To innovate, you don’t need to learn more—you need to unlearn. In this thought-provoking keynote from Prodacity 2025, Barry O'Reilly, Cofounder of Nobody Studios and Author of Lean Enterprise and Unlearn, reflects on 10 years of transformation, the biggest lessons learned, and what’s next for digital innovation.

From experimentation and DevOps adoption to breaking the bureaucracy of innovation, O’Reilly shares how organizations can ditch outdated ways of working, measure outcomes instead of outputs, and embrace uncertainty as a strategic advantage.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• Why unlearning outdated assumptions is more important than learning new ones
• The evolution of Lean Enterprise and what’s changed over the last decade
• Why experimentation is now essential for every high-performing organization
• The bureaucracy of innovation—and how to fight it
• How to shift from measuring output (story points) to measuring real outcomes
• The future of AI, no-code tools, and software development at scale

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: The inspiration behind Lean Enterprise & Unlearn
[01:11] - How experimentation went from a niche idea to an industry standard
[03:25] - The death of the project mentality—why product thinking wins
[06:37] - Why "big budget, multi-year projects" are a recipe for disaster
[09:49] - The Capital One story: Building high-performance teams through learning
[12:35] - The bureaucracy of innovation and why companies still resist change
[14:58] - Why most organizations are stuck in short-term thinking
[17:02] - The rise of DevOps, DORA metrics, and continuous improvement
[19:44] - AI, automation & no-code tools—what’s next for software teams
[22:38] - Final thoughts: Unlearning the past, embracing the future

🔗 Stay Connected:
Learn more about Prodacity: https://www.rise8.us/prodacity
Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

📖 Get the Book:
Want to dive deeper? Check out Barry O'Reilly’s books:

• Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale
• Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results

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Barry O'Reilly (00:03):

So I think first up has to be a huge shout out to Bryon and the team. Will we give them a hell? Yeah. Woo! Unbelievable. One of the joys of doing this is you get to go all over the world and meet fabulous people like yourselves, but to be in a venue, this is even more special I think. And we're one of the first people to be in here and do an event like this. So it's been amazing. He was kind enough many months ago to send me an email and say, we'd love to sort of create a conference around the inspiration behind Lean Enterprise. And so what I thought I'd do is share a little bit of a fund reflection maybe over the last 10 years, some of the things that surprised me about what changed, some of the things that I think everyone in this room can be really proud of that we managed to move our industry forward together. And then maybe some of the things that are still frustrating us a little bit. And then just for fun, let's talk a little bit about what the next 10 years might look like. Does that sound like fun?

(01:11):

Alright. And surprise, surprise, there'll be lots of chance for audience participation as we go along. Alright? But I did want to start with some of the things I think everybody in this room should be incredibly proud of. One thing, it's always an honor to use these sort of ideas as a lightning rod to inspire people, but it's everyone in this room that moves our industry forward. You're out there in some of the most difficult sort of environments, if you will, trying to advocate for a better way of working. And I know it's frustrating. I know it can feel sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back, but you're making a lot of progress and you're making it not just better for people that are around you, but you're making it better for the next set of people that come along and the next set of people.

(02:04):

So that's what moves us forward. And some of the things that have really struck me, and I think I've heard this again and again and again, is even this idea of experimentation. I remember in 2012 when we started to incept this idea of what Lean Enterprise could be talking about, experimentation actually felt a bit like you were some weird scientist with a white coat on locked in a room. And yet today and nearly in every single talk that I heard over the three days, people were talking about creating new knowledge by trying new actions and behaviors to create new information. And that is something that really has propagated everywhere. It's almost at the point now if you're not actively experimenting, you're going backwards. And that wasn't an idea we had 10 years ago. Similarly, this idea of busting up the project mentality and getting into this product mentality, Amazon we're still at this time, they were even not even really talking or starting to talk about this idea of two pizza teams, small cross-functional teams that were connected with customers that were building fast and getting rapid feedback cycles.

