Category: Book Review

The Unicorn Project

A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim https://itrevolution.com/the-unicorn-project

The Unicorn Project is a companion book to Kim’s previous work: “The Phoenix Project”.  Unicorn covers the same timeline, same company and same business/devops transformation as Phoenix, but with an overlapping cast of characters. In Unicorn, the focus is on the transformation is from the perspective of the IT engineers on the coal face. Essentially, this is the “redshirt” version of Phoenix.

Kim uses the same novel-like style used in the Phoenix project to keep the material engaging and moving at a high tempo. From that perspective it works, but I do find some of the situations overly contrived and distracting.

Moving past the style there are a lot of ideas and tools presented in the book. The two main ones are: The Five Ideals and The Three Horizons. The Five Ideals are the main lessons of the book and our redshirts embrace them step by step on their journey from frustration to devops masters. The 5 ideals are:

  • The first ideal: Locality and Simplicity
  • The Second Ideal: Focus Flow and Joy
  • The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work
  • The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety
  • The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus.

By leaning into the ideals progressively though the book our protagonists are able to become more engaged, move value creating members of the team. This allows them to start exploring the second idea, the Three Horizons from Geoffrey Moore. The Three Horizons help and organisation think about a business in terms of three time horizons:

  • Horizon 1: Your current core business
  • Horizon 2: Near term expansions to the core business
  • Horizon 3: Longer term innovations that allow you transform the business

The group then try to make context based decisions on how to rationalize their IT group to find headroom to invest in innovation.

Takeaways

After a first reading, what struck me most was an observation towards the end of the book that the three core metrics critical to any successful business are:

  1. Employee Engagement
  2. Customer Satisfactions
  3. Cash Flow

While all good ideas seem obvious once they have been pointed out – I particularly liked this one. The book did a good job of demonstrating how the 5 Ideals could first build employee engagement and then deliver increased customer satisfaction.

I also really appreciated that idea of psychological safety. In a laboratory based environment physical safety is taken extremely. But so frequently psychological safety is overlooked in a workplace. This is really something to watch out for in everyday situations.

Living with AI – Some lessons from Chess

At the end of last year I finished reading Range by David Epstein 

One of the interesting things that came out of reading this was the discussion about how Chess has changed, since AI engines became strong enough that they could not be directly beaten.

There was an analysis presented by from Garry Kasparov was about how he had mastered a large collection of chess tactics. Essentially he could map from a situation on the board  to an appropriate play to respond. As his “library” of tactics was better than other players he became the strongest player.

While not a chess player, this made me recall how the best players (well better players than me) won in the Street Fighter 2 video game. Find the best combo for a player (Normally Guile as he had a 4 hit combo and everyone else had 3) and then get tactically very good at applying those combos in a bout.

The best human players were beaten by the Chess AI engines when that became better at this tactics led approach to playing they the game. The famous games being against Deep Blue. A Chess Engine running on the smart phone is as strong as Deep Blue that beat Kasparov in the 90s. But now a new form of advanced chess has formed with AI Engines running tactics but with human “generals” guiding an overall strategic direction. This has led to new type of specialists in the game. Those who can direct their AI’s better that their opponent.

In a world of automation and increased AI usage. This has to be the model we look at and train our people operate in. How can the future of work be based around centaur’s operating using AI to assist in solving complex problems.