Effective DevOps

Chapter 18. Bridging Devops Cultures: Fostering Human Connections

In addition to helping us learn about successful technologies and effective cultures, stories also allow us to form and maintain strong interpersonal connections with each other. As we discussed in Part III, the strength of the ties between individuals and groups has an overall positive effect on an organization’s health and productivity.

Stories are a way for us to foster these sorts of connections at an individual level. Learning what we value in our own individual narratives, the stories that we tell about ourselves, can help us to understand and empathize better with others. In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of these narrative elements and how they relate to the overarching cultural context of devops. We’ll also see how these individual stories can add up to impact organizational health and how you can work toward creating healthy cultural systems rather than unhealthy ones.

Individual Stories and Narratives around Work

Some people shy away from getting too personal (or interpersonal) in the workplace, saying things like “I only care about the work” or valuing technical skills more highly than anything else. But unless you are a one-person organization creating software only for yourself, you work with other people and you create software for other people; the interpersonal aspects of work cannot be erased from the equation.

In this chapter, we’ll examine various ways in which individual stories can play ...