(03:25):

And in the talk I gave at the beginning, I still remember sitting down, this is hilarious story. I sat down with Rich and his team, this executive group for Capital One. They were sitting there going, what's the ideal construct for a team? And it was really funny. One of the executives went, oh, I've been building teams my whole life. I'm going to go off into a room and design what the ideal team looks like and then I'll come back and then I'll tell the whole company this is what the ideal team will work like and people will have to move from Washington to San Francisco. And I was like, geez, this is crazy. And three of the executives were like, no, no, no. We're going to go out and interview everybody who's working in these teams to ask them what did they think is the most optimal construction of their team?

(04:19):

I'll let you guess who you think came up with a better answer, but these are things that really started to happen and other things we should be really proud of. I've written leaner portfolio management, but even these concepts of big multi-year, big projects, big budgets, big teams, that was the flavor of the day. And yet I think if anyone starts to hear the notion of multi-year project, hundred million dollars, hundreds of people in this room, they probably start shuddering. So this idea of adaptive smaller bets, working faster, running these sort of sessions where you have amazing teams coming together to think about a portfolio of different classes of work. When we're building new products, should we have small little cross-functional teams with a small little budget to see if there's something there to even work keep building versus running your sort of business as usual systems of record. This portfolio approach to product development, again, is radically different than the one size fits all mentality. That was pretty much everywhere.

(05:33):

And this is hilarious for me to think about this, DORA. So in 2015 I quit my job in ThoughtWorks in London and moved to San Francisco to start a company with Jez, and Jez and Nicole were writing with Gene Kim, the DevOps, our DORA what became the DevOps assessment. They were building this little tool that was at the time in a spreadsheet, which is hilarious. And they used to go around asking people all these questions and Nicole was building this model. But again, all I've heard over the last couple of days is now people thinking is this is the benchmark for high performance engineering organizations and that auditability is a great step forward for what we're thinking about really tracking things around the same time. These are just flashback photos for fun. Does anyone know who that person is? On the left? You might recognize decided Jez's head, but does anyone recognize the other guy?

(06:37):

No. So that's John Allspwa and John Allspwa, you can probably accredit and blame for starting the DevOps movement. He did a talk in 20, I think it was around 2011 at one of the O'Reilly web summits where he had this talk called 10 deployments in one day. And people went to that talk thinking that it was going to be a load of bs. Like how could somebody do that? John was first job was at a company called Friendster. Does anyone remember that? Yeah. And then after that he went on to work at a company called Flickr. Does anyone remember that one? Right? And this idea that was so important, I would really encourage you all to follow John's work today. He was the person who really advocated this idea of safety and speed in software development that we wanted to be fast, but we wanted to be safe.

(07:42):

He went to London University and studied this sort of human factors and safety management course. One of the first engineers I ever knew who did that, he was in rooms with physicians and doctors and people building huge infrastructure projects, trying to learn about resilient systems because he recognized that software was getting so complicated that it was impossible for us to understand the system and that we actually, instead of trying to simplify things, we had to recognize that no, everything was going to only get more complex. And what we had to learn how to do was manage complex adaptive systems. And that means that nobody knows all the information and you need to create systems to monitor how the system is performing and seeing if it operates within the bounds that you want it to if it's a safe system. And these were revolutionary ideas at the time.

(08:43):

This is sort of about 20, probably 13 when we went to visit John and Etsy and his whole team were dreaming about these ideas of building resilient systems but also understanding human factors. So this notion of blameless postmortems where people would sit there and ask how did this happen? Rather than whose fault was this? And the power of asking those questions, how did this happen is that you started to look at the work management systems and realized how did the system create a bad outcome and how could we improve the system to drive towards better outcomes, not the person. And these are things that you might think a lot about today. Like Steven talked a lot about this today about work systems and managing to better similar inputs but better outputs. These were sort of the beginnings of these ideas. So today it's amazing to see how far that thinking has moved forward. So it's always fun to get the audience participation. I thought I might give you a chance from the five things we've selected today, what strikes you as maybe the thing that you're thinking as an industry. Remember you all did this. I just basically go give talks and open supermarkets these days. So what strikes you as the things that you think maybe you're more proud of that as an industry we've achieved?

