Recently I was honoured to give my talk, "The Important of ... Empathy (in #chaosengineering)" to the wonderful audience at @chaoscarnivalio. I decided to make the talk a ... talk, rather than a slideshow, and I promised I'd share the major points ... so here they are, a thread.
I started with a confession, that the success of the #chaosengineering initiative in your company has less to do with the tools you pick than you may realise... And as the co-founder of the @chaostoolkit, that's quite the hard confession to make!
What helps your #chaosengineering succeed isn't just the tools, it isn't the types of failure you can inject, it isn't even how #cloudnative, or not, your system is, or how wonderful your #observability is set up ...
First it’s worth reminding ourselves of what we wanted from #chaosengineering in the first place. A key goal of chaos engineering is to help you proactively surface and explore Dark Debt - snafucatchers.github.io
#chaosengineering helps you explore, verify and improve your resilience capacities (anticipation, synchronization, response, learning).
#chaosengineering uses scientific, hypothesis-driven experiments to seek evidence of your resilience capacities and dark debt.
#chaosengineering seeks to help us learn how resilient we are, and to turn those learning's into improvements.
And there's the challenge ... learning requires psychological safety and collaboration, which in turn both also require you to practice and learn the skill of ... empathy!
#psychologicalsafety #collaboration
#psychologicalsafety #collaboration
Masochistic and sadistic scenarios of #chaosengineering that focus on injecting failure fail because they lack #empathy.
Little empathy = little psychological safety and collaboration = little learning.
Little empathy = little psychological safety and collaboration = little learning.
Empathy comes in three, related flavours: Affective, Cognitive and Compassionate.
#empathy
#empathy
Affective #empathy encompasses being aware of how others feel.
Cognitive is your ability to understand how others might have felt.
Compassionate is acting based on the knowledge and awareness of how others will, or are, affected.
Cognitive is your ability to understand how others might have felt.
Compassionate is acting based on the knowledge and awareness of how others will, or are, affected.
Empathy is an important foundation behind #DevOps, #SRE, CI/CD, and it is crucial to the success of your chaos engineering.
And the really good news is ... you don't have to rush out and try and hire special "empaths" (although you can if you’d like!)
And the really good news is ... you don't have to rush out and try and hire special "empaths" (although you can if you’d like!)
Empathy is a trait and a skill. Because it’s a skill, it can be learned.
Neuroplasticity (psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Jerzy_Kon…) tells us that we can rewire the brain. Even faking empathy creates empathy!
Neuroplasticity (psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Jerzy_Kon…) tells us that we can rewire the brain. Even faking empathy creates empathy!
#Empathy, like much of #EQ, is a powerful, learnable skill. Whether you be a new developer, or a seasoned lead engineer, you can learn empathy and EQ through practice.
From practice to habits and rituals. Two practices are the Proust Method (particularly good for developing cognitive empathy), and the "Listening Deeply and with Intent" set of skills.
Great #chaosengineering focuses on exploring your #resilience and requires psychological safety and collaboration to enable the goal of learning and adapting. At the heart of both psychological safety and collaboration is practicing the skill of empathy.
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