Simone Cicero

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Hi everybody.

 

Simone Cicero

And we are honored to welcome our guest for today, a pioneering and a global leader in software development, deep thinking in technology and its impact on business, and a leading advocate for, I would say, thoughtful innovation in software engineering, but also beyond that, Rebecca Parsons. Hello, Rebecca. It’s a great pleasure to have you here.

 

Rebecca

Happy to be here, Simone, Shruthi. Nice to meet you both.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much. Rebecca has been a technology tri-bracer, I would say, a visionary leader. She’s been relentlessly advocating for ethical innovation. She’s been the chief technology officer, and she’s still a CTO emerita at ThoughtWorks, and now also an independent strategy thinker and board member, I would say, of some different initiatives. 

 

Additionally, she has has co-wrote several key books, including one, the seminal “Building Evolutionary Architectures”, a book that has been, I would say, a critical resource for navigating complexity in modern software systems. Also, many editions of the technology radar at ThoughtWorks, which is a reading that is very common in our desktop for all technologies and designers worldwide.

 

She also served as a chair of the Agile Alliance for a decade or so. Her current focus is about shaping the future of software by fostering, I would say, technical innovation, but also ethical practices and inclusivity. As I said, it’s a privilege to have you. I’m sure that in this episode, we’re going to dive into some of the most pressing topics in technology and organizing. 

 

But as a starting point, maybe as an opening conversation, I would love to hear from you, let’s say, based on your such a deep experience with brands worldwide and technologies for decades, what really is today the role of technology in organizations and how technology fits into existing organizations as a critical element? So I leave it to you for an opening discussion.

 

Rebecca 

Well, the interesting thing is that over the last couple of decades, really since Nicholas Carr wrote his book that said, you know, that basically IT was irrelevant, technology has become more and more important to businesses. And in fact, businesses increasingly are technology companies that happen to provide banking services or happened to be retailers or something like that. 

 

This is a somewhat old story, but I still think it’s very illustrative. We were working with an insurance company many years ago and the crown jewel of that organization, of their business model, why they were so successful in business was their underwriting model. And they could get superior margins on their policies because their model was so good. But it had 82 parameters. And all of a sudden, someone got the bright idea that, gee, we should be able to quote insurance online. Now, would either one of you fill out a form that required 82 parameters for you to get a quote, just a quote for insurance? Of course not. And what they realized is that what had been the crown jewel of their business model was now a boat anchor. 

 

And they had to completely change how they thought about as an organization, we are going to differentiate ourselves, how we’re going to be successful to come into the world of technology. And that was there. I’m no longer an insurance company. I’m a technology company that sells insurance. 

 

And we’re seeing this expand into other industries. Even something as heavily of physical intensive as something like mining. Mining companies even more and more are taking advantage, particularly around health and safety, exploration, things of that nature. So all companies have to reckon with the fact that they need to have a technology strategy and a technology estate that supports their business strategy.

 

In fact, I just did a talk a couple of weeks ago at WebSeminar where we were talking about this problem of business strategy being created in isolation and then tossed over to the IT department. And the IT department just laughs because there isn’t a connection between the reality of the estate and what the business is trying to achieve. And if you are looking to deliver on a business strategy, in today’s world, you have to be in sync with your technology strategy and let’s face it, the current state of legacy in your organization. And so I think this is a transformation that we’re right in the midst of. We still have a significant amount of the C-suite and boards that aren’t yet completely comfortable with technology.

 

And so as technology leaders, it’s our responsibility to help bring those business leaders along. And that’s not, gee, there’s this new Kafka real-time data. Isn’t that cool? And the COO is just, what in the world are you talking about? We have to put it in context so that the business leaders can in fact develop a business strategy that takes advantage of the technology trends in ways that allows the organization to continue to differentiate itself. And we’re just in the midst of this process. 20 years from now, you’re not going to have too many people in the C-suite who aren’t comfortable with technology, but that’s still the case that we have to help people. We have to help business leaders understand

 

What are the risks inherent in say our data strategy with respect to regulatory changes? But what also are the opportunities? How can we use this new technology to amplify our differentiation in the marketplace?

