhatsApp users in UK and Brazil. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), pp.1-12.

 

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. and Aral, S., 2018. The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), pp.1146-1151.

 

Williamson, P., 2016. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature News, 540(7632), p.171.

 

Community Approaches to Health and Covid-19

I have been struck by the differential impact of Covid-19 on different communities. Black people in the UK are 4 times more likely to die from Covid-19 as white people, and when taking other socio-demographic factors into account, the risk of a Covid-19 related death for black people is still 1.9 times greater than white people (White and Nafilyan, 2020). The effect is not just restricted to the UK; the same effect has been seen in the USA, where predominantly black counties suffered significantly higher Covid-19 infection rates and deaths (Millett et al, 2020)

 

These statistics are alarming. From a biomedical perspective, the risk for black people who have contracted Covid-19 is nearly twice as great, whilst structural racism, socio-economic  disadvantages and other social determinants mean black people are more likely to contract the disease in the first place. Black people in the US are significantly less likely to trust physicians (Armstrong et al, 2007), are more likely to exhibit vaccine hesitancy (Razai et al, 2021), and are more likely to work in “essential” jobs, or roles that require in-person interaction that cannot be done from home (Dyer, 2020). The typical low pay of these types of roles mean that workers are less able to take time off, or practice protective measures such as isolating at home (Public Health England, 2020), and this impacts not just black communities but all those people in lower paid, “essential” and in-person jobs. 

 

The Covid-19 pandemic had disproportionate impacts on low-income families (Bitler et al, 2020), of which the results will be felt for years, possibly for generations. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was stalling and inequalities were worsening in England (Taylor-Robinson, 2019), and the Covid-19 pandemic only served to amplify these inequities. Children, especially those living in low-income families have suffered significantly, with evidence showing that the pandemic caused low-income families’ expenditures to increase, whilst expenditures of higher income families decreased.

 

For many children living in poverty or in low-income families, schools are not just a place to learn, but to eat healthily. School closures meant that for many of these children, it wasn’t just their education that has been put on hold, but their nutrition too, which will only serve to widen the existing gaps in food security and learning (Van Lancker and Parolin, 2020).

 

There are efforts to redress these inequalities that have been growing over the past decade, and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In “Build Back Fairer”, the Covid-19 Marmot Review, community approaches to health are recommended in an approach “based on the principles of social justice” (Marmot et al, 2020), in order to reverse these growing inequalities. Proposed measures include increasing funding for public health alongside an expanded focus on the social determinants of health, recognising that poverty, deprivation, employment, ethnicity, social class and culture strongly influence health and our individual perception of it.

 

 

References:

 

Armstrong, K., Ravenell, K.L., McMurphy, S. and Putt, M., 2007. Racial/ethnic differences in physician distrust in the United States. American journal of public health, 97(7), pp.1283-1289.

 

Bitler, M., Hoynes, H.W. and Schanzenbach, D.W., 2020. The social safety net in the wake of COVID-19. National Bureau of Economic Research. (No. w27796).

 

Dyer, O., 2020. Covid-19: Black people and other minorities are hardest hit in US. BMJ, p. m1483. doi: 10.1136/bmj.m1483.

 

Marmot, M., Allen, J., Goldblatt, P., Herd, E. and Morrison, J., 2020. Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review. The Pandemic, Socioeconomic and Health Inequalities in England. London: Institute of Health Equity.

 

Millett, G.A., Jones, A.T., Benkeser, D., Baral, S., Mercer, L., Beyrer, C., Honermann, B., Lankiewicz, E., Mena, L., Crowley, J.S. and Sherwood, J., 2020. Assessing differential impacts of COVID-19 on black communities. Annals of epidemiology, 47, pp.37-44.

 

Public Health England, 2020. COVID-19: understanding the impact on BAME communities. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-understanding-the-impact-on-bame-communities (Accessed: 11 May 2021).

 

Razai, M.S., Osama, T., McKechnie, D.G. and Majeed, A., 2021. Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minority groups. BMJ, p. n513. doi: 10.1136/bmj.n513.

