What’s the biggest obstacle to innovation? According to Barry O'Reilly, it’s not learning—it’s unlearning. In this keynote from Prodacity 2025, Barry shares insights from his books Lean Enterprise and Unlearn, exploring how leaders can rethink old habits, embrace experimentation, and drive transformational change in their organizations.

From lessons in Roman history to insights from top Fortune 500 companies, Barry illustrates why letting go of outdated mindsets is the key to building high-performance organizations. He also shares actionable frameworks to help leaders challenge assumptions, navigate disruption, and rethink digital transformation strategies.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• The evolution of Lean Enterprise and what’s changed in the last 10 years
• Why the biggest challenge isn’t learning—it’s unlearning
• How the world’s top organizations adapt to change
• The importance of small experiments in large-scale transformation
• How leaders can rethink digital transformation and measure real outcomes

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:05] - The 10-year impact of Lean Enterprise
[01:05] - Lessons from Continuous Delivery and early DevOps skepticism
[03:10] - The power of iteration and experimentation in building high-performance teams
[05:09] - The real challenge: unlearning outdated mindsets, not learning new skills
[07:12] - What the Roman Empire can teach us about innovation
[09:05] - The exponential pace of technology and disruption
[11:02] - Why disruption happens to individuals, not just companies
[12:01] - Unlearning as a system: letting go of outdated behaviors
[14:51] - Identifying personal and organizational areas to unlearn
[18:35] - How small cultural shifts drive massive transformation
[26:03] - Real-world case studies from Capital One, Volkswagen, and American Airlines
[34:07] - Breaking free from the feature factory mentality
[41:44] - Final thoughts: Think big, start small, learn fast

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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/

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Barry O'Reilly (00:05):

So about six months ago, I get a phone call from a guy called Bryon and he's like, do you realize it's 10 years since your book Lean Enterprise was launched? And first of all, it made me feel incredibly old to hear that, but it was also a great moment for me to reflect and go, wow, that's amazing. And he asked me to come and share a little bit of the story, not only of the book, but a movement that many fantastic authors that you're going to hear about from the next couple of days are here to also share their stories around. But this is actually where it sort of began for me with a post-it note, what was probably almost 14 years ago where at the time the Lean Startup book had just been released by Eric Ries, and many people saw it as a seminal moment in these ideas of rapid experimentation, engaging customers in fast feedback loops and building great products.

(01:05):

My co-author, Jez Humble, had also released Continuous Delivery, which was another sort of seminal book, if you will, in the engineering space where the idea of doing thousands of deployments a day with software to help you be faster, cheaper, more effective was actually an idea that most people thought we were crazy. We would walk into executives and say, imagine being able to release software hundreds of times a day. And they literally thought we were mad. They'd sit there and go, well, it takes us to six months to do one release. How can we do thousands of releases a day? And yet again, if you think about today, if you're not releasing software multiple times a day, people would say you're almost crazy. So this was the real inspiration behind the book. We wanted to think about a system that we could explain to people who weren't startups, how could they use this idea of experimentation, iteration, and building great products that people loved?

(02:08):

And we used a lot of the methods actually that we advocated for how to build a book to tell the story. So you can imagine this is actually a user story map here of all the different chapters, the ideas. And what was really important for us is to use stories, real examples of teams that had solved these problems in highly regulated, huge industries where often people say it can't be done. And the great thing about this is, it's kind of surreal for me, is again, many of the people who are going to speak over the next few days, our Post-It notes up on this wall nearly 14 years ago, who we were inspired by their work, their stories, and their examples to help many people sort of improve how they work. And one of the things that really also helped me understand about being successful in building that product was the importance of having a great team.

(03:10):

One of the things we committed to is almost doing continuous delivery principles about how we wrote the book. We would write small chapters and ship them to one another, give each other feedback. Most of the time people reminded me how much my content sucked and I had to iterate it. But that hard truth was great because the product got better and better and better. And we would sit here and put post-it notes together and test it with people as much as we can as we created the book. And the results really for me, and many people were really truly outstanding. You maybe recognize many faces that are up on these photos here, but the book was a moment where many people really embraced this idea of creating a high performance organization. They wanted to understand how they could build products better, cheaper, faster, at higher velocity.