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, I always felt fascinating how companies have been trying to position themselves as technology companies to improve their valuations, for example. So if you have a company that is aiming for IPO, for example, they will always try to position themselves as technology companies. But on the other hand, I always very much fascinated by the idea that technology is rather abundant and open. it’s paradoxically, I think, also more complex to build, I would say, a sustainable competitive advantage on top of the technology, rather than, for example, on top of existing scarce assets. You mentioned, for example, if I’m not wrong, we can talk about, I would say, heavy industries like manufacturing or even mining and so on. And people still will try to position themselves as technology companies while maybe they have existing infrastructure that is much harder to replicate and to build for a competitor. So how do you see that connection? 

 

I mean, especially nowadays where I would say software and more generally with AI knowledge related technologies are becoming so commoditized or so open. How do you see organizations building advantage on top of technologies and starting their own structure, I would say, centered around technologies in a world where technology seems to be so fluid and open and commoditized?

 

Rebecca 

Well, that’s part of why it’s called software, because it’s soft. It’s easy to change. Back years ago, early in my career, I worked for a semiconductor company and you build a chip and it’s there. Yes, you have programmable chips and all of that, but hardware is hard. Not that it’s difficult, but that it is harder to change. And software has inherently always been able to be changed, sometimes more readily than others. And that’s where legacy code comes into the picture. But fundamentally, we’ve always had to think about what else in terms of software? How do we differentiate it? 

 

And one of the things that I found very exciting several years ago was when we as technologists started to care about this little thing called user experience. When I think of some of the software systems I built, when I watched before Sabre, for example, modernized its interface, and you’ve got these people working at the airline ticket desk, and they’re just trying to manipulate things because the bizarre key combinations they needed to do to do anything. I mean, these were definitely not user friendly. 

 

In the past several years, we’ve developed quite a set of tools and research methodologies to try to understand not just what the software should do. know, pretty much since the Agile Manifesto, we’ve understood how to get at the heart of how to elicit what the software should do and, you know, how to build it in such a way that it responds to the change that happens out in the world.

 

And that has come to user experience where we now have iterative design sprints and we’re using many of the same tooling that we use in other parts of the software development life cycle to support iterative design, user testing. So one of the ways an organization distinguishes itself is by how well it understands it’s users. What is it that they are really trying to accomplish? And what am I doing to make it as easy as possible? Because you can deliver something that has tremendous customer value but it is more valuable if it also has a user interface that is easy to access, intuitive to use, pleasing to look at. I think particularly as more of a company’s or organizations interaction with their end customers become mediated by technology.

 

The organization, in addition to having the software that supports it, really has to understand what are these customers trying to accomplish and why, and how can I build a relationship with my customer that is transparent on my part, that engenders trust from my end customer? All of those things, those are the kinds of soft factors.

 

Once everybody is using software, you have to find something else because even if I don’t have your code.

 

I can replicate your software. And so you have to have something else that provides your differentiated. And increasingly that is, how am I building and nurturing the relationships I have with my customers?

 

Simone Cicero 

I know Shruti has a question in the background, but I wanted to highlight, I think a couple of bits. I think it was very interesting to listen to you because I said, you know, it sounds complicated to build advantage around software, but you brought up a very important point that software is not just about software, but it’s about evolutionary capabilities. It’s about listening to your customers.

 

It’s about, and you mentioned the Agile Manifesto, which was probably even, I would say earlier than human centered design, bringing this topic of innovating with customers around customers on the table for the first time. So what I bring home is that even if software doesn’t sound something you can really build an advantage around, how your organization, let’s say, creates the possibility to evolve faster and create better user experiences and interfaces with customers, thanks to software, is where you build your differentiation capability around maybe scarcer assets or unique assets that you may have. It may be a retail presence or it may be manufacturing capabilities or deeper technological capabilities, but still – software and I would say UX, interaction design gives you the real capability to build a real advantage over your competitors.

 

Rebecca

Yes, and one of the things that is so important, I mean, when I first started talking about evolutionary architecture years ago, well before the book, people would come up to me at the stage and whisper and say, don’t you think you’re being professionally irresponsible advocating for evolutionary architecture? Because it’s the foundation, you cannot evolve it. 

