Balancing Tech & Human Creativity • Kaiser, Greiler, Carpenter, Terhorst-North & Wardley • GOTO 2024

Balancing Tech & Human Creativity • Kaiser, Greiler, Carpenter, Terhorst-North & Wardley • GOTO 2024

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Welcome to "GOTO Unscripted." My name is Simon  Wardley. I'm here with a panel of lovely people.   Adele Carpenter, who came along and did some  mapping, so a mapper as well. Sorry, I'm just a   little biased. I'll throw that in there as well.  Michaela Greiler, Susanne Kaiser, and Eddie,   the shipboard computer. Hi there. 

Hi there. God, I'm sorry, this is Dan North.  So, we're here at GOTO in Amsterdam. This is   the first time I've actually been to  a conference in Europe for, oh gosh,   five years. I think the last time was with  Eddie, the shipboard computer, where you had   an entire floor of a hotel as your room. They accidentally gave me an entire floor   of a hotel. So, I checked into the hotel and it's  just, you check into the hotel, and it's a really  

quirky hotel called the Amrath in the city. And  they said, "You're in room 501." I was like,   "Okay." And they said, "No, you're in room 501."  "How do I get there?" "You take the lift." So,   I took the lift. The lift only goes to the  fourth floor. Like, where's room 501? So,   you come out to the fourth floor, you walk along  a corridor, and then there's a separate staircase   that goes up because it's a... It's a private thing.  Well, because room 501 is the entire 5th floor. Wow.  So, I went up this private staircase and you  go in, it's like a sort of souk thing. So,  

you go down a couple of steps, a big floor  area, up a couple of steps, the other side,   and then into, I won't call it a bedroom, it's  a sleeping area, which is this vast four-poster   bed. This thing had two balconies. So, you go  through like a lounge area, a bunch of sofas,   open onto a roof terrace where there's a  huge table, you know, maybe 15, 20-seater   tables out there. And then the other roof terrace.  Because you kind of have too many roof terraces,   right? There's a smaller roof terrace over here.  And of course, I'm a speaker at a conference, and   the first thing I think is, "We need a party in  this room." So, we bought a bunch of people back,   and yeah, and we partied in room 501. Cool.  Thanks. It was, you just turned up to the hotel and it's  

room 501, you're expecting a small room. You go  up and there's a doorbell and it opens, and you're   trying to think, "Where's his room?" And then  suddenly it dawns on you, it's the entire floor.  The whole thing is his room. Completely mad, but there we are. So,   how are you finding the conference? Awesome so far. So, it's now the first  

half of the first day. And I already have a  lot of formal fear of missing out for all the   talks that I could not attend at the same time.  So, I'm looking forward to all the recordings.  And now you are speaking  as well, or you've spoken?  I've spoken, so before lunch.  Yeah, so I'm now relaxed.

Off duty. You've spoken as well?  Yes. I'm also already on the relaxed side. There's  a panel that I will be on tomorrow. But yeah,   for today I'm done. And I'm just enjoying  the company. I really enjoy connections. I   haven't been to a conference for a long time.   Meeting people is such a different experience,  

so I'm very excited about that one. So, you're like me, it's been years since   you've been to a sort of event. Unfortunately, yes.  Adele, you came along to my...I did  a workshop yesterday on mapping.  You did. It was excellent. Thank you.  Eleven out of 10, do recommend. Eleven out of 10. Fantastic. Thank  

you very much. That's very kind. We didn't cover math...  No math. ...or percentages.  No, not at all. How have you enjoyed it? Well, a disclaimer, I'm on the program committee.  Fantastic. Well, there we are.  And I'm taking notes. Taking notes. Never   invite Simon again. He's been quite useless. I'm very proud of the program that we have put  

together. And I was in Susanne's talk earlier,  and I thoroughly enjoyed that. She put a lot   of content, including Wardley mapping into a  50-minute slot. And I saw another talk from   another wonderful speaker, Jody from JetBrains.  That was an excellent way to cut the hype of LLMs,   which I think we could all use a healthy dose  of. So, I thoroughly enjoyed that talk as well.  

