The devops handbook how to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations By Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis

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What was your last step and what happened?
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What did you learn?
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What is your condition now?
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What is your next target condition?
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What obstacle are you working on now?
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What is your next step?
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What is your expected outcome?
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When can we check?
This problem-solving approach in which leaders help workers see and solve 
problems in their daily work is at the core of the Toyota Production System, 
of learning organizations, the Improvement Kata, and high-reliability or-
ganizations. Mike Rother observes that he sees Toyota “as an organization 
defined primarily by the unique behavior routines it continually teaches to 
all its members.”
Promo 
- Not 
for 
distribution 
or 
sale

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46 • Part I
In the technology value stream, this scientific approach and iterative method 
guides all of our internal improvement processes, but also how we perform 
experiments to ensure that the products we build actually help our internal 
and external customers achieve their goals.
CONCLUSION
The principles of the Third Way address the need for valuing organizational 
learning, enabling high trust and boundary-spanning between functions, 
accepting that failures will always occur in complex systems, and making it 
acceptable to talk about problems so we can create a safe system of work. It 
also requires institutionalizing the improvement of daily work, converting 
local learnings into global learnings that can be used by the entire organization, 
as well as continually injecting tension into our daily work.
Although fostering a culture of continual learning and experimentation is 
the principle of the Third Way, it is also interwoven into the First and Second 
Ways. In other words, improving flow and feedback requires an iterative and 
scientific approach that includes framing of a target condition, stating a hy-
pothesis of what will help us get there, designing and conducting experiments, 
and evaluating the results.
The results are not only better performance but also increased resilience, 
higher job satisfaction, and improved organization adaptability.