 

And then even again, before the book came out, but around that time of the first edition, the tone changed from people coming up and whispering, I know I need to do this. I just don’t know how, because the mindset was still in this. This is the rock and it can’t change. 

 

Because business model lifetimes were shrinking and disruptors were coming in with a different take on a business model and organizations had boat anchors that was their legacy estate. And consumer expectations were changing radically. Twitter introduces a new feature, and now all of the sudden, banking, when you check your account balance, you want that same kind of feature. You were no longer in control of where your requirements were coming from.

 

That meant in order to stay competitive, in order to keep the loyalty of those customers, yes, you had to prioritize that, but you had to keep up with their expectations. And that is a very different proposition than it was 20 years ago when people would just take whatever you gave them.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yeah, if I can just jump in, I’ve been listening and there are so many points I’ve noted, so I’m thinking which tangent to go in. But I think one, you know, key, let’s say point that we wanted to touch upon is that, like you mentioned, let’s say, UX kind of tools or agile kind of tools have been developed as a means to enable technology essentially. So,

 

Now with more and more tools coming up, has been even more democratization of innovation tools within organizations, which have reshaped how we look at, let’s say creativity, ideation inside organizations and so on. how has that sort of shaped, is there over-dependence on these tools? How do we get like a human-centric approach towards these technology implementations and within the democratization that it has enabled.

 

Rebecca 

Well, I think that that’s an interesting point you raised on the democratization because one of the things that I think evolutionary architecture and its close enabler, continuous delivery, has allowed for more experimentation. Because if you look at the way organizations pre-continuous delivery looked at a release, it was a potential to get fired by the CEO because you crashed the system because something went wrong with the release. Yeah. And people didn’t celebrate the features that were coming out with the release. People celebrated the fact that it didn’t bring down the system this time and isn’t that wonderful because I don’t care how good your run book is. No one is at their best at three o’clock on a Sunday morning. They’re just not.

 

And humans are very good at making little mistakes that have catastrophic consequences. And so it was understandable why you would make big bets with your releases. With continuous delivery, with things like A-B testing, and some of those other frameworks that are available, you can start to source ideas from a broader range and those ideas can be smaller because I mean, you wouldn’t do a big legacy drop for one minor change. But one of the things that we found in thinking about human centered design is that, you know, sometimes the curves around the button matter. Why? 

 

I’m sure there’s some psychological explanation, but you wouldn’t have done a release in the past, just to test whether or not changing the shape of a meant people didn’t abandon their carts. But once you can de-risk deployment, you can increase experimentation and you can allow more people to at least feed ideas in. Now, the other point that you raised though, it is critical that we don’t lose the human.

 

And when you think about user centered design and system syncing and all of this, it’s around the notion of you have a hypothesis about what matters to your user. And that user is a person, it’s a human, it’s not a robot. And how can I best create an environment that the user finds productive and is a win-win for both of us. 

 

And so I think that the democratization has allowed us to increase the scope from where we draw ideas and we can talk about smaller ideas because we can safely test them. And this whole test and learn cycle is a critical part of how we do, particularly end user facing software today.

 

Shruthi Prakash

So how do you enable designers, architects inside organizations to think about the long-term impact of their contribution? for example, you mentioned on, let’s say the curved edges for a design factor for maybe reduced dropout from the cart and so on. 

 

But there have also been other cases where let’s say your intent of design might have been to promote a certain product and so on, but essentially it has now become maybe anti-competitive, margin squeezing, things like that for the participants of an ecosystem. how do you enable long-term vision rather than maybe short-term vision in these steps?

 

Rebecca

Well, you need both is the thing. And one of the tensions that you get between people with titles like enterprise architecture or chief designer or something like that is they have by definition a long term mandate. The enterprise architect, I’ll focus that because I’m more familiar with that, but I expect you have similar kinds of things with design strategists. That enterprise architect is responsible for the long-term enterprise value of the IT estate. He has to think about long-term. So he doesn’t want proliferation of too many tools because he has to continue to have a much more heterogeneous workforce. 

 

The delivery teams, and the product teams, they generally have a shorter term focus. And it’s okay, you know, this is the next logical step. And a delivery team in particular, their job is to get their features safely and efficiently, as efficiently as possible into production so that we can test the hypothesis that is coming from the product owner or whomever. So they, by definition, have a short-term focus. 