We just had a great keynote. So, I'm very,  very proud of the program we put together.   None of you... Good.  ...have disappointed me yet. Sure. I promise I will   do it tomorrow, but anyway, the... It all goes down with you tomorrow morning.  Can always count on you, Simon Adaptive Systems through Wardley   Mapping, DDD, and Team Topologies Absolutely. Well, what we can talk  

now about LLMs, we can also talk about  your talk. So, you had...well, I presume   this was all about organizational design.  Did you take everybody through the hands?  Not only organizational design but also like, I  call it arc, architecture for flow. So, it's kind   of like a holistic view on three perspectives  of the Brisbane strategy with Wardley mapping,   of course. Then also software architecture and  software design was domain-driven design and  

team organization with team topologies. And  bringing them together and also having a Wardley   map as a conversation starter to generate a common  understanding of the landscape you're operating   in. And then also, I'm sorry, I'm reusing your  Wardley map in totally different ways than you...  I'm actually fine. ...might have originally attended   or invented for. So, I totally... That's fine.  ...I used Wardley maps in every...I also  added layers. I have not presented it yet,   only a little bit in this talk, but usually,  I also added some additional layers to... 

That's all right. ...going into the domain-driven design perspective   from the problem space, starting with the user and  the user needs. And then also diving into solution   space where you come then with the components  fulfilling the user needs directly and indirectly.  

And then mapping them to evolution stages to  also channel or to focus your development,   your strategic investment in the core domain  web. Also blending and domain-driven design...  Nice. ...which comes in with   the sub-domain types of core domain providing a  competitive advantage. Supporting sub-domains and   generic sub-domains where you can then go towards  the right spectrum of award limit. More like,   "Okay, can we use off-the-shelf products or all  also the utility suppliers for those parts of   our system that do not differentiate us?" And so  it's like I combine everything. And then also... 

Fantastic. ...bringing in also the   team perspective. Also on the Wardley map and to  try to drive some team ownership boundaries with   domain-driven design as components. What teams  can own what component on the value chain. And  

also switching then from the external view to the  internal product view to come also to the platform   perspective was developing experience, also  involving, like, product mindset and so on. So,   it's a combination... Awesome.  ...obviously, bringing them together  with a goal to design and build adaptive   social-technical systems. That's all. Look at all the trouble I've caused.   I mean, that was fantastic. And  you've got a book coming out as well.  Yes. Yes.  So, yeah, I announced it already. I'm sorry  for the audience. I already announced it  

I guess a couple of years ago and I  was really naive, to be honest. So,   it was my first book and it took so much time.  But I'm also in a serious signature series of   Vaughn Vernon’s Signature Series at Addison  Wesley. So, it also takes, until you are the   one that gets reviewed, it takes the time as well.  But it's moving forward and let's cross fingers.   I'm not making any promises when it's going to  be published because there's always problems. 

Right. But, yeah,   I'm currently 12 years into my... Oh really, 12 years?  ...first book. Amazing.  And I've just decided, I actually have a strategy  now. I didn't have a strategy for a long time. I   was just kind of googling along. It just turned  into...basically, it's got 40-something chapters   because it's 40-something patents. My software,  the stuff I've been doing for well over a decade.  

And well, I'm working with a brilliant co-author  now and what she's convinced me to do is,   because the book is in chunks, and let's just take  the team patterns chunks out and just do that as   a book about patterns of effective teams, which  was a talk I did GOTO Chicago a few years ago,   kind of goes over most of those. We've got  a couple more bits in there as well. And   it is nearly done. I'm like, "I'm going to  publish a book hopefully this year, right?" Wow. Awesome. 

But it's only taken me 12 years and a massive kick  up the backside and a brilliant co-author. So,   you need those two things, I think. That's true.   You see, I have a completely different plan in the  fact that once your book is published, that'll be   the 17th book with Wardley Map in it... Awesome. 

...which will go onto my level library, which  doesn't include my book because I haven't   actually written it yet. And so... This is exactly what I do. This is   my BDD strategy. That's like, "Why do  you write a BDD book?" [I wrote a BDD   book. John Ferguson Smart wrote a BDD book.  Gaspar  wrote...There's like some really,  

really good BDD literature out there.  I don't need to write one. Go and   read those, they're brilliant. Rethinking Developer Experience:   Tools, Collaboration, and AI Michaela, you were talking about,   you spoke today as well. Yes.  