(10:32):

It gets so exciting for me, I'm like, it's like a horse race again. Come on, who's going to win? I should write something down up here and then I can guess what's going to win and I'll show my card at the end and you can all print yours in, right? Cool. Alright, we'll share all these at the end, but just iss there no site reliability engineers in here? One guy. There's one person did the T-Rex arm and just stuck it up and sort of waved. So you're safe here man. Don't worry. I got you. There you go. There's one vote for yourself. You're allowed that, right? But then there's also this group I know is masters of excellence and care a lot about the things that I think still lack progress. And for me, this is one of my, I suppose pet peeves is I think we still struggle with the bureaucracy of innovation.

(11:34):

This is from Karen's talk about value stream mapping. This is my favorite version of what most companies are doing. Annual water safe can scrum band delivery ops where you have people still working in these massive silos. And it's a frustration, right? Because we as Karen talked a lot about flow and speed and the end-to-end systems of work and yet many of the teams still talking about agile in such a small context is a bit of a killer. I think we're still trapped in short-term thinking about how we make investment decisions. One of the fun things about writing Lean enterprise is we have to go and get industry reports. My favorite report we did was how do companies make investment decisions? And the first one was this idea of a committee comes up with from potential options. So basically we make stuff up financial modeling. About 13% who did that? A person with the highest paid opinion. Basically the hippo decides in order for it to be a valid study, you need five options. So we put in a product portfolio approach because it just sounded good. 9% of people said they did that. And then people who said they have no systematic approach, 7%. So what we learned was 7% of people tell the truth and everybody else is making stuff up.

(13:00):

But again, it shows you, and this is again what Doug was talking about, Doug Hubbard, about using even simpler models and probabilistic thinking to challenge our ways of thinking how effective that can be. And we're still not doing it. Too many transformations fail, right? So it was funny, I was sitting in the audience earlier and I was like, wow, everyone's trying to transform but still we have these sort of horrendous success rates of less than 10% in some instances. And it was funny, whenever I did the search for how many transformations fail and McKinsey and BGC come up and then I keep thinking how many of those consultants are working on these transformations and they're still getting these bad results. Maybe there's a conflict of incentives there.

(13:51):

And then one of the things we talked a lot about in the culture chapter and Ed I think really was hammering this home with his experience at NASA is when we wrote the book in 2015, this idea of how engaged people were in their work, 18% being actively disengaged in their work, really sort of irked me. That was one of the things I was really sort of ****** off about the workplace. And I still see that we're struggling to move beyond this. And when you think about when Ed was giving his talk, and this is a guy who has spent 30, 40 years in NASA and he looks like he's just about to start his first day with so much excitement when he talks about the passion he has for that work, why don't more people get to experience that I think is a huge one for me.

(14:45):

And then apart from laughing most of my way through Alistair's, talk about the perversion of metrics in the world, I think this is a huge problem for us still, right? We're still counting things. How many story points did we do? How many hours did we put into something rather than thinking about the actionable metrics that are driving behavior change. And that's one of the things I've heard in so many of these talks here is like how can we get good at describing outcomes, measuring outcomes? And to be honest, when we worked at Capital One, that was the thing that was the scariest part for people is showing your work measuring against outcomes because it's so much more comfortable to measure how many story points you did or how many features you did, how much output you created rather than outcome. And so we've got to embrace it. So again, pop quiz, here's your chance to vote. I'm going to pick one, I'm not going tell you until you pick right? Get your votes in. Vanity Metrics is making a quick break first. Bureaucracy's losing not empowered. Yeah, I love seeing which ones.

