Organizational Habits for a better DevOps culture

Applying the lessons from Charles Duhigg’s Power of Habit to DevOps

DevOps has been hailed as a panacea for large tech organizations that not only need to innovate, but innovate at a rapid pace as they try to compete with nimble startups. With DevOps, organizations hope to reduce cycle time and get products in front of customers faster. Yet many organizations struggle to achieve these goals. One reason is that organizations fail to address the cultural aspect, which is at the heart of DevOps. Changing an organization’s culture is hard, especially for one that is set in its ways.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about how individuals and organizations are driven by habits. Habits are hard to change, because once formed, they are automatic and are followed without much active thought. An organization’s culture is primarily driven by its habits — either instituted by design or adopted over time. Changing existing bad habits or creating new good habits are the key to change. In the book, Duhigg explains the science behind habits and provides a framework for changing habits or creating new ones. The book is filled with great stories about the habits — good and bad — of successful organizations and individuals.

A culture of postmortems

Never let a serious crisis go to waste — Rahm Emanuel

One of the stories from the book is of Alcoa and its then newly hired CEO, Paul O’ Neill who helped turn the company around by focusing on one keystone habit: Worker Safety.

[O’Neill] identified a simple cue: an employee injury. He instituted an automatic routine: Any time someone was injured, the unit president had to report it to O’Neill within twenty-four hours and present a plan for making sure the injury never happened again. And there was a reward: The only people who got promoted were those who embraced the system.

Software engineering organizations have the perfect parallel in the postmortems that are conducted after an incident or an outage. Postmortems when done right reveal the underlying root causes and not just the issues on the surface. It is just as important to share the learnings and next steps with the rest of the organization. Further, postmortems occasionally reveal other bad organizational habits that need to be addressed. Nobody likes an outage, but when they do happen, they have a tendency to motivate people to work hard to prevent a similar incident. Postmortems provide a great opportunity to use that momentum to drive real change within an organization.

The Habit Loop

So, you’ve identified bad habits in your organization and good habits that you want to start, what next? How do you go about changing organizational behavior in a lasting manner? The Power of Habit introduces the Habit Loop:

Every habit is unique and it can take a lot of analysis to isolate the cues and rewards that form your habit loops. Changing existing habits works best when you keep the cue and the reward the same and work on modifying the routine. To create new habits, you can find existing habit loops and tack on the new routines or you have to create new cues and rewards.

On a project that I worked on recently, our Continuous Integration was working well enough that we were delivering stories to production at a rapid pace. The only problem was that we were moving so fast that our documentation was severely lagging behind development. We were using Kanban at the time with daily stand ups. We started by adding a column to our kanban board that made “Documentation Complete” as a gate before a story could proceed to “Done”. The stand-ups were where we made sure that stories didn’t “accidentally” skip the “Documentation Complete” column. In essence, we took existing cues around our stand-ups and Kanban and tacked on a new routine of making sure Documentation was updated, with the reward being the story going out to production at the end. It’s a simple example, but over time, we used the same trick to make sure monitoring, stress testing were thought about for each story rather than as an after thought.