(04:09):

I got to travel all over the world for many years to come. The book was translated into I think 12 languages at this stage. The funniest one was going to Japan and trying to explain Lean to the Japanese. That's a little bit of a funny moment for me as I went along. But again, it was a special moment in certainly my life. And to see many people be inspired by it, and especially how many people in the government picked up these ideas and started to apply them. Jez himself went on to work in 18F in one of the sort of first assignments there. And while traveling the world and seeing all of this and experiencing the interest and the appetite for people to build great products and improve the way companies worked, the moment that really sort of struck me is that while I was meeting all these amazingly talented gifted professionals, the challenge was never learning new skills.

(05:09):

The challenge was never these competency of these gifted people to understand the concept and apply it. Now, learning was never the problem. The biggest problem actually was unlearning because most of these people relied on the skills that had made them successful in the past and continue to try apply those skills in any new context in the future. And that's actually really what sort of inspired me to write Unlearn. We're facing any time, but this one in particular where technology is rapidly accelerating, it's changing the way that we operate, and therefore we need to sort of update our own operating systems, if you will. And that's really what inspired me and what I'll share today. But you'll also see how many of the other people that we'll share over the next couple of days how their stories have also inspired that. So why we might have started off 10 years ago, I'm going to go even further.

(06:11):

Back to 2000 years ago when the seed of a civilization, a startup if you will, sprung into being in seven Hills in central Europe. And that startup went on to scale and sustain itself as one of the great cultures that we've known now at the peak of its power. The Roman Empire accounted for roughly 20% of the world's population and covered nearly 2 million square miles. Now, there's lots of hypotheses about what allowed this culture to scale and sustain itself for so long. This is the audience participation section. What do you think were the unique innovations that helped the Romans succeed? You can shout out a few answers. Road roads, love the roads always comes up. Good. What else? Uc, aqueducts. Excellent. What else? Yes, bombs. That's war. Yes. Excellent. Army government. What else?

(07:12):

Well, the thing that's most interesting is all of these things contributed, but there was one unique innovation to the Romans. You see, whenever they engaged other cultures, when they found practices that were better than their own, they let go of their existing practices and incorporated those new practices into their systems of operation. So they actually created a governance mechanism that allowed them to both learn new skills and let go of skills that were no longer as effective. And this was sort of the unique innovations that allowed them to scale and succeed for so long. So that notion of un learning really sort of struck me. And I was like, this is kind of different. And I've always heard about learning organizations. When Peter Singh wrote the book, the Fifth Discipline, the word learning organization sort of exploded into if you knew a vernacular of engineering and building companies.

(08:09):

But at the same time, I was looking around for something different and I came across Bo Berg who in 1981 sort of wrote this and he talked about the idea of unlearning, which was, as our knowledge grows simultaneously, it becomes obsolete as our reality changes. So really understanding involves taking in new information, but also knowing when to discard outdated information. And again, this really resonated with me because you think even of your own journey as a child, the stories are parents tell us as children versus what the reality of the world. They're massive simplifications. And as you go through your journey of life, you start to refine your models to understand what works and what doesn't. And then even when you start to think about the biggest companies in the world, only sort of 20 years ago, it was all about being as big as you can be.

(09:05):

Number one in your market. Jack Welch had this pioneering view that you scaled through people. It was how big is your office? How many people are in your company? How many locations are you dotted around the world? And even 10, 15 years ago, that was very much the same until everything changed. When these companies started to use technology to rapidly iterate their products, they use cloud computing to gather massive data about user behavior and understand what worked and what didn't work. Does anyone know how many people are in the Apple Pay team that it takes to run that product? It serves billions of people across the world. What's your best guess? Six. That's ambitious. Probably 200. 200. Good. What else?

(10:00):

35 is the answer, right? But it gives you a sense of when you start to understand and leverage these technologies, the power of what you can achieve is quite phenomenal. And yet many of us get stuck. We use the mindset and behaviors that made us successful in the past believing they'll continue to help us be successful in the future. But actually innovation happens much more on an exponential curve. Initially, these new ideas sort of are deceptive. They actually feel like how could that work? Like I said, 2020, telling people to do thousands of software deployments a day, they thought we were mad telling banks to use cloud computing and AWS would make them more secure than a tin can that they had under their desk. They thought we were mad, right? And you see this today, whether it's artificial intelligence or all these new tools, as they come onto the market, they have these massive moments of exponential innovation.

