Resilience Engineering, DevOps, and Psychological Safety – resources

With thanks to Liam Gulliver and the folks at DevOps Notts, I gave a talk recently on Resilience Engineering, DevOps, and Psychological Safety.

It’s pretty content-rich, and here are all the resources I referenced in the talk, along with the talk itself, and the slide deck. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss anything mentioned, or you have a meetup or conference that you’d like me to contribute to!

Here’s a psychological safety practice playbook for teams and people.

Open Practice Library

https://openpracticelibrary.com/

Resilience Engineering and DevOps slide deck  

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VrGl8WkmLn_gZzHGKowQRonT_V2nqTsAZbVbBP_5bmU/edit?usp=sharing

Resilience engineering – Where do I start?

Resilience engineering: Where do I start?

Turn the ship around by David Marquet

Lorin Hochstein and Resilience Engineering fundamentals 

https://github.com/lorin/resilience-engineering/blob/master/intro.md

 

Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety:
“The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons”, Scott D. Sagan, Princeton University Press, 1993.

 

Sidney Dekker: “The Field Guide To Understanding Human Error: Sidney Dekker, 2014

 

John Allspaw: “Resilience Engineering: The What and How”, DevOpsDays 2019.

https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-washington-dc/program/john-allspaw/

 

Erik Hollnagel: Resilience Engineering 

https://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/resilience-engineering.html

 

Cynefin

Home

 

Jabe Bloom, The Three Economies

The Three Economies an Introduction

 

Resilience vs Efficiency

Efficiency vs. Resiliency: Who Won The Bout?

 

Tarcisio Abreu Saurin – Resilience requires Slack

Slack: a key enabler of resilient performance

 

Resilience engineering and DevOps – a deeper dive

Resilience Engineering and DevOps – A Deeper Dive

 

Symposium with John Willis, Gene Kim, Dr Sidney Dekker, Dr Steven Pear, and Dr Richard Cook: Safety Culture, Lean, and DevOps

 

Approaches for resilience and antifragility in collaborative business ecosystems: Javaneh Ramezani Luis, M. Camarinha-Matos:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162519304494

 

Learning organisations:
Garvin, D.A., Edmondson, A.C. and Gino, F., 2008. Is yours a learning organization?. Harvard business review, 86(3), p.109.
https://teamtopologies.com/book
https://www.psychsafety.co.uk/cognitive-load-and-psychological-safety/

 

Psychological safety: Edmondson, A., 1999. Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), pp.350-383.

The four stages of psychological safety, Timothy R. Clarke (2020)

Measuring psychological safety:

 

And of course the youtube video of the talk:

Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Resilience Engineering and DevOps – A Deeper Dive

robustness vs resilience

[This is a work in progress. If you spot an error, or would like to contribute, please get in touch]

The term “Resilience Engineering” is appearing more frequently in the DevOps domain, field of physical safety, and other industries, but there exists some argument about what it really means. That disagreement doesn’t seem to occur in those domains where Resilience Engineering has been more prevalent and applied for some time now, such as healthcare and aviation. Resilience Engineering is an academic field of study and practice in its own right. There is even a Resilience Engineering Association.

Resilience Engineering is a multidisciplinary field associated with safety science, complexity, human factors and associated domains that focuses on understanding how complex adaptive systems cope with, and learn from, surprise.

It addresses human factors, ergonomics, complexity, non-linearity, inter-dependencies, emergence, formal and informal social structures, threats and opportunities. A common refrain in the field of resilience engineering is “there is no root cause“, and blaming incidents on “human error” is also known to be counterproductive, as Sidney Dekker explains so eloquently in “The Field Guide To Understanding Human Error”.

Resilience engineering is “The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.Prof Erik Hollnagel

It is the “sustained adaptive capacity” of a system, organisation, or community.

Resilience engineering has the word “engineering” in, which makes us typically think of machines, structures, or code, and this is maybe a little misleading. Instead, maybe try to think about engineering being the process of response, creation and change.

Systems

Resilience Engineering also refers to “systems”, which might also lead you down a certain mental path of mechanical or digital systems. Widen your concept of systems from software and machines, to organisations, societies, ecosystems, even solar systems. They’re all systems in the broader sense.

Resilience engineering refers in particular to complex systems, and typically, complex systems involve people. Human beings like you and I (I don’t wish to be presumptive but I’m assuming that you’re a human reading this).