 

Taylor-Robinson, D., Barr, B. and Whitehead, M., 2019. Stalling life expectancy and rising inequalities in England. The Lancet, 394(10216), pp.2238-2239.

 

Van Lancker, W. and Parolin, Z., 2020. COVID-19, school closures, and child poverty: a social crisis in the making. The Lancet Public Health, 5(5), pp.e243-e244.

 

White, C. and Nafilyan, V., 2020. Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by ethnic group, England and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 15 May 2020. Office for National Statistics.

 

Whitehead, M., Taylor-Robinson, D. and Barr, B., 2021. Poverty, health, and covid-19. BMJ; 372:n376

180 Factors of Organisational and Digital Transformation

The below is a simple but extensive (though non-exhaustive and growing) list of factors to address and discover when working on organisational and digital transformations.

I’ve used this list as a helpful reminder when carrying out discovery sessions with clients, and you can too! If you’d like to suggest additions or changes, please let me know!

Organisation

  • Line of business
  • Risk register / immediate risks
  • Risk appetite
  • Public / private / shareholding / equity holding
  • Impediments and current challenge
  • Tracking up or tracking down
  • Industry volatility and disruption
  • Competitors
  • Urgency
  • Cost of delays
  • Cost of changes
  • Regulatory compliance needs
  • Locations
  • Time zones
  • Organisation size
  • Organisation age
  • Diversity of business lines/units
  • Purpose and values
  • Mission statement
  • History and folklore
  • Past mergers and acquisitions
  • Organisation identity in the world
  • Public or private
  • Short term pressure / long term pressure
  • Heterogeneity of leadership / board
  • Finances – cash, P&L, share price, turnover, EBITDA
  • Cost sensitivity
  • Preference for opex vs capex
  • Exit strategy

 

People

  • Organisational culture
  • Heterogeneity of culture across the organisation
  • Leadership buy-in to transformation
  • Key stakeholders
  • Prior transformation attempts
  • Psychological safety (org-wide / in-team)
  • Customer expectations
  • Customer base (business, consumer, public, other)
  • Ease of customer feedback
  • Diversity
  • Equality, gender pay gap visibility
  • National identity and culture
  • Survival anxiety
  • Team member churn rate / length of tenure
  • Organisational structure, reporting lines, matrix, hierarchies
  • Geographical distribution
  • Permanent teams vs outsourced teams
  • Skill and mastery level
  • Tacit knowledge in the organisation
  • Capabilities and gaps
  • Promotions, recognitions and awards
  • Pay scales
  • Orthodoxies
  • Defined roles
  • Cross-teaming
  • Training, coaching, mentoring, support
  • Career paths
  • Physical working environment
  • Communities of Practice
  • Remote vs on-prem (degrees of remoteness)
  • Longevity of teams
  • Centres of Excellence / Enablement
  • Stream aligned teams / function-aligned teams / hybrid
  • Known rituals
  • Facilities, office design, open vs closed offices, physical space
  • Exposure to “business” information such as cashflow, profit, turnover, and granularity.

 

 

Process

  • Operating model
  • Policies
  • Standards
  • Processes
  • Regulation of process
  • Standardisation appetite
  • Finance process
  • Budget cycle
  • Business case requirement
  • Hiring process
  • Procurement process and duration
  • Adherence to frameworks
  • International & national standards
  • Audit frequency and type
  • Governance, risk, compliance processes
  • Product vs project
  • ITIL / COBIT / other frameworks
  • Environment provisioning
  • Preference for waterfall vs agile
  • Handoffs
  • WIP limits
  • Communications cadences and expectations
  • Current methodologies and practices
  • Security clearances
  • Natural / habitual cadences
  • Agile adoption
  • Scrum adoption
  • Methodologies at scale (SAFe, LESS, etc)
  • Statistical Process Control – level of automation and adoption

 

Data and Tools

  • Wall space or digital tools – information radiators
  • Data-driven insights capability
  • Communication tools – asynchronous vs synchronous
  • Silos of information
  • Data feedback loops
  • Dataviz and analytic tools
  • Degree of tool integration
  • SSO
  • “Shadow” IT
  • Degree of autonomy / lockdown of machines
  • AI/ML
  • Volume of data
  • Information availability, default to open/closed
  • Data treated as asset or liability
  • Default information openness
  • Dashboarding and reporting