And you were speaking about... Developer.  ...DevEx, developer experience. Developer experience. Yes. Which is, I'm...Okay, so I'm gonna in my primitive  sense, I mean, you are talking about the tool   sets we use as developers, which are pretty  much all identical, search, edit, navigation,   and they're all appalling. Is that correct? I think that's in the essence what everybody   understands around developer experience.  And I think it also depends a lot on the   productivity side, right? So, what a lot of  companies...I mean, developer experience also  

comes a lot from the companies that are developing  software developer tooling, right? The developer   experience is so much more, right? So, when we  set out, I think around three years ago to really   study developer experience and I did the ground  theory study around that, and we really sat down   and interviewed people and looked at the topics  that emerged, right? The tooling is just a really   tiny percentage. It's about the social-technical  systems that we have, right? So, we actually   identified 26 different factors around developer  experience and we grouped them into 4 categories.  One of the biggest is collaboration and culture,  right? Like, how supportive are my teammates?   How much knowledge sharing is going on? Do  I get answers to my questions, right? A lot   of things were about product management, right?  So, it would be more developer-focused already,   but it's about having clear goals, requirements,  right? Can I do my job, actually? And then we had,   obviously, the tooling side as well, right? But  there was a lot about flow, about can I actually   do the stuff without hitting obstacles, right?  What about our, you know, feedback loops that   we have? So, developer experience is so much  more about tooling. I think it's...you know,   developer experience, the terminology was a little  bit used, like UX, user experience just for tools   that are made for developers. But that's not  the developer experience that I'm talking about.  

That's not the research that we are looking at. This is really about how the team is doing,   going away from how fast they are. Productivity  metrics and measurements are really bad for   knowledge workers, right? We're coming out  of an industrial revolution time, right,   where we measure how fast and how many things can  we do? But it's not what we want people to do,   right? We don't want them to write a lot of code  that's, you know, buggy and we want to write them   good code, innovative code, right? We want them  to have creative solutions. I'm coming a lot from  

the research side as well, right? So, there's this  happiness, there was this productivity research,   right, I was heavily involved in that. But  there's also the happiness side, right,   which is a little bit fluff, right? I  know making it a little bit stronger,   but a developer experience is not about that,  right? Developer experience, and I think this   is why it's so powerful, I call it doing your  best work joyfully. It's really a work focus,   right? It's really about thinking, the best work.  So, quality work that you can do, but joyfully,   right? So, you are getting back all this... How to make engineering joyful?  Yes. But also doing really good work, right?  And we mapped that back. So, what I presented  

were some statistical analysis results that  we got, right, where we really could show   that there's a really strong correlation between  the developer experience areas, dimension, right,   the factors and outcomes like creativity,  learning, innovation, right? Productivity   actually is the outcome, right? The direct  outcome from it, tech tap and all of that.   But isn't that all going away? Because I  was talking to a CIO a couple of months ago,   and they're intending to get rid of all their  developers because they're gonna have a prompt   and they're going to be able to just type into it,  you know, make my legacy system future proof and   magically OpenAI will solve all their problems. Well, I tell you, my 8-year-old...  Your 8-year-old. My 8-year-old taught himself to program in Python.   Completely self-taught, auto-detect, with ChatGPT  within three months, right? He built a web server.   He built a compiler, a tiny compiler, a tiny  web server, everything tiny. But it's working,   right? So, I think AI is super, super powerful,  right? But it's just a tool, right? And it's   actually feeding off the information that we are  feeding in, right? It's like, it's garbage in,   garbage out. But also we have a lot of good  information, a lot of good, like, code blocks,  

for example, that it feeds off. So, actually,  there comes working code out of it. And then if   you have a person that steers it...and I think  that's come back to the industrial revolution,   right? It's just, we are even more knowledge  workers now, right? Because all of that, things   that we can actually put into pipelines, right,  that we can automate. I think it's brilliant   that it's...I mean, we have to be very careful and  there are a lot of things that we...you know, we  

should guide where it's going right? And on what  information comes out and how we are using it. But   I think I'm not scared at all for us developers. So, you don't see it as a replacement...  No, not all. ...but as an assistant.  Yes. Yeah. And we have to make sure that we keep  it like that, right? Like, we have to keep it  

within the boundaries of itself right there. Unfortunately, there's a lot of   executives who think it is a replacement. Well, and this, I mean, my punt on this is with   any technology, the successful technologies are  the ones that help people do work better, not the   ones that replace work. And I was saying earlier,  kind of the architecture of the Toyota, the whole   kind of lean production system stuff. You know, he  talked about automation, which is automation with   a human touch. And he says, you know, machines  don't build cars, people build cars with machines. 