(16:04):

I feel like we should play some Benny Hill music or something like that. All right, I love it. Vanity Metrics. It's a pretty clear winner on that and bureaucracy making its way. Hang on. That's it. Hang on. That's kind of ironic as bureaucracy discharges up as soon as we get towards the end of this, it's like, hang on, let's have a committee. We need a committee meeting to vote on this before we move forward. Alright, fun. It's always fun to do these things. Some of the stuff I guess that's really surprised me. And again, I love to, I'm going to ask you all this and this is an exciting time. The AI software development, particularly in the last 18 months is just blowing my mind. The tools that we're now starting to get to build this software copilots, whether you're writing code you, you're sort of using GPTs for transformations.

(17:02):

I have a venture studio, we're trying to do a hundred companies in five years and so much of it is reliant on us using tools of this ilk to do rapid prototyping, customer testing, it's like it's as fun a time to be building software as ever cloud everywhere. Again. I still remember in 2010 when Jez and put out continuous delivery and people literally thought we were crazy saying that you could do a thousand deployments a day. Banks thought we were nuts when you said you should run your infrastructure in the cloud. And again, how much that has flipped remote work. So Rise aid is an example, right? Everybody's distributed. Everyone's distributed in our venture studio, we've people in 17 countries across nearly every time zone. The sun never sets on us. It's a fascinating time to be building in this way access to talent in places of the world, giving people economic opportunity that never would've had it to be anywhere. It's amazing. And all these no-code tools as they start to really become fun things where you don't have to be a deep technical person to just get some of the benefits of technology in your work I think is fascinating for everybody out there. But we're still stuck with one of the, I think the biggest hypocrisies of all time.

(18:31):

Thanks for the clap. I got five bucks for you. How good is this? I was finding this meme, I was like wow, this actually exists. Safe is an agile framework for lean enterprises. I would like to say that is not true. This is the thing we do have to be careful of people trying to make money out of rubber stamping things. And I just think the work that you're all doing to really drive change is about finding great patterns and practices that work and sharing them with one another. And that's sort of the power of the conference. I'm sure you're all leaving with great ideas from one another about what you've heard a different team do. Some of the speakers share. That's the power for me of sharing stories, sharing information, building relationships, building knowledge again as Ed said, and not certifying more scrum maniacs or becoming enterprise safe gurus or whatever they are these days. Alright, so the last one and then we're going to get some of your thoughts as well. Five hopes for the next 10 years. Has anyone got some hopes they want to shout out in advance before I share mine? Who's got a hope for the next 10 years about how our industry's going to change?

(19:57):

Are you looking forward to enterprise safe when it comes out? Yes. Enterprise say five. Hopefully that comes out soon. Six, exactly. It's going to be better. I just think one of the things that I personally am fascinated about is how we're going to use these tools to get better, faster, cheaper, quicker, even more. I dunno if any of you are using tools, but some of the practices I used to do on my daily work that would take me a day, it used to take me a day to write a blog. Now if I can't write a blog in about 45 minutes, I kind of panic because I've built all these tools around me to help me automate so many of the backend work with it. Simple things like I have a meeting, I have a copilot meeting with me, we have the meeting, it's running.

(20:47):

At the end of that I download the transcript, I have a structure that I want GPT to output the meeting in. It uploads the file, the transcript file asks it to recalibrate it in the structure of meeting notes that I like to take. It sends me, creates a Google Doc for me to review. I hit put that in email and then I send out meeting notes typically about three minutes after a meeting. Some people think it's actually weird in meetings with me and then I send them these perfectly crafted meeting notes in three minutes and they're like, did you just pre-plan the whole meeting? And I was just totally like Jedi mind tricked. But these are the kind of efficiencies that you're going to start seeing. I think owning your own data.