 

And when it comes to that balance, sometimes the long-term has to win because you can’t compromise your long-term viability by just keeping the lights on. That’s how so many organizations ended up with the legacy that they did, is they didn’t want to invest what they needed to invest. But sometimes the short term has to win. 

 

I was involved in a retail project around the time that Chip and Pin was coming to some countries in Europe. And there was a staggered law. If you were certified as Chip and Pin ready by date one, you got a bonus.

 

In between date one and date two, you were okay, but you didn’t get the bonus. After date two, you were fined. And I believe the fine was basically you no longer had any protection against fraud. I believe that’s how those dates worked. And so lots of organizations had a very important short-term need to not go past date two.

 

One side or the other of date one, it might be good, but you didn’t have an absolute need. You had the absolute need at day two. And so if you’re about to miss day two, the short term has to win because you’ve got organizational risk associated with missing that date. And so part of the job of the architects in this case is to help the broader business weigh those risks. You’ve got a business risk here if you miss day two. You’ve got a technology risk if you push to make day two. And this is what it’s going to take to clean up after day two. 

 

One of the interesting things too that you mentioned is kind of the long-term vision of the design.

And part of how you maintain a long-term vision is to have it more principle-based so that the specific instantiation of how does this play out, you brought up the notion that something was now margin-squeezing or something like that. If you have the right kind of framework there, and the ability to evolve your design just as you evolve your technology, you can evolve your way out of that corner. You have a long-term vision by focusing it on, are the principles that I’m going to maintain regardless of what it is that I’m implementing in terms of the design, just like in terms of the architecture.

 

Simone Cicero 

If I can build on that, Shruthi, if you allow me, because this is a very tangible problem that I see in technology centric organizations. You got it very well. So long term versus short term. Normally we perceive it as the struggle between maybe, I don’t know, a go to market function that gets requirements from customers that maybe they want their own use cases implemented.

 

I want solution like I need it. But on the other hand, you have maybe an R &D function, especially when you have tech-intensive organizations, or in general, a technology factory, something that builds technology. It can be software, but it can be also other things. That normally has to reduce the amount of personalization that gets delivered to the customer, because you want to have more like a platform, long-term vision and you want to reduce your cost to the cost of ownership of the technology over the long term because otherwise you’re going to manage like 10 different, thousands different variations of a technology is still unsustainable over time. So there is always this friction between the people in touch with the customers, the people in touch with the technology. 

 

And sometimes you have product people in the middle that need to really be able to kind of create a coherent process that keeps everything together. So in terms of your experience, and also maybe if I can add, when technology goes down in cost, there is an even deeper expectation of market-oriented people to say, let’s do this. It doesn’t cost them much to do that. So let’s follow the need of the niche customer that we have.

 

So in your experience, what is a good organizational approach in terms of separation of duties and in terms of distributing decision making and probably also profit and loss and total cost of ownership in such a chain that comes from somebody in touch with a customer, a product leadership or platform leadership and a technological capbility in the background?

 

Rebecca

Well, I’m not sure that’s the way I would decentralize it. You might, but I might have misunderstood your blocks here, but I do think that. You need to have a technology capability close to your product capability, whether that be product as end user or maybe product in terms of supporting an internal function, where you’ve got end-to-end responsibility. It’s really helpful if that technology to product to organization they have a metric to chase. We want you to improve X. You own the shopping cart experience and your metric is the rate of cart abandonment or something in a retail context.

 

And the overall encompassing organizational structure is the one that sets the principles. For so long, enterprise architecture involved saying, “you will use this tool to do this thing. And this is how you will use that tool.” 

 

And the teams that are on the receiving end of a dictate like that: “But wait a minute, that tool is wholly unsuited for the problem that I have”
What we want to encourage instead from an overall governance perspective is: “in using a tool such as this to solve a problem such as this, this is the outcome you want to achieve”.

 

Maybe it’s you want guaranteed order of delivery for messages, or maybe it’s a performance or security requirement. It could be all kinds of things. But rather than saying, “this is how you are going to do it, what instead you say is this is what you need to achieve as an outcome. And by the way, we’d like you to use this tool”

 

And in that kind of governance setting, you have a technology team that can say, based on my product requirements, actually using this tool in this way makes it far easier to achieve the outcome. 