 

Products

  • Number and characteristics of key products
  • Criticality (life/death or just for fun)
  • Cost of delay for features
  • Level of planning expectation
  • Estimates and deadlines required
  • Risk appetite
  • Reliability requirements
  • Scaling requirements
  • Quality requirements
  • Degree of coupling
  • Degree of cohesion
  • Current lead time
  • Current flow / wait time
  • Current quality
  • Internal regulation
  • Unplanned vs planned work
  • Product lifespan
  • Feature lifespan
  • Marketing approach and capabilities

 

Technology

  • Satisfaction of technical capability
  • Common platform?
  • Architecture – monolithic vs microservices / APIs
  • Potential fracture planes
  • Team topology
  • Corporate network (MPLS, VPNs, hybrid, SDN, etc)
  • Cloud usage (production) – private/hybrid/public
  • Edge and IoT technology
  • Preferred technologies and codebase
  • Build and Deployment pipelines
  • Deployment strategies – canary, blue/green, rolling, A/B
  • Engineering skills
  • Engineering practices
  • Service Desk?
  • Infra as code
  • Containerisation
  • Test and QA approach
  • Work definition approach – user stories, MoSCoW etc
  • Rate, predictability and volume of work requests
  • Where does work come from?
  • Environments
  • Monitoring and observability
  • Degree of automation
  • Branching strategies
  • Existing reliability
  • Existing rate of change
  • Accelerate metrics
  • Technical debt
  • Pair programming, mob programming practices
  • Ratio of junior to senior engineers
  • Dev workstations and tooling
  • Dev / Ops teams & handovers
  • On-call culture and process
  • Infosec team / function and interactions

Please feel free to use this however you’d like, and if you think something needs adding to this list of organisational transformation factors, please let me know!

Summary of all State of DevOps Reports since 2013

It’s not that easy to find all the annual state of DevOps reports, partly because they forked in 2017 between Puppet and Google/DORA. Below I’ve listed each report by year, and I’m in the process of listing all the key findings from each report. Some reports provide greater insights than others.

The first report was in 2013, and showed quite clearly that adopting DevOps practices resulted in technological and business improvements. Along the way, Puppet and Google / DORA joined forces, parted ways, and now (as of writing in 2021) there are two State of DevOps Reports, and the focus has broadened to SRE, Organisational Culture, Security, and even Documentation.

2013 – Puppet:

  1. Respondents from organisations that implemented DevOps reported improved software deployment quality and more frequent software releases.
  2. DevOps enables high performance by increasing agility and reliability. High performing organisations ship code 30x faster and complete those deployments 8,000 times faster than their peers. They also have 50% fewer failures and restore service 12 times faster than their peers.
  3. Organisations that have implemented DevOps practices are up to five times more likely to be high-performing than those that have not. In fact, the longer organisations have been using DevOps practices, the better their performance: The best are getting better.

2014 – Puppet and DORA –

  1. Strong IT performance is a competitive advantage. Firms with high-performing IT organisations were twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals.
  2. DevOps practices improve IT performance. IT performance strongly correlates with well-known DevOps practices such as use of version control and continuous delivery.
  3. Organizational culture matters. Organizational culture is one of the strongest predictors of both IT performance and overall performance of the organisation. High-trust organisations encourage good information flow, cross-functional collaboration, shared responsibilities, learning from failures and new ideas; they are also the most likely to perform at a high level.
  4. Job satisfaction is the No. 1 predictor of organisational performance. Job satisfaction includes doing work that’s challenging and meaningful, and being empowered to exercise skills and judgment. Where there is job satisfaction, employees bring the best of themselves to work: their engagement, their creativity and their strongest thinking.