(11:02):

And really this is the gap, the difference between what you thought you would do and what the world looks like now. So when I talk about disruption, the way I think about it is disruption doesn't happen to companies. The truth is it happens to individuals. We get stuck hanging on to the outdated mindsets and behaviors that made us successful in the past, but no longer matter. So just like a product has features and you've got to constantly innovate the features of your product for it to stay relevant in a market human have behavior. So if you're not constantly innovating your behavior to adapt to the market you're in, you're going to be disrupted. So this is really the premise, if you will, drove me to this concept of unlearning and how important it is in today's world. Now also, unlearning is kind of a provocative word.

(12:01):

I'd be walking into these Fortune 500 executives and saying, you need to unlearn. And they'd be like, who the hell is this guy? Get him out of here. And often people would say, well, what are you saying? Everything that I know is wrong and nothing could be further from the truth. Now the way I think about unlearning is it's a system. It's not a process of letting go or reframing or moving away from once youthful mindsets and behaviors that we're successful in the past but now limit our success. So it's not forgetting, discarding or throwing out your knowledge or experience, it's simply the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and making space for new information to come in to inform your decision-making and action. And really the power of this is once you understand that both learning and unlearning is a system, you can learn that system and you can start to apply it to all the obstacles or challenges that you're facing and learn.

(13:03):

And this is really what I started to do. I started to help people identify obstacles that were holding them back for success. And once they were able to really diagnose areas where they might need to unlearn, then it was really just teaching them new behaviors to relearn and experiment and try to see what worked and what didn't to get the breakthroughs that they need. And the beauty was this wasn't a one and done process. You didn't just have to wake up one day unlearn once and magically your life was okay. This was a system that you could use to sort of tackle obstacles and scale it to even more bigger challenges over time. So this was sort of unlearn and everybody got excited about that. So hopefully now at this stage, you're sitting there in the audience and you're like, okay, the Romans seem to have unlearned, this person berg, whoever they are, seem to talk about it.

(14:02):

What do I need to unlearn? Is that what you're all sitting there thinking? Well, today is your lucky day. I'm going to teach you how to identify that. Alright, so what I'm going to ask you to do is take out a piece of paper, maybe something in front of you, something you can write down, and I'm going to ask you a couple of questions to help you if you will diagnose something that you might need to unlearn. Is everybody ready to do that? Yeah. Okay, great. Everyone's excited. Look pens in the air. Love it. Okay, so here's a couple of questions and I'd like you to write down what your answer is on. And you know what? To make this even more fun, we're not even just going to write it down. We're going to be able to share it with a word cloud. So everyone's going to see what everyone's thinking about too as well, right?

(14:51):

So here's the questions. Number one, can you think of a situation where you're not living up to the expectations you have for yourself? Maybe there's a situation that you're not achieving the outcomes that you're aiming for. A maybe there's a situation that you're struggling with, that you've tried a few things and you're not getting the breakthrough that you're looking for. Maybe there's a situation you're actually totally avoiding because you just can't even deal with it. Now have a think about that. Not living up to the expectations you have for yourself, not achieving the outcomes you desire, situation you're struggling with or maybe avoiding or you've tried everything that you can think of and you're not getting a breakthrough. Have a quick think about that.

(15:51):

And maybe when you've written one or two things down, you can scan this QR code and type it into the phone and we'll have this beautiful word cloud emerge as we sort of go along. All right? So a situation that you're not living up to the expectations you have for yourself. Maybe you're not achieving the outcomes you desire, you've tried everything that you can think of, but you're not getting a sort of breakthrough. I love it. Budgeting first one up. Amazing. It's that time of year, isn't it? I love it. Yeah, I love these things. Fear, failure, parenting, health always comes up a lot. Training. I love it. Stubbornness, fantastic.

(16:50):

The good thing about doing this is you start to realize everybody's got problems. It's not just you as they add more and more up here, alright? But these are very, as you say, human sort of responses, but also people that are working with large companies. Confidence, procrastination, perfection, bureaucracy, goal planning. These are all obstacles that many of us are facing when we're trying to create these high performance organizations. Cool. Alright. Over 50 responses there. We'll share this back with you at the end, but you start to get a sense of the things that matter to people in the room and how important these are. And this was, I love fear of failure. It's beautiful.