Consider Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework:

cynefin

Systems in an Obvious state are fairly easy to deal with. There are no unknowns – they’re fixed and repeatable in nature, and the same process achieves the same result each time, so that we humans can use things like Standard Operating Procedures to work with them.

Systems in a Complicated state are large, usually too large for us humans to hold in our heads in their entirety, but are finite and have fixed rules. They possess known unknowns – by which we mean that you can find the answer if you know where to look. A modern motorcar, or a game of chess, are complicated – but possess fixed rules that do not change. With expertise and good practice, such as employed by surgeons or engineers or chess players, we can work with systems in complicated states.

Systems in a Complex state possess unknown-unknowns, and include realms such as battlefields, ecosystems, organisations and teams, or humans themselves. The practice in complex systems is probe, sense, and respond. Complexity resists reductionist attempts at determining cause and effect because the rules are not fixed, therefore the effects of changes can themselves change over time, and even the attempt of measuring or sensing in a complex system can affect the system. When working with complex states, feedback loops that facilitate continuous learning about the changing system are crucial.

Systems in a Chaotic state are impossible to predict. Examples include emergency departments or crisis situations. There are no real rules to speak of, even ones that change. In these cases, acting first is necessary. Communication is rapid, and top-down or broadcast, because there is no time, or indeed any use, for debate.

Resilience

As Erik Hollnagel has said repeatedly since Resilience Engineering began (Hollnagel & Woods, 2006), resilience is about what a system can do — including its capacity: 

  • to anticipate — seeing developing signs of trouble ahead to begin to adapt early and reduce the risk of decompensation 
  • to synchronize —  adjusting how different roles at different levels coordinate their activities to keep pace with tempo of events and reduce the risk of working at cross purposes 
  • to be ready to respond — developing deployable and mobilizable response capabilities in advance of surprises and reduce the risk of brittleness 
  • for proactive learning — learning about brittleness and sources of resilient performance before major collapses or accidents occur by studying how surprises are caught and resolved 

(From Resilience is a Verb by David D. Woods)

 

Capacity Description
Anticipation Create foresight about future operating conditions, revise models of risk
Readiness to respond Maintain deployable reserve resources available to keep pace with demand
Synchronization Coordinate information flows and actions across the networked system
Proactive learning Search for brittleness, gaps in understanding, trade-offs, re-prioritisations

Provan et al (2020) build upon Hollnagel’s four aspects of resilience to show that resilient people and organisations must possess a “Readiness to respond”, and states “This requires employees to have the psychological safety to apply their judgement without fear of repercussion.”

Resilience is therefore something that a system “does”, not “has”.

Systems comprise of structures, technology, rules, inputs and outputs, and most importantly, people.

Resilience is about the creation and sustaining of various conditions that enable systems to adapt to unforeseen events. *People* are the adaptable element of those systems” – John Allspaw (@allspaw) of Adaptive Capacity Labs.

Resilience therefore is about “systems” adapting to unforeseen events, and the adaptability of people is fundamental to resilience engineering.

And if resilience is the potential to anticipate, respond, learn, and change, and people are part of the systems we’re talking about:

We need to talk about people: What makes people resilient?

Psychological safety

Psychological safety is the key fundamental aspect of groups of people (whether that group is a team, organisation, community, or nation) that facilitates performance. It is the belief, within a group, “that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” – Edmondson, 1999.

Amy Edmondson also talks about the concept of a “Learning organisation” – essentially a complex system operating in a vastly more complex, even chaotic wider environment. In a learning organisation, employees continually create, acquire, and transfer knowledge—helping their company adapt to the un-predictable faster than rivals can. (Garvin et al, 2008)

“A resilient organisation adapts effectively to surprise.” (Lorin Hochstein, Netflix)

In this sense, we can see that a “learning organisation” and a “resilient organisation” are fundamentally the same.

Learning, resilient organisations must possess psychological safety in order to respond to changes and threats. They must also have clear goals, vision, and processes and structures. According to Conways Law:

“Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure.”

In order for both the organisation to respond quickly to change, and for the systems that organisation has built to respond to change, the organisation must be structured in such a way that response to change is as rapid as possible. In context, this will depend significantly on the organisation itself, but fundamentally, smaller, less-tightly coupled, autonomous and expert teams will be able to respond to change faster than large, tightly-bound teams with low autonomy will. Pais and Skelton’s Team Topologies explores this in much more depth.

