Engineering Culture by InfoQ
InfoQ
Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.
Episodes
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12 snips
May 13, 2019 • 13min
Dave Snowden on Liminality in Cynefin and Moving Beyond Agile to Agility
In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave Snowden at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about the addition of liminal spaces in the Cynefin framework, pre-scrum techniques and the future of agility
Why listen to this podcast:
• The Cynefin Framework provides a perspective on the world
• The latest version of the Cynefin framework include two liminal domains
• The strength of approaches like Scrum is holding things in a liminal state long enough to become right, before they move to complicated
• In the complex domain the keys are identifying coherent hypotheses and running parallel safe-to-fail experiments
• There is a whole body of techniques for addressing IT problems and there is no one right answer – use the techniques best suited to the nature of the problem
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Hh5qn0
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May 6, 2019 • 11min
Fabiola Eyholzer on Changing Thinking in HR
In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Fabiola Eyholze at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about the need to radically change HR thinking and practices in organisations to enable creativity and productivity.
Why listen to this podcast:
• The need to create great places of work where people enjoy going to work
• It’s about having meaningful work; understanding why we do things and our contribution is to making a positive impact on other peoples’ lives
• We want people to think outside the box and be creative at work and that means we need to create workplaces that support them to do so
• We thrive when we bring diversity into teams – different personalities and approaches result in better outcomes
• Most HR people do genuinely care about other people, about engagement and about creating healthy workspaces; yet HR is often so process-driven that they forget about the important people factors
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2GYAp6f
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Apr 29, 2019 • 13min
Doug Kirkpatrick on Self-Management, Professional Growth and Great Cultures
In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Doug Kirkpatrick at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about what self-management actually means for the people in an organisation.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Self-management enables everyone in the organisation to thrive and do their best work
• It’s not about layers of control, rather it’s dense networks of committed self-managers guided by a clear set of principles
• It’s the responsibility of each self-manager to guide their own career
• Decision rights come down to who is the best person to make that particular decision
• Great organisation culture is one where people are happy, free to do their best work, engaged in high levels of good, effective collaboration and are able to contribute to the world
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2DHpq0a
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Apr 22, 2019 • 25min
Dave West on the State of Scrum
In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at scrum.org about the current state of scrum and the latest initiatives by scrum.org
Why listen to this podcast:
• Scrum has been used for over 25 years and people are using it in different areas and the challenges are not around the rudimentary aspects of adoption rather it is about optimising the way of working in different contexts
• The need to move beyond adherence to a single approach into a wider, pragmatic mesh of ideas from multiple sources
• The fundamentals of Empiricism, self-organisation and continuous improvement need to be wrapped in discipline, customer-centricity and a value model that makes sense while we constantly improve our skills
• The characteristics of the organic model are completely different to the factory model – thinking needs to shift from process adherence to values & behaviours, from specialists to generalists who are customer focused who can learn quickly, from hierarchies to flat organisations
• You can’t be agile without transparency and an empirical mindset
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2PtfhsE
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Apr 16, 2019 • 20min
Phil Abernathy on Employee Happiness and the Bureaucracy Mass Index
In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Phil Abernathy about his work helping organisations focus on employee happiness to drive customer happiness and shareholder return and the Bureaucracy Mass Index as a tool to identify where companies are bloated and ineffective. He also spoke about what’s needed for real transformation.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Great companies are realising that in order to attract great talent you have to have a great place to work
• If you have complex systems and complex processes, the root cause will be complex structures
• The organisational BMI – the Bureaucracy Mass Index, the proportion of enablers to doers. A healthy BMI is around 10%, whereas in many organisations it gets to be as high as 40%
• Having clear objectives that are visible to the while organisation enables good decision making; Objectives and Key Results are one tool to achieve this
• Organization transformation must include mindset and culture as well as structure and roles
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2XhBYCO
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 9, 2019 • 28min
Mik Kersten on Moving from Projects to Products
Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mik Kersten of Tasktop about his new book, Project to Product and how the Flow Framework can be applied to changing the way of working in organisations.
Why listen to this podcast:
• The project model of software development is fundamentally broken
• The management techniques which were invented in and needed for managing in the era of industrial revolution are not applicable or useful in the era of software development
• Most organisations’ rate of change in improving how they build software is so slow that they are unable to compete against any of the tech giants who choose to adopt a new market
• The shift from projects to products enables organisations to realise more value and respond top market changes quicker
• The flow framework is a tool to help identify where to make changes based on finding the bottlenecks and releasing value in the system
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2VxhVj7
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 1, 2019 • 22min
Nigel Dalton on Taking Back Management
In this podcast recorded at the Agile India conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group about his experiences and the need to take back management as an important practice in today’s organisations
Why listen to this podcast:
• There is a science of invention – deliberately combining things that you might not have thought of combining before
• What matters more than having an agile process is having a resilient organisation – bounce-back-ability
• The four elements which need to be present for sustainable success are good management, resilience, creativity and agility
• Management as a profession and practice has become tainted and unpopular, yet good management is critical to organisation success
• The more organizations that can apply humanistic values, lean principles, value focus, flow of work and continuous improvement the stronger the economy will become
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ hhttps://bit.ly/2HQNoJW
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Mar 26, 2019 • 20min
Flint Brenton on the Collabnet/VersionOne merger and Helping Customers Adopt Value Streams
In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Flint Brenton, CEO of Collabnet/VersionOne on how the organisation is integrating post the merger and supporting customers as they adopt value stream thinking.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Reflecting on the way the two businesses have come together since the merger of Collabnet and VersionOne
• The company is focusing on supporting value stream management in their customers development businesses
• You can adopt value stream management without including DevOps, but it’s really hard and doesn’t deliver the expected benefits
• Regardless of size, every enterprise is now a software company
• The importance of educating customers on the cultures that are found in the best run development organisations and the benefits that are possible
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HH6uSO
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Mar 19, 2019 • 19min
Andrew King of Ocado Technologies on Great Hiring Practices and Designing Culture
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Andrew King, Organisational Scientist at Ocado Technologies about the hiring practices they use and how to design the culture you want.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Context effect says that anything that happens in decision making that is altered by the context in which the decision is made
• The compromise effect – when faced with a choice of options we try to avoid the extremes
• These types of effects impact hiring processes and culture design and have to be actively mitigated against
• Design your interviewing questions very carefully to explore the things that will actually help in the decision-making process
• The content of an interview is the candidate’s responses, not the questions that are asked
• To implement effective change, follow the principles rather than blindly following a process
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2FfKyuo
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

Mar 13, 2019 • 22min
Jason Box and Paul Johnston on What Technologists can do About Climate Change
In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Box and Paul Johnston about the impact climate change is having, how information technology contributes to greenhouse gasses and what technologists can do to help combat it.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Climate change is the challenge of our time
• Data centers are a real problem IRO global warming and greenhouse gas emissions
• Data centers have the same emissions impact as the aviation industry
• There is an initiative to have all data centres using sustainable power sources by 2024
• Data center demand is set to increase by 5 times by 2025
• The greenlandtrees.org initiative is planting trees to capture carbon
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Hi9jt8
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2Hi9jt8