2015 – Puppet and DORA:

  1. High-performing IT organisations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster. Failures are unavoidable, but how quickly you detect and recover from failure can mean the difference between leading the market and struggling to catch up with the competition.
  2. Lean management and continuous delivery practices create the conditions for delivering value faster, sustainably.  This results in higher quality, shorter cycle times with quicker feedback loops, and lower costs. These practices also contribute to creating a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
  3. High performance is achievable whether your apps are greenfield, brownfield or legacy. As long as systems are architected with testability and deployability in mind, high performance is achievable.
  4. IT managers play a critical role in any DevOps transformation. Managers can do a lot to improve their team’s performance by ensuring work is not wasted
    and by investing in developing the capabilities of their people.
  5. Diversity matters. Research shows that teams with more women members have higher collective intelligence and achieve better business outcomes.
  6. Deployment pain can tell you a lot about your IT performance. Where code deployments are most painful, you’ll find the poorest IT performance, organisational performance and culture.
  7. Burnout can be prevented, and DevOps can help. Burnout is associated with pathological cultures and unproductive, wasteful work.

2016 – Puppet and DORA:

  1. High-performing organisations are decisively outperforming their lower-performing peers in terms of throughput. High performers deploy 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead times. They also continue to significantly outperform low performers, with 24 times faster recovery times and three times lower change failure rates.
  2. High performers have better employee loyalty, as measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). Employees in high-performing organisations were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organisation to a friend as a great place to work, and 1.8 times more likely to recommend their team to a friend as a great working environment. Other studies have shown that this is correlated with better business outcomes.
  3. Improving quality is everyone’s job. High-performing organisations spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework. As a result, they are able to spend 29 percent more time on new work, such as new features or code. They are able to do this because they build quality into each stage of the development process through the use of continuous delivery practices, instead of retrofitting quality at the end of a development cycle.
  4. High performers spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues than low performers. Through better integrating information security objectives into daily work, teams achieve higher levels of IT performance and build more secure systems. less time on unplanned work and rework.
  5. Taking an experimental approach to product development can improve your IT and organisational performance. The product development cycle starts long before a developer starts coding. Your product team’s ability to decompose products and features into small batches; provide visibility into the flow of work from idea to production; and gather customer feedback to iterate and improve will predict both IT performance and deployment pain.

2017 – Puppet and DORA:

  1. Transformational leaders share five common characteristics that significantly shape an organisation’s culture and practices, leading to high performance. The characteristics of transformational leadership — vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition — are highly correlated with IT performance.
  2. High-performing teams continue to achieve both faster throughput and better stability. The gap between high and low performers narrowed for throughput measures, as low performers reported improved deployment frequency and lead time for changes, compared to last year. However, the low performers reported slower recovery times and higher failure rates. It’s possible that pressure to deploy faster and more often causes lower performers to pay insufficient attention to building in quality.
  3. Automation is a huge boon to organisations. High performers automate significantly more of their configuration management, testing, deployments and change approval processes than other teams. The result is more time for innovation and a faster feedback cycle.
  4. Loosely coupled architectures and teams are the strongest predictor of continuous delivery. If you want to achieve higher IT performance, start shifting to loosely coupled services — services that can be developed and released independently of each other — and loosely coupled teams, which are empowered to make changes.
  5. Lean product management drives higher organisational performance. Lean product management practices help teams ship features that customers actually want, more frequently. This faster delivery cycle lets teams experiment, creating a feedback loop with customers.

2018 – Puppet:

  1. DevOps drives business growth – maintaining a robust software delivery and operability function increases productivity, profitability, and market share.
  2. Cloud technology correlates with business performance – this is enabled by reliable and sustainable cloud infrastructure, utilised via cloud native patterns.
  3. Open source software improves performance – high-performing IT teams are 1.75 times more likely to use open-source applications.
  4. Functional outsourcing can be detrimental to software performance, and Elite Performers are rarely using it.
  5. Technical practices such as monitoring and observability, continuous testing, database change management, and the early integration of security in software development all enable organisational performance.
  6. DORA identified high-performing organisations in a range of profit, not-for-profit, regulated, and non-regulated industries. The industry you’re in doesn’t affect your ability to perform.
  7. Diversity in tech is poor, but improving, and teams with improved diversity demonstrate higher performance than those that don’t.