Engineer the conditions for resilience engineering

“Before you can engineer resilience, you must engineer the conditions in which it is possible to engineer resilience.” – Rein Henrichs (@reinH)

As we’ve seen, an essential component of learning organisations is psychological safety. Psychological safety is a necessary condition (though not sufficient) for the  conditions of resilience to be created and sustained. 

Therefore we must create psychological safety in our teams, our organisations, our human “systems”. Without this, we cannot engineer resilience. 

We create, build, and maintain psychological safety via three core behaviours:

  1. Framing work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. The primary outcome should be knowing how to do it even better next time.
  2. Acknowledging your own fallibility. You might be an expert, but you don’t know everything, and you get things wrong – if you admit it when you do, you allow others to do the same.
  3. Model curiosity – ask a lot of questions. This creates a need for voice. By you asking questions, people HAVE to speak up. 

Resilience engineering and psychological safety

Psychological safety enables these fundamental aspects of resilience – the sustained adaptive capacity of a team or organisation.:

  • Taking risks and making changes that you don’t, or can’t, fully understand the outcomes of. 
  • Admitting when you made a mistake. 
  • Asking for help
  • Contributing new ideas
  • Detailed systemic cause* analysis (The ability to get detailed information about the “messy details” of work)

(*There is never a single root cause)

Let’s go back to that phrase at the start:

Sustained adaptive capacity.

What we’re trying to create is an organisation, a complex system, and sub systems (maybe including all that software we’re building) that possesses a capacity for sustained adaptation.

With DevOps we build systems that respond to demand, scale up and down, we implement redundancy, low-dependancy to allow for graceful failure, and identify and react to security threats.

Pretty much all of these only contribute to robustness.

robustness vs resilience

(David Woods, Professor, Integrated Systems Engineering Faculty, Ohio State University)

You may want to think back to the cynefin model, and think of robustness as being able to deal well with known unknowns (complicated systems), and resilience as being able to deal well with unknown unknowns (complex, even chaotic systems). Technological or DevOps practices that primarily focus on systems, such as microservices, containerisation, autoscaling, or distribution of components, build robustness, not resilience.

However, if we are to build resilience, the sustained adaptive capacity for change, we can utilise DevOps practices for our benefit. None of them, like psychological safety, are sufficient on their own, but they are necessary. Using automation to reduce the cognitive load of people is important: by reducing the extraneous cognitive load, we maximise the germane, problem solving capability of people. The provision of other tools, internal platforms, automated testing pipelines, and increasing the observability of systems increases the ability of people and teams to respond to change, and increases their sustained adaptive capacity.

If brittleness is the opposite of resilience, what does “good” resilience look like? The word “anti-fragility” appears to crop up fairly often, due to the book “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder” by Nassim Taleb. What Taleb describes as antifragile, ultimately, is resilience itself.

I have my own views on this, but fundamentally I think this is the danger of academia (as in the field of resilience engineering) restricting access to knowledge. A lot of resilience engineering literature is held behind academic paywalls and journals, which most practitioners do not have access to.  It should be of no huge surprise that people may reject a body of knowledge if they have no access to it.

Observability

It is absolutely crucial to be able to observe what is happening inside the systems. This refers to anything from analysing system logs to identify errors or future problems, to managing Work In Progress (WIP) to highlight bottlenecks in a process.

Too often, engineering and technology organisations look only inward, whilst many of the threats to systems are external to the system and the organisation. Observability must also concern external metrics and qualitative data: what is happening in the marketspace, the economy, and what are our competitors doing?

Resilience Engineering and DevOps

What must we do?

Create psychological safety – this means that people can ask for help, raise issues, highlight potential risks and “apply their judgement without fear of repercussion.” There’s a great piece here on psychological safety and resilience engineering.

Manage cognitive load – so people can focus on the real problems of value – such as responding to unanticipated events.

Apply DevOps practices to technology – use automation, internal platforms and observability, amongst other DevOps practices. 

Increase observability and monitoring – this applies to systems (internal) and the world (external). People and systems cannot respond to a threat if they don’t see it coming.

Embed practices and expertise in component causal analysis – whether you call it a post-mortem, retrospective or debrief, build the habits and expertise to routinely examine the systemic component causes of failure. Try using Rothmans Causal Pies in your next incident review.