(21:35):

It's so hot right now. There's just a very interesting time, right? Folks here are obviously working with very sensitive, very important information and it being protected and how that propagates into our own daily lives we're being monetized in ways we don't even realize yet. And how that's going to shift I think is something I think is really, really important. This is me trying to look like some guy from the future. This is one of the Google Eye things is kind of weird, but one of the things I think is really fascinating is this idea of real time, real context mentoring and learning when you're doing new tasks. And maybe some of you are familiar with Pluralsight or these types of businesses where you can sort of on demand go and get training if you're trying to write JavaScript. So many of the products we're building in our studio are things like only machines that only five engineers in the world know how to fix. So we're building these learning tools that early stage operators can learn how to fix really expensive machinery in real time, in context by just understanding problems and being guided. I think this is going to be fascinating. My big hope is that we get to the end of burnout culture. This is my favorite one. It's only six hours, 40 minutes and 35 years until I'm done with work.

(23:09):

Does anyone dream of that each day? I feel like that some days it's normally Tuesday, I feel like this. But it's a passion for many people and I think as we get more and more automation into every part of our aspect of our work, we should be able to get to focus on things that we really use our real creativity for and spending more of our time in the creativity and less of our time in the repeatable tasks that we can automate. And then probably the thing I'm most excited about is I just think it's becoming cheap. So lower borrowers, it's such a bigger audience out there. It really is some of the best times in the world that anybody can pursue their dream of having an idea for a business or starting something or finding a group of people that care about a niche or a problem that you care about and you want to try and fix.

(24:10):

And this is sort of for me, probably one of the biggest promises that technology offers through creativity, sharing of knowledge and relationships as Ed said, is that we're going to get to build some pretty amazing things. When we launched our venture studio, we did an equity crowdfunding. It means that you didn't have to be a high net worth individual. You could invest in our studio if you were like a bus driver, a doctor, or a vc, it didn't matter. We got a thousand investors and 55 different countries around the world. 50% of the investments were a hundred dollars. And all these people now own part of our venture studio and they're bringing ideas, they're building things they want to contribute and it's amazing. So these are some of the things I think that are exciting. So I have two little things left to ask. One, what are some of your hopes?

(25:09):

Throw it into the chat. Let's build a world cloud and I'd love to hear some of the things that you're excited about, all of the things that are starting to come online and what could be different. Yeah, the next horizon. OSS interoperability, great AI friendly, lean enterprise. And 2.0, I don't know, we're never going to write another book just in case anyone wants to ask. We made a commitment that we would write it once and then let you all write a better book in a few years time. So hopefully someone's in the audience that's going to do that.

(25:49):

Yeah, it's pretty fun to just sort of see these kind of things that people are thinking about and excited about and it's a great time to be part of this. There's one last little exercise I love to do with people, especially when they've been at a conference for a couple of days, and it's a really simple exercise that if you've a bit of paper in front of you or you can do it in your mind, it doesn't matter. But it's a little bit of a mindset question that I like to ask people just to help you understand maybe how much your thinking has evolved over the last three days. And it sort of goes like this. I want you to think of this little statement. I used to think insert word here. Now I think insert word here, right? Have a little reflection over the last three days or maybe something that when you came here you used to think X, but now you think Y. I am going to invite you all to do that little exercise and write it down. And when you've done that, I'd encourage you to turn to the person beside you and tell them what you wrote down. I'll give you a minute to share with each other. I used to think safe was amazing. Now I think it's really amazing,

(27:45):

Ron, tell your friend, it's okay. They've been there too.

(28:16):

All right. The counter has told me that I have hit zero and the light is red. That means someone is going to come out with a coat hanger. Listen, it's a tough job that we're all doing out here, but you really are making a dent in the universe and changing the way things happen. I love this quote that you can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. So I want to just show a lot of appreciation and gratitude to all the work you're doing out there. It's really having an impact. I want to thank the Rise eight team, Bryon and everybody for putting on really a stellar event and I look forward to coming back in not 10 years, hopefully a bit before that again to share some more stories with you. But thank you very much and have a fantastic rest of your afternoon and party conference. All right, take it easy.

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