 

And then you can go and have a discussion of a governance nature to say, see, we’re achieving your outcome, but given our situation, this is why the standard way of achieving that outcome is not possible or is problematic, harder to maintain, harder to upgrade, whatever the case may be. And by switching to this outcome-driven governance, you can establish the parameters of how you want that technology estate to behave across the range of teams without some architect reaching down from on high and poking the team and say, no, no, no, you’re not doing that right. Because the architect shouldn’t care the specifics of what they are doing as long as it fits within the principles and the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. And so.

 

When you think about a typical large organization the enterprise architects are vastly outnumbered, even by the number of development teams, let alone the number of developers. And so in the past, they’ve had to manage by, here are your requirements, here are your standards, this is what you have to do.

 

But things are just moving so rapidly now that even though that might’ve been more cost efficient, we’ve moved past what cost efficient, the need for cost efficiency in particularly customer facing technology. Because if you care about cost, you care about strict standardization, you care about strict stability, you don’t want to install multiple times a day, heaven forbid.

 

Yeah, look at all those opportunities to make a mistake. And so the balancing act that you have to have at that overall enterprise level is, you know, what are the outcomes that we must achieve from a business perspective? How can I carve up the responsibility for the product and technology teams so that they can be empowered to work within those guidelines?, but for the most part, determine what it is that they need to do from a product, both a product and a technology perspective. 

 

You do have to have some overall governance there to say, okay, know, the various product visions, just like the various technology visions, they have to be coherent.

 

And so, but there isn’t a magic fairy dust. This is a hard problem. Sometimes stability needs to win. Sometimes innovation needs to win. Innovation isn’t always stable. On the other hand, you don’t you don’t want one of your core systems to go down either. So it’s not like we don’t care about stability. It’s not like we don’t care about correctness. But there are some things that you have to allow it to be more dynamic or the market’s going to kill you.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, in the last few years with markets requiring much more dynamicity and technology being more democratic in general, what we are seeing is that these outcomes that you mentioned, both product-wise and business-wise, are more often pure business outcomes. 

 

So let’s say PNL, positive PNL or in general revenues and so on. know, in line with this, what we are seeing is, at least from our perspective is many, many teams in our organization, all interacting with the customer, maybe bringing to the market different products in a portfolio, in a wide portfolio, right? 

 

Maybe, I don’t know, you have a financial fintech company that makes payments and then on the other side they make, I don’t know payment processing features or they have, I don’t know, loans or instant financial tools, financial products and so on. So there’s a plethora of products, a system of record, CRM, whatever. 

 

So you have a plethora of products, plethora of themes. Northstar is often revenues because it’s so competitive market. So in your experience, what are these enabling constraints that companies have been using or can use to achieve the coherence you were talking about. 

 

For example, in our experience, are seeing a lot of use of taxonomies, companies, teams that try to agree on what they’re building and how the pieces fit together. Like, for example, somebody building an operating system, somebody building enabling solutions on top or something like that. But also, I’m curious to hear from you, if you have experiences in how companies have distributed direct financial responsibility, like P&L responsibility to product teams, and how this also stresses the technological capability, creating maybe, I don’t know, I would say, stressors on the software assets that they have, needing more refactoring or things like that. 

 

So in general, I would say, what are the other tools that you have been seeing used in the industry to ensure that as technology gets democratized and multiple teams get to the market for a complex set of products, they remain coherent. They don’t build things that don’t plug into each other. Or maybe you end up with teams that are not even responsible of their own financial numbers and build something that is not really in line with the roadmaps or the customer needs.

 

Rebecca (39:36.508)

Yeah, and as I said earlier, there isn’t a magic bullet. I’m very, I can’t remember a time when somebody asked me how to distribute P&L. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t seen situations where you were trying to distribute responsibility for overall organizational cost.

And in general, the tools are not that different from the kind of facilitation tools that you use in any stage of negotiation. The number of times I’ve heard people within some of the clients saying, well, no one has a problem of stakeholder management any worse than mine. It’s like, you know, those trade-off discussions, they’re always knockdown, drag out fights, you know, because, well, my stuff is more important, but my stuff is also more important and how resources get allocated are a constant battle. 