That's true. And if you have better   machines, you can build better cars. If you have  machines that you can switch up really quickly,   they call it a SMED, single-minute exchange  of die. So, you could change the whole machine   over in less than a minute. You can build lots of  different kinds of cars, but you still need human  

beings doing that. You know, calculators didn't  get rid of accountants. They made accountants   much less error-prone, right? It meant they  could work better. Computers didn't replace   administrators. It made admin much easier, you  know, and the great tools are the tools that   allow people to either do what they need to  do better or to do normal things. And they... 

Can I add something here? Sure.  One of the factors of the effects, right,  was engaging work. Can you do stimulating   and engaging work? And it was very predictive for  innovation, you know, for all the good outcomes   that we actually want. And I think if AI takes  over the boring task, like boiler-plate coat,   right, the surroundings, and you can really  focus on creativity, on innovation, on,   you know, making sure that the tool actually  gives you a good answer, right, and making sure,   if the answer is even good and testing that,  and, you know, I think this is amazing,   right? I'm actually quite positive about it, but I  obviously see also the problems that we have with   it. But it's more from an ethical perspective, I  think, where we have to be conscious, right? What   kind of information do we feed off? What biases  are there in our systems, right? And how do we use   that? But with every powerful technology comes  a lot of responsibility as well, right? So... 

I agree with that. I think, you know, I look  back at...and this is why, and I never think of   feature parity as a product thing. It's all about  experience. I remember for many years Eclipse was   this big open source Java editor and IntelliJ  was this big Java editor, and basically they   were like feature parity right down to the detail.  And they'd leapfrog each other a little bit. But,   you know, you would find working in one,  working in Eclipse, you could get stuff done,   it was just a bit clunky. And working in  IntelliJ, you would get the stuff done,   it was just really obvious. And naturally, it  just became an extension of you. You could,   like, basically think Java into the machine.  Do you know what I mean? And what they did  

brilliantly was DevEx, was the user experience.  What does it feel like to be using this tool? If   you feel like the tool is on your side...And  I guess, you know, when I'm building...like,   I've been building trading systems and, like,  traders do not want to use trading systems,   they want to trade. That's what they wanna be  doing. The trading system is in between them   and trading, right? So, you know, if you can  make the trading system invisible, you win. 

That's true. If you can make the tool   feel just so intuitive that it's not even there. So, there was, oh God, I can't remember the date.   I think it was in 1972, Nicholas Negroponte  published a paper, which was "Architecture by   Yourself," which was all about when you design,  the process of design is a conversation between   two designers, sometimes within the head of a  single person. And what's interesting about large   language models is the system itself is becoming  the designer. So, you are having a conversation   with the system to build something. And that's  the whole area of conversational programming.  

But what's fascinating about that space is that  a lot of the conversations we're having through   things like Copilot are all text-based. And  the problem with text alone, as in code, is   it's stuck within a world of rules and syntax and  style. So, is the code right and wrong? How have   you styled...you know, how have you written that? But if you look at most engineering departments,   the conversation occurs at two different  places. One is the screen and the second   conversation is on the whiteboard. And the  whiteboard is about objects, relationships,   and syntax. So, there's very, very different  conversations going on whenever we're solving  

a problem. And we've concentrated on one area, one  specific, and using that as the sort of Copilot to   help us. Now, one of my concerns about this is not  only are we training it potentially in the wrong   medium. Back in 2005, I introduced a structure,  which is nowadays known as explorer as villages,   town planners, so basically mapping out the  environment, breaking it into small teams,   small cells. And what we noticed is as the  components evolved, the attitude you needed, so  

you had skill sets like engineering, finance, but  there are different attitudes. So, exploring, when   you're exploring that engineering side is subtly  different from sort of like the villager where you   are turning things into a product to the town  planners where you're industrializing, and you   need three very different attitudes when building  something. And they're all really important.  ...I can confirm that there's  also an ego element to this.  Ok. So, I've always wanted to think of myself as,   you know, the pioneer, the explorer, the, "I'm  gonna go and have all these great ideas." It   turns out I'm rubbish. I've had 2 great ideas  in 30 years, 2. One of them is impressionable,  

in 30 years. I'm really, really good at growing  ideas. I'm really good at taking someone else's   thing and growing it. It turns out I'm a brilliant  villager and I kind of really fancied myself as an   explorer and I just don't have an explorer gene  in me. But I'm great at villaging. I'm like, I've   made my peace with that by now. It's difficult. So, Susanne, I know you've expanded on this stuff   so much. How do you find large language models  and the idea of Copilots fitting into that? 

