Issue link: https://enterprise-resources.awscloud.com/i/1282535
Mark Schwartz is an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services and the author of The Art of Business Value and A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility. About the Author For a humble manager, there is a better way to reduce risk. The manager can assume that he or she doesn't know whether the idea will turn out to be a good one, and instead work with the employee to find a way to quickly and inexpensively test the idea. The manager can coach the employee on finding a good, minimal test, and what success would look like. Then, once the test is conducted, the manager and employee can agree on whether the idea is promising or not. Adopt practices that encourage humility DevOps was created to support this humble approach to delivery. A DevOps team tries to reduce lead times for getting capabilities to production so that they can get fast feedback from users. Feedback, by the way, is not necessarily verbal feedback from asking customers what they like. More commonly, it is quantitative measures relating to goals the company has established. The cloud also helps enable this way of working. With the cloud, it is easy for the enterprise to create a quick MVP and then iteratively refine it. The cloud mitigates risk because any infrastructure or services that have been provisioned can quickly be de-provisioned if an idea doesn't work. The cloud makes the DevOps processes of continuous integration and continuous delivery possible and lets the company put in place security, compliance, and reliability guardrails, which then let that company experiment at high velocity. Humility enables better companies Is it surprising that Lean and Agile IT require humility? Or that today's uncertain and rapidly changing business environment demands it? We have always thought that managers and experts should know what their markets want. But in a business environment of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change, where customers, regulators, and even nature are full of surprises, it should come as no surprise that humility can improve a company's competitive position, facilitate innovation, and help build relationships with customers.