 

And part of what we do and advocate for is at least try to change that battle to something that does have objective criteria against it. “Okay, so what’s the risk you’re trying to mitigate with this thing that you’re doing over here? And what’s the revenue potential for what you’re trying to do over here?” 

 

But the extent to which you can decentralize those things it turns into a ‘my feature against your feature discussio’ into a much more general ‘my metric against your metric’. And so you’re allocating resources on the basis of what kind of team do I need to do to drive this metric where we want? What kind of team do I need to drive this metric where we want?

 

And then the decision-making is: “okay The risk that you’re trying to mitigate over here, it’s real, but this revenue potential right now gets priorities”. So we’re going to fully staff this team and you’re going to get what’s left and you do your best”. And so you shift the global decision-making more on the basis of what are those business outcomes that you’re trying to achieve, and how are those different teams aligned. And that’s also how you get out of that problem of this team over here just, you know, bebopping around doing whatever they want to do. Because if they try to do that, they’re not gonna have a team for very long. 

 

And so it’s moving sort of up the organizational chart, you know, in the early days of Agile, was different customers from different parts of the organization fighting over getting my feature into the next iteration. And now you’re just moving that discussion up. the planning horizon for team resourcing can be very different than the planning horizon for a release. OK, so for the next quarter, you’ve got this great revenue potential up go for it. 

 

And then you over here will reevaluate maybe market conditions or regulatory conditions change and now that risk, which used to be, okay, I’m going to monitor it, but I’m not really worried about it. Maybe that risk all of a sudden, I need to worry about this now. 

 

And so with that obviously comes P &L because you do have to justify, but it’s easier to think from a P&L perspective when you’re looking at a revenue generating team than you are a risk mitigation or compliance related team. And yet they’re still important. And that’s where that global decision-making needs to be made to weigh the business risk versus the business opportunity of all of these different potential delivery paths.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. mean, that’s just a recap. think it’s important for our listeners. From what I perceive, you said, let’s try to always keep an overall perspective, especially on two things. One, the compliance risk management and general enabling elements of the organization so that the business opportunity doesn’t always, I would say, override the strategic long-term elements of the company. 

 

And at the same time, I perceive also something that tells me, be careful on using P&L to distribute autonomy in teams that are building a system of elements of a single product, let’s say. So you may have to keep more of a big picture element when you’re building single product or maybe a large part of an existing product offering that needs to be coherent. that’s also a very interesting point. Thanks for making this clear.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yes, if I can just take it from there, right? Like, I think we wanted to touch upon what all of this technology integration means for an organization in terms of its implications. So let it be in terms of maybe organizational culture, decision making, employee well-being and so on. So how does this operationalize in an organization and how do you also make this process essentially, let’s say, as fair as you can, so maybe including diverse perspectives, making it unbiased. How can leaders become more intentional in their approach towards their implications of technology?

 

Rebecca

Well, there’s a lot to unpack there.

 

One of the things that, one of the phrases that you hear increasingly is a focus on developer happiness. And personally, I’m uncomfortable with that phrase because I don’t wanna outsource my happiness to anybody. 

 

But developer productivity, developer satisfaction, those start to get more at the, how do I worry about the wellbeing of my employees, of my delivery team? 

 

Often what we find is frustration for developers very often comes from a frustration with the tools or the processes. There was one client that we were working with and our developers were going nuts because the build would break not because the code was wrong or a test failed, but the source control system wasn’t reliable. 

 

And you know, and they kept saying, we’ve got to fix this. We’ve got to fix this. And, you know, the pushback initially was it’s not that big of a problem. Well, they were going nuts because how can I do my work if the bill breaks? You know, because some butterfly took off from a tree in Brazil and so the source control system fails. And so we started documenting the amount of downtime for the entire team that was being caused by these outages. And we were able then to take that data and say, you need to fix this product problem because this is what it is costing you – Not just in developer frustration, but in time wasted. 

 

And so part of well-being comes first from, are you asking me to beat my head against a particular wall every single day to do something that is objectively unnecessary or I don’t understand or the tools just don’t work the way you think they do, and you’re making my life miserable.