I think so, it's also like when I see it  from the team cognitive load perspective,   I guess it could be. So, it's a great tool that,  yeah, increases your efficiency in terms of, like,   that you can use it like conversational  programming, engineering, something like   that. And also being your rubber duck when you do  pair programming with your Copilot, for example.   But also built on top of large language models  in your own value chain that you can build upon,   and then you can focus on your core domains  or your core capabilities that you would like   to focus on. So, it can reduce ourselves taking  over or reducing potential team cognitive load.  Coming back to the explorer, villager, and town  planner, it's also my...So, my personal view,  

it's a mix of mindset per each team. So, where one  specific mindset is more prevalent, for example,   like the one that tries to explore and discover  new things, but they also have some of the other   mindset maybe also because some areas needs  to be stabilized and, for example, but also,   like, the teams that own components in commodity,  which are stable, standardized or more stable,   more standardized. But they also have this  town planner mindset to mature and optimize.   But they also need to confront specifically  when it comes to the large language model   when it's new to their platforms, for example,  they provide and how they can incorporate in   their variety of platforms that they provide. But they also have to have a kind of, like,  

explorer mindset as well, so that they enable  those teams to respond in different ways at   different situations. So, when something's new,  it's not that the other team's exploring it,   it could also be the platform team. Even though  they are more on owning these stable components   and the available chain, they also can say,  "Okay, let's try this out with a little   explorer mindset as well, and then see where  we can also support the streamlined teams,   imprompt engineering or something like  that." So, that is, yeah, also that…  Organizational Changes with AI and Tech Evolution An awful lot of change, an awful lot of, you know,   this particular set of technologies impacting the  way we think about things, the way we communicate   things, the way we work with others, the way  we structure. Adele, I mean, I would imagine   conferences going forward, and you are gonna be  bombarded by huge numbers of talk subscriptions,   all generated by large language models. How do  you distinguish between what is actually genuinely   human and not? Secondly, of all these sorts of  conversations, the whole sort of conversational   programming to the organizational structure,  fantastic event you've put on. What do you  

think is really important going forward? Well, the GOTO program of GOTO is actually   invite-only. So, we kind of dodge  that whole delving into the...  That's crafty. ...CFP landscape nonsense.  Well, you still got material testing, right? You  sort of know that the person you're contacting   exists and isn't just a very clever construct... Important.  ...of Wardley map somewhere. You make sure they turn their profile view.  It's not Eddie, the shipboard computer. Exactly. We do tend to avoid that. But I   do have friends that collect a lot of CFPs. And  there was actually a screenshot that was going   around that was hilarious where they had ordered  all of the CFP proposals in alphabetical order.  

And there was just a section that was in this  ever-changing landscape and there was like 30.  Oh, no. There's a great video from Dylan B.,   who's also well-known to the GOTO team. He did  a video recently actually on that phenomenon   of CFPs. And the change in words that have  been used, a word like delve, for example,   had a very low usage rate pre, you know, 2022  in CFPs. And now last year it's gone up orders   of magnitude, the usage of that word. So, it's  quite amusing to see. But yeah, personally... 

So, you scrape out the word delve  and that's like all of your LLM.  Basically, yeah. Also colons in subjects or in  talk titles is also a bit of a giveaway as well.  I've got one of those.  Me too.  I just need to check some things. Well, that brings us all the way back to Eddie,  

the shipboard computer. So, I'm gonna say... I'm busy right now, I'm trying   to make a cup of tea. A cup of tea. Right. So,   all I can say is thank you ever so  much. Thank you for joining us for  

this very "Unscripted GOTO talk" and  you've been absolute stars. Thank you.

2024-11-15 00:39

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