Run “fire drills” and disaster exercises. Make it easier for humans to deal with emergencies and unexpected events by making it habit. Increase the cognitive load available for problem solving in emergencies.

Structure the organisation in a way that facilitates adaptation and change. Consider appropriate team topologies to facilitate adaptability.

In summary

Through facilitating learning, responding, monitoring, and anticipating threats, we can create resilient organisations. DevOps and psychological safety are two important components of resilience engineering, and resilience engineering (in my opinion) is soon going to be seen as a core aspect of organisational (and digital) transformation.

 

References:

Conway, M. E. (1968) How Do Committees Invent? Datamation magazine. F. D. Thompson Publications, Inc. Available at: https://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

Dekker, S. 2006. The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. Ashgate Publishing Company, USA.

Edmondson, A., 1999. Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), pp.350-383.

Garvin, David & Edmondson, Amy & Gino, Francesca. (2008). Is Yours a Learning Organization?. Harvard business review. 86. 109-16, 134.

Hochstein, L. (2019)  Resilience engineering: Where do I start? Available at: https://github.com/lorin/resilience-engineering/blob/master/intro.md (Accessed: 17 November 2020).

Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D. & Leveson, N. C. (2006). Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Hollnagel, E. Resilience Engineering (2020). Available at: https://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/resilience-engineering.html (Accessed: 17 November 2020).

Provan, D.J., Woods, D.D., Dekker, S.W. and Rae, A.J., 2020. Safety II professionals: how resilience engineering can transform safety practice. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 195, p.106740. Available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832018309864

Woods, D. D. (2018). Resilience is a verb. In Trump, B. D., Florin, M.-V., & Linkov, I.
(Eds.). IRGC resource guide on resilience (vol. 2): Domains of resilience for complex interconnected systems. Lausanne, CH: EPFL International Risk Governance Center. Available on irgc.epfl.ch and irgc.org.

John Allspaw has collated an excellent book list for essential reading on resilience engineering here.

DevOps, Psychological Safety and Resilience Engineering

The Links Between Psychological Safety, Resilience Engineering and DevOps

Note: since writing this, I’ve learned a lot more about resilience engineering and its relation to DevOps and psychological safety. 


Psychological safety is cited as the key factor in team performance by numerous studies including Google’s Project Aristotle and the DORA/Google State Of DevOps Reports. The evidence shows that teams that operate in psychologically safe environments where they can present their true selves at work, take risks, admit mistakes, and ask for support from their teammates, significantly outperform other organisations

However, establishing psychological safety is rarely prioritised by delivery-focussed leaders who use output-oriented metrics. Instead, these leaders tend to focus on objectives, metrics, and modern practices such as value-stream alignment and cross-functional teams. While these have great value, and will go some way, or indeed a long way, to drive performance and delivery, they are not the full picture.

It can be very challenging, particularly for less experienced leaders, or capable leaders in difficult circumstances, to build and facilitate psychologically safe environments. This is particularly true in technologically-oriented organisations where the domain is complex and failure is explicit, obvious and can generate a large blast radius. 

Mistakes happen. They must happen.

In a psychologically unsafe team, a software engineer who makes a mistake in a complex system and releases a small flaw into production that later causes an outage may be blamed for the mistake. The flaw will be easily attributable, and the impact of the outage can be significant. In many organisations, the resultant fear of error can dramatically slow down the rate of change and speed to market.

Of course, the converse is not appealing either; it’s not acceptable to tolerate errors, outages, and mistakes. Speed to market with a faulty product or service may be equally as bad as a significant delay to reach the market. Customers do not tolerate poor quality services, so we need to build high quality services and do it at velocity. This delivery at pace is one of the key tenets of DevOps, and an effective DevOps culture requires psychological safety.

Resilience Engineering and Psychological Safety

In my work on psychological safety in high performance teams, I’m often asked about how to achieve it, and whilst there are many general approaches that overlap significantly with principles of excellence in servant (or empathetic) leadership, there are also specific actions and approaches that are suitable specifically for technology teams. Here, we’re going to drill down into one of the key aspects of a DevOps approach: Resilience Engineering, and how psychological safety is a fundamental component of resilience.