 

But another part of that in terms of, you mentioned, know, bias and diversity and such. One of the things that ThoughtWorks has created in recent years is something called the Responsible Tech Playbook. And it includes a series of facilitation techniques that really allow you to tease out bias without needing every intersectional perspective sitting in the room. You can’t get it. You’ve got this whole list of different kinds of disabilities and, you know, is somebody thinking about the deaf? Is somebody thinking about the blind? Is somebody thinking about the colorblind? Is somebody thinking, you know, on and on and on, and then you get race and class and country of origin and religion. And so what you want to do instead is have processes that enable a group to say, to really pose the question, how would I react to this if I was an immigrant from this country in another country and the dominant religion in that country and my class and, know, and really start to look at your choices.

 

It’s interesting because some of the times when I talk about things like how building products, taking bias into account, inevitably somebody in the audience throws up their hand and says, you’re just making an argument to get more women involved in tech. And it’s like, no, it is much bigger than that. 

 

And we need to take those things into account and those perspectives into account. And this is becoming even more of a business risk than perhaps it was in the past. A few years ago when Apple came out with their credit card and a husband and wife both applied using exactly the same financial information because they had pooled financial resources and they both applied for the credit card and he got a higher credit limit than she did. It’s like, okay, what else could have triggered that except this is a man and this is a woman and given identical financial information, she gets a lower credit limit. How is that not biased? you know.

 

And that got a lot of press, a lot of bad press. And so we’re starting to see some of these issues move from, isn’t it wonderful that they’re taking this into account to this is a real business priority. There’s a lot of data, for example, that says designing products that are inherently accessible. The population of people that have some level of disability is a significant market share. And there’s low hanging fruit in the accessibility space that will allow you to address that. And so I do believe that we are moving more towards thinking about the well-being of our users, the well-being of our employees.

 

Now, is that trend going to continue given how the tech market is at the moment? mean, it’s pretty rough out there right now. And so it may be that there’s going to be some level of retrenchment from that. But I do think it’s something that technology leadership and business leadership more broadly is taking seriously.

 

Simone Cicero 

And do you think that by enlarging a little the picture, companies are also thinking about more like their impacts on their own supply chains or sustainability more in general. So not just from a perspective of market penetration or market success, from a perspective of business risk, but also from a perspective of business continuity risk. you speak a lot about implied choices in technology when it comes to sustainability or business resilience or regenerative thinking. 

 

Do you see that this conversation is also reaching the boards and the architects and they’re making choices to be sure that, for example, they do not waste energy or things like that because this is really becoming important for the business results.

 

Rebecca

Pre-pandemic, I saw a much broader move. You major announcements by the big platforms, the Microsofts, the Googles about green pushback against some of the blockchain and crypto just because of the sheer amount of energy used for mining.

 

The pandemic got people thinking about more about supply chain vulnerabilities as opposed to supply chain efficiency. Because just in time, supply chains and all of that stuff from the Toyota school, we saw how vulnerable that made us when all of the sudden, we couldn’t get things out of China because the borders were closed because of the pandemic. 

 

Then following on to that, at least in the US, and I haven’t heard that this is quite as stark in other parts of the world, but there’s a backlash against ESG funds. That they’re greenwashing or, you know they certainly can’t be as profitable as anybody else because if you worry about all of this ESG stuff, you’re obviously compromising your bottom line, et cetera. So I think it varies widely. 

 

You do have people who are concerned about climate impacts. And in fact, from organizations like, I believe, both Amazon and Microsoft are building sort of mini nuclear power stations because they were all for all this green stuff until GenAI. And the power consumption of GenAI is unbelievable. And OK, so do I keep my climate commitments or do I climb on the GenAI bandwagon? And so they are in fact looking at can I build or can I fund the construction of cleaner energy sources so that I can have my green and my AI at the same time. 

 

And so I do think that there are definitely people out there who are worried about it. More and more interest in not just the source of power, but broader green software engineering capabilities, green UX, where you design your interface to help people understand the impact of the decision that they’re making. 

