Guest Lorin Hochstein, Netflix engineer, shares insights on resilience, peer-to-peer learning, and close call value. Discusses grassroots programs at Netflix, measuring negative outcomes, and driving cultural change. Emphasizes knowledge sharing, career transitions, operational expertise, complexity management, and influential resources.
Resilience goes beyond metrics, focusing on peer-to-peer learning and reflection on mistakes.
Creating space for reflection and skill development enhances teams' capacity for tackling challenging work.
Collaborative design processes and valuing collective contributions boost problem-solving capabilities in teams.
Deep dives
Importance of Psychological Safety in Team Dynamics
Building a culture of psychological safety within a team enables better collaboration and communication. It fosters an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing ideas and concerns without fear of judgment, ultimately leading to more effective problem-solving and innovation. Encouraging open dialogue and valuing diverse perspectives enhances team cohesion and performance.
Balancing Capacity and Workload in Engineering Teams
Increasing the capacity of engineering teams to handle complex and challenging work is crucial for sustained productivity. Creating space for reflection, learning, and skill development allows teams to adapt to evolving challenges and develop expertise. Balancing workload with capacity ensures that teams can effectively address issues and deliver high-quality solutions.
Enhancing Expertise Through Collaborative Design and Operations
Engaging in collaborative design and operations processes allows teams to leverage diverse perspectives and insights to address complex problems. Recognizing that expertise emerges through interactions among team members rather than individual efforts enhances problem-solving capabilities. Emphasizing joint cognitive systems and valuing collective contributions fosters a culture of shared responsibility and continuous learning.
Promoting Organizational Resilience Through Collective Learning
Emphasizing the importance of resilience in organizations involves promoting a culture of continuous learning and adaptation. By acknowledging that resilience extends beyond metrics and involves nuanced interactions and responses to challenges, organizations can better prepare for unexpected events. Encouraging teams to explore the 'squishy space' of knowledge creation and problem-solving facilitates the discovery of innovative solutions.
Navigating Managerial Challenges in Resilience Engineering
Addressing the managerial challenges in resilience engineering requires developing tools for aggregating complex information and signals beyond traditional metrics. Leaders need to look for alternatives that capture qualitative insights, such as psychological safety and collaborative dynamics, to gauge team performance and preparedness for challenges. Building a narrative around enhancing expertise, fostering collaboration, and promoting learning can help justify investments in resilience-building initiatives.
Today’s conversation is about resilience, and as today’s guest, Lorin Hochstein, notes; “Resilience is about the stuff that isn’t visible through the metrics.” Lorin is a senior software engineer at Netflix who is on a mission to improve the company’s engineering department through creating a culture within which peer-to-peer learning and the process of reflecting on past mistakes are foundational. Lorin is responsible for the development of a few grassroots programs at Netflix which address the company’s lack of deliberate knowledge sharing, which he talks about today. We also discuss the value of close calls as opposed to incidents, and how Lorin works around the challenge of measuring the negative outcomes which didn’t occur. Although he makes sure to point out that he does not bear a "staff" title (Netflix does not have them), he is certainly doing some interesting staff-type work, and his passion for value creation is inspiring.