2018 – DORA  (Accelerate):

  1. SDO (Software Delivery Organisation – i.e. development teams) performance unlocks competitive advantages. Those include increased profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organisation and mission goals.
  2. How you implement cloud infrastructure matters. Proper (effective) usage of the public cloud improves software delivery performance and teams that leverage all of cloud computing’s essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers.
  3. Open source software improves performance. Open source software is 1.75 times more likely to be extensively used by the highest performers.
  4. Outsourcing by function is rarely adopted by elite performers and hurts performance. While outsourcing can save money, low-performing teams are almost 4 times as likely to outsource whole functions such as testing or operations than their highest-performing counterparts.
  5. Key technical practices drive high performance. These include monitoring and observability, continuous testing, database change management, and integrating security earlier in the SDLC.
  6. Industry doesn’t matter when it comes to achieving high performance for software delivery. High performers exist in both non-regulated and highly regulated industries alike.

2019 – Puppet:

  1. Doing DevOps well enables you to do security well.
  2. Integrating security deeply into the software delivery lifecycle makes teams more than twice as confident of their security posture.
  3. Integrating security throughout the software delivery lifecycle leads to positive outcomes.
  4. Security integration is messy, especially in the middle stages of evolution.

2019 – Google:

  1. The industry continues to improve, particularly among the elite performers.
  2. The best strategies for scaling DevOps in organisations focus on structural solutions that build community, including Communities of Practice.
  3. Cloud continues to be a differentiator for elite performers and drives high performance.
  4. To support productivity, organisations can foster a culture of psychological safety and make smart investments in tooling, information search, and reducing technical debt through flexible, extensible, and viewable systems.
  5. Heavyweight change approval processes, such as change approval boards, negatively impact speed and stability. In contrast, having a clearly understood process for changes drives speed and stability, as well as reductions in burnout.

2020 – Puppet:

  1. The industry still has a long way to go and there remain significant areas for improvement across all sectors.
  2. Internal platforms and platform teams are a key enabler of performance, and more organisations are adopting this approach.
  3. Adopting a product approach over project-oriented improves performance and facilitates improved adoption of DevOps cultures and practices.
  4. Lean, automated, and people-oriented change management processes improve velocity and performance.

2021 – Puppet:

  1. Organisational dynamics must be considered crucial to transformation.
  2. Cloud-native approaches are critical. It is no good to simply move traditional workloads to the cloud.
  3. Shift security, compliance and change governance left, and include security stakeholders in all stages of value delivery.
  4. Culture change is key, and must be promoted from the very “top” as well as delivered from the “bottom”. Psychological safety is at the core of digital and cultural transformations.

2021 – Accelerate:

  1. The “highest performers” continue to improve the velocity of delivery.
  2. Adoption of SRE practices improves wider organisational performance.
  3. Adoption of cloud technology accelerates software delivery and organisational performance. Multi-cloud adoption is also on the increase.
  4. Secure Software Supply Chains enable teams to deliver secure software quickly, safely and reliably.
  5. Documentation is important to being able to implement technical practices, make changes, and recover from incidents. 
  6. Inclusive and generative team cultures improve resilience and performance.

2022 – Google / DORA:

  1. Generative Cultures are indicators of higher performance.
  2. Less experienced teams who implemented trunk-based development actually show less positive results than teams who do not use trunk-based development.
  3. Healthy, high-performing teams also tend to have good security practices broadly established.
  4. Software delivery performance alone does not predict organisational success. Excellent software delivery combined with high reliability (high DORA Metrics in this case) correlate with organisational success.

On the accessibility of information

I came across an interesting looking paper this week, co-authored by a prominent leadership “thought leader”, but there’s no open access version available, which means it’s only accessible by people willing/able to pay £30 for a copy, or who work or study in an academic institution. I have a deep love of academic study, and I sincerely believe in the pursuit of knowledge without any specific agenda, a la Max Planck: “Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.” . However, knowledge and insight are nothing if not shared. Information should be open and accessible.

Information that is hoarded behind institutional or commercial walls is of no value other than to those who created it. It should be of no surprise that people reject knowledge that they have no access to.

And it’s for that reason, that no matter how interesting or ground breaking the research is, if it’s not accessible to those without the privilege of money or academic background, I’m not going to share it here.