(17:41):

I know. We'll go on to the next slide. Thank you. So this was very interesting for me where you had everyone, the obstacles that they needed to face. And often what comes up are very big things. We need to change the culture, we need to change the budgeting system. Huge big things to change that are very difficult. So many people ask me, well, how do I start to change these things? And oddly, the trick about unlearning is you do need to think big about these big problems and systemic challenges that you're trying to solve. But the trick is actually to start small so you can demonstrate and learn fast what works and what doesn't. So often when people talk to me about changing the culture, I would often say to them, well, the way you start to change the culture is start role modeling some new behaviors in yourself.

(18:35):

So people start to see that you're doing things differently. And then that starts to inspire your teams. And then as your team starts to work differently, it really starts to inspire the organization. And one of my favorite examples of this is Christian, the CIO of Volkswagen. So I worked with Christian for a number of years and he had this idea of what he called culture hacks, which were very small changes in behavior but were highly visible. So he did simple things like whenever there was a meeting, he'd always leave an empty chair in the meeting room that somebody could jump into that chair and advocate on a customer's behalf. He used to have an auto response whenever you sent him an email, which would say, I don't read email between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM so don't expect a response. I'll respond later in the afternoon. Right?

(19:26):

Setting these sort of cultural prompts across his company. One of the things that was my favorite though is his team used to always wind him up and they'd be like, you're an executive, you just sit in meetings all day. You don't really have to do any work. So he was like, interesting. Okay. So he held a competition where he let anyone in the company apply for his job for the day where they could become the CIO. And this competition was ran throughout Volkswagen and an engineer that had been with the company for two months won the role. I don't even think he had a suit, he had to go out and get a jacket or something like this. But Christian persisted and gave him this sort of role to be the CIO for the day where he led the whole company and Christian would sit in the back of the room and to see how the team responded to daily decision makings.

(20:17):

They had an outage of one of their key systems. Halfway through the day, Christian still persisted with this two year engineer in the company like running the role of CIO to see how the team would respond. So these are sort of the powerful steps that you can start to think about about demonstrating what it means to unlearn and yet learn at the same time. Similarly to where you start, it's also important to understand the characteristics you've got to cultivate within yourself. And there's number, the first one is curiosity. And this one's kind of funny because I've never met a person who didn't say they were curious. If I ever ask someone, are you curious? Everyone's like, yeah, of course I am. And yet one of the challenges is imagine this situation where you're working in your company and a new person shows up and you give them a job to do that you know how to do and they start working on the task in the total opposite way that you would do it. What's your knee jerk reaction to them when they start doing that?

(21:22):

Yeah, I can see people smiling. They're doing it wrong. That's what everyone says. And yet that's a classic example of shutting yourself down to new information, to new ways of doing things. You'll do it the way I would do it. Now, another great example of this is Jonah Renia, he's the COO for at HSBC for global trading. And what Joe would do is he would sit down with graduates when they came in every year and give them problems to work on that he was working on specifically to see how they would solve it. Now you can imagine in a company like HSBC that's extremely hierarchical when you have one of the most senior people sitting with the most junior people to learn from them and see how they use tools, the sort of cultural artifact that creates. The next one is ownership. And this is really about if you're not getting the results you want, what do you do?

(22:15):

Do you blame the team? Do you blame the partner, the business supplier, or do you own the problem yourself? I always say it's not the chocolate bar's fault that I can't lose those five pounds. It's actually mine, right? Unlearning requires a lot of ownership. The next one is commitment. Because you're going to have to do things that you suck at often when you're trying things for the first time, you're not going to be competent at them. And many people struggle with that idea of struggling. So how can you commit to doing things that you're not going to be good at the start? The next means then getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. You've got to constantly try things that are outside your comfort zone to grow. Learning new skills like AI learning models. Nobody knows how to do that until they start trying it, but you're going to suck at it when you start, right?

(23:07):

This is the practice of sort of that. And then finally, one of the most important parts is about creating safety. Safety to succeed. And safety happens at many levels. You have mental safety or psychological safety where you're not afraid to make mistakes in front of your peers. Then physical safety, like taking small steps or safe to fail experiments that allow you to learn while taking risk. And then also ecoNUMMIc safety where you're making these small bets, small risks, but high information return. Alright, so here's the other pop quiz that we're doing today. So this is a highly interactive talk. I'd like you to go back to your little menti meter that you were on a minute ago and I'd like you to think about what's the characteristic you've got to cultivate most in yourself to unlearn.