Resilience Engineering is a field of study that emerged from cognitive system engineering in the early 2000s, largely in response to NASA events in 1999 and 2000, including the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter. It is defined as “The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.” Erik Hollnagel

Resilience Engineering is the intentional engineering of a system (a sociotechnical system, such as a community,  organisation, or nation) to anticipate, detect and respond to both external and internal changes, planned or unplanned, to the system itself and continue to operate whilst change occurs.

Very little theory within this domain has been generated that doesn’t emerge from studies of real work; Resilience Engineering exists within high-stakes domains such as aviation, construction, surgery, military agencies and law enforcement and is becoming more visible in DevOps and Digital Transformation.

There is a difference between robustness and resilience engineering,  as described by David Woods, Professor, Integrated Systems Engineering Faculty, Ohio State University. Technological measures such as autoscaling, failovers, retries and queues, for example, only really contribute to robustness, not resilience:

  • Decoupling and reducing dependencies between components
  • Utilising microservices and containerisation
  • Autoscaling applications based on demand
  • Creating self-healing applications and systems
  • Using monitoring and visibility tools to facilitate responses to out-of-bounds events
  • Adopting error budgeting instead of (or in addition to) uptime measures
  • Using automated code testing, continuous integration and advanced deployment practices

robustness vs resilience

These approaches extend to concepts such as chaos engineering. This is where flaws and interruptions are intentionally introduced in order to examine how the system behaves and help engineers identify how they can improve it.

DevOps practices such as these help to build and improve psychological safety, through facilitating safe risk taking , and resilience Engineering requires psychological safety to be present, because it is only psychological safety that enables people (the adaptable component of a system) to anticipate, respond and adapt to changes and challenges.

The formation of DevOps teams

As a new DevOps-oriented team moves through Tuckman’s Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing cycle, it relies more and more on cultures and practices that facilitate risk taking and admitting mistakes. If these practices are not embedded, the team will never be able to progress to the “performing” stage, because high performance explicitly requires innovation, and therefore, risk taking. Without psychological safety, teams will cycle around the Storming and Norming phases as elements change in or around the team, such as people leaving or joining.

It is only once an engineering team reaches the high performing stage that they can truly deliver high quality services at velocity. By utilising resilience engineering principles and DevOps practices, engineers are supported to take risks, experiment, deploy changes and recover quickly. They can feel comfortable in the knowledge that if something did go wrong, they’d find out straight away, before customers start calling. These practices, far from being so-called “soft” skills, are measurable by solid metrics that describe velocity whilst maintaining reliability, such as Change Rate, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time To Restore (MTTR).

Engineering Team Topologies

Resilience Engineering echoes many capabilities with the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), introduced by Ben Traynor’s team at Google in 2004. SRE practices and capabilities may be implemented by an expert, dedicated, shared SRE team, or it may suit your organisation to embed an SRE function into each stream-aligned (SA) team if the products and systems are large enough to justify it. Alternatively, it may be feasible to empower software engineers themselves to carry out SRE responsibilities if your systems are small enough.

In addition to expert leadership practice, well organised teams, adopted shared values, systemic root causes being diagnosed in retrospectives, and an embrace of continuous improvement, we must adopt capabilities that empower team members to carry out their roles without fear of failure. In a technology team, those capabilities are the very same ones that enable high velocity change, security, and reliability. 

For more information regarding technology team organisation, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais explore in great depth how software teams can be organised to deliver most value, safety, and performance in their book “Team Topologies”, where they examine how the concepts of Conways Law, Cognitive Load and Organisational Evolution converge. 

Resilience engineering is about entire organisations, not just technology.

Whatever team you’re on, or whatever team you lead, considering resilience engineering principles will improve delivery, safety, happiness, and performance. This enables people to work without fear, psychologically safe in the knowledge that errors do not flow downstream. This place is where true high performance, speed to market, quality and innovation happens.

Psychological safety is also a core component of Agile delivery teams, as it fundamentally enables truthful communication, response to change, and the ability to make mistakes and innovate.

Build your own high performing teams with psychological safety

For more information about high performance teams, psychological safety, DevOps, or any of the other concepts covered in this article, get in touch. I’m always for collaboration, speaking at events, podcasts, or other ways to get involved and help teams become more productive, safer, and most importantly, happier.

Download a complete Psychological Safety Action Pack full of workshops, tools, resources, and posters to help you measure, build, and maintain Psychological Safety in your teams.

@tom_geraghty

tom@tomgeraghty.co.uk