Ep. 2: Jeff Sussna - Designing Delivery

Stories Connecting Dots with Markus Andrezak

This episode is held in English language. My guest is Jeff Sussna, founder and principal of ingineering.IT. He mainly works in the world of operations and is a well known speaker all over the world in the area of DevOps. Surprisingly, he approaches this field with the tools of Service Design, Cybernetics and Promise Theory.

Using these ways of thinking, he also wrote a great book, „Designing Delivery“, in which describes the role and challenges of companies in the new world where brands and product development are dialogues.

In this conversation, we discuss the following topics:

- Services as a fundamental model of coping with a modern, complex world, in which companies need relationships and conversations with their clients. - The role of Design Thinking and Service Design - How Cybernetics can help us understand and decide in situations of complexity and uncertainty - How the model of Promise Theory helps us deal with systems that sometimes fail or are incomplete and how this again helps us to live with the unavoidable circumstance of failure - Thinking broad and embracing ambiguity and dealing with that through balance - Discussions on mindfulness

Beyond all, what I really learned and appreciated in this interview was Jeff's ability to break down complex thoughts in easy to understand small steps, taking nothing as granted. Kind of like a good maths teacher.

Content:

0:00:00 - Introduction

0:01:19 - When, how and why did Dev and Ops separated?

0:08:06 - Nostalgie of full stack dev and how we are facing bigger tasks because of the INternet’s success

0:14:01 - Jeff is not on the wrong end of the value chain with his topics, the whole company should embrace them

0:22:25 - Let’s have positiv impact on people, outside and inside of the company

0:28:05 - Is „the family“ and „relationship“ a good metaphor for how we should work?

0:32:58 - Announcement of winners of Give Aways from Episode 1

0:34:27 - Jeff’s Book „Designing Delivery“ and the concept of services, Jobs To Be Done, are physical products easier than digital products?

0:47:09 - Design Thinking and Service Design

0:55:27 - Cybernetics

1:01:04 - Portfolio and Feedbackloops as a Cybernetic Systems

1:02:13 - Promise Theory, embracing failure in computer and human systems, incompleteness of systems (also in maths)

1.11:16 - On thinking beyond, going broad and the power of serendipity

1:14:28 - Amiguity and Balance

1:15:11 - On mindfulness, your reaction defines the outcome, there are no shortcuts