 

So there is definitely that going on broadly across the industry, but it is not evenly distributed. And I would not want to assert that the gains that we have made there are stable. Because like I say, you’ve got the backsliding that’s happening, having to do with AI, and now we’ve got to figure out, okay, is there a way for Microsoft, for example, to meet their net negative goal and still be a leader in the application of generative AI. I don’t know that we know the answer to that question at the moment.

 

Simone Cicero (59:27.478)

I mean, these are so deep questions that have been engaging philosophers for probably millennia. So I think we’re not going to have any answer on this. Or rather, if we have an answer, think it’s that technology has its own course and we’re really failing to prevent its impact on the planet. So we probably have to cope with that one way or another.

 

So let’s see how it’s going to be turning out. So Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yes. So, mean, towards the end of our discussion. So we have a section called Breadcrumbs. So I would like to ask you if there are any maybe books or podcasts or anything that, you know, listeners can gain from through listening to you, any suggestions that you might have for them.

 

Rebecca 

This is more meta suggestion first, which is – I very often get asked, how can you keep up with technology? And my response to that is that you find people in different aspects of technology that you trust.

 

I have my people in programming languages and if they tell me this is a really interesting new language, I’m going to go take a look at it because, you know, they’re following it. And if they find it that interesting that they’re willing to bring it up to me, I have my person in the database space and it’s the same thing or the data analytics or data management. And so I find getting a variety of sources is important. 

 

But one of the things that is also true is unless you’re operating a really high level, no one can really understand the detailed specifics of the entire technology stack now. When I started, it was easy. It isn’t. You’ve got your front end frameworks and you’ve got your different kinds of middleware and you’ve got your different analytics and you’ve got your different, you know observability tools, which of course are different from your monitoring. And when you think about the breadth of technologies that it takes to deploy a significant system, no one person can understand the minutiae in all of those. And it’s even hard to say we have technology generalists now. 

 

You can be a generalist across may be back end, or you can be a generalist across architectural paradigms, but a true end to end soup to nuts, of life to end of life generalist, that’s got to be pretty high level. 

 

And so the first step is to decide what are the things that you’re really interested in. One of the things I’m finding in my in my new situation. And I am, by the way, the former emerita. I’m not officially with ThoughtWorks anymore.

 

Years ago, I got a bachelor’s degree in economics. And so I’m actually reading more about economics. I read a very interesting book as well recently on The titans of the 20th century. And it had a chapter on Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but also Joseph, no, it was Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, and then Ben Gurion and Haagani. 

 

And each one of those, made a significant mark on what our society looked like coming out of the 20th century. And I found that fascinating. And what I really enjoyed about it is what was the breadth and the fact that the author was willing to put an analysis of Hitler in the same you know, on the same level as an analysis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mahatma Gandhi. Yeah. And, and I, I’ve, so I found that quite interesting, but I just encourage people to figure out what makes your eyes light up when you talk about it and go find those things because that’s what that’s what’s going to bring you joy.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thank you so much.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you. Thanks very much for this. Shruthi, do you want to add something?

 

Shruthi Prakash

No, I was just going to say it’s like one of the nicest breadcrumbs we’ve had because usually it’s just like a, you know, book recommendations or so on. We appreciate that as well, but this really helps. Yeah.

 

Rebecca

Excellent.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you very much. mean, it’s been a super interesting conversation. I think it’s a very, I mean, I didn’t have the ambition to gather all your insights in one episode, but I think we got a few key ideas here that our listeners can think through as they build their own companies or maybe as they manage their own teams. So thank you so much for the conversation. I hope you also enjoyed and brought you to new territories a little bit.

 

Rebecca 

Yes, yes, you guys ask penetrating questions. And I enjoyed that.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much.

 

Thank you so much. For our listeners, ofcourse, Shruthi, thank you so much for your questions, as always, for your time.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you, thanks Rebecca, thanks Simone.

 

Simone Cicero

And for our listeners, always remember that if you go to www.boundaryless.io/resources/ podcast, you will find this episode, all the transcript, with all the recommendations that Rebecca shared. And I really encourage you to look on the internet. There are tons of talks from Rebecca. You can pick and, you know, she covers such a wide range of topics. It’s really, especially for technologists, I think it’s really a work that needs to be known. 

 

So thank you so much for your books and for everything, Rebecca, again. And for our listeners, of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.