(24:03):

I always love doing this one. I feel like it's like a horse race or something. Which horse is going to win? We can pretend we're in Vegas and bet on the one do we think is going to be the winner. All right, we're about 35 votes now, getting up to 38. Yeah, great. Alright, there's 50. That's pretty mu ch, well, here comes great safety to succeed. Is it going to win? Who knows, right? But it gives you a chance to get a sense of what matters to folks. And again, most of what's going to help us be successful is facing into things that are uncomfortable that we don't understand and we're not going to be great at. But committing to it, creating safety to do it, but also have the curiosity to give it a shot, I think is one of the most important. Okay, awesome.

(25:06):

Thank you folks. Alright, back to the show, back to our regular programming. So this is really then again, what inspired me personally about unlearn. It was helping people understand you've got to think big, you've got to break yourself free of these sort of existing legacy mindsets and behaviors, but you don't think big and start big. You got to think big and start small so then you can learn fast what works and what doesn't. And this is what allows to sort of rapid iteration. And this has been sort of another amazing experience to travel all over the globe and help lots of these amazing companies adopt these practices and put them into their daily work. So what I'm going to do for the last couple of minutes is just share a couple of these case studies with you to provide more inspiration when you go back to your daily jobs to start applying some of these practices and what you're doing.

(26:03):

So the first one is changing thinking to change behavior. And this is probably one of the more counterintuitive ones. Has everyone heard of the NUMMI story? So NUMMI is this amazing factory in the US where they produced cars for GM. It had the honor of being the worst performing factory in North America for GM. People would go to work drunk, they would sabotage the cars, like put beer bottles in it. It had the worst quality metrics of anywhere. Now at the same time, Toyota were having this massive performance improvement relative to the US in terms of car production and they were starting to disrupt the US market. So what happens when we experience disruption in the market? What happens?

(26:50):

Tariffs!Thank you very much. All right, here we go. Alright, so what are you laughing at? This is happening right now. So one of the things, Toyota wanted to still be in the US market. So they looked to do a partnership and they reached out to GM to do a partnership. Which factory do you think GM recommended Toyota should work with? Well, the NUMMI factory of course. So Toyota were delighted they got this factory, but one of the stipulations is rehiring the entire workforce. So Toyota again, delighted they got a factory, they got people. Now they took everybody to Toyota City in Nagoya, Japan, and they spent two months working under the Toyota production system of daily experimentation. And if anyone listens to this American life as a podcast, amazing podcast, but for most people it was a transformational experience in their life.

(27:43):

They started to learn the power of when you're allowed to experiment the outcomes that you can achieve. And the person who designed that actual program was a guy called John Schuck. He's one of the leaders of the lean movement. But he moved to Japan to work in Toyota. He became the first manager. He couldn't speak a word of Japanese when he got there, but one of the things that he learned a lot and the culture was often in Western society we often tell people you have to change the way you think in order to change the way you behave. But what he learned was actually the opposite is that if you change the way people behave, they get exposure to different information and that changes how they think. So a classic example in software is we used to have these massive silos, your analysis, engineering, testing ops, and we changed the way people behave by making small cross-functional teams. So you would sit together with a small group and then you'd learn in real time what worked. Instead of writing big requirements documents, we changed the way people behaved and wrote small user stories that you would ship frequently. And by working under this environment, it changed people's mindset because they were behaving differently. Now NUMMI was a great story, it was a massive success story for Toyota, but in 2008 it closed because it had global financial crisis. Does anyone know what happened to the factory?

(29:15):

This is what's built at the NUMMI factory today. Elon's first put Tesla there, but more of the things that I started to learn, especially while we were working on these teams is creating output is often very easy. Busy work is easy, but outcomes are extremely hard. So again, in about 2013, Rich Fairbank got in touch with me. Rich is the founder of Capital One, the credit card company in the us. And one of the things that they were trying to do was a digital transformation. They called it agile everywhere. And it was one of the most interesting experiences because Rich was hugely innovative person. But when I asked him how will, when you're digitally transformed, who here is working on a digital transformation of some description? Yeah, it's often called Project Phoenix. Yeah, who's working on Phoenix Two? That's normally the next one that happens.

(30:20):

But when I asked Rich to sort of explain how will you know when you digitally transformed, most people just sort of looked at me and went, when we deployed new cloud infrastructure, it was nobody really knew. So one of the great things about shifting from output to outcomes is you have to get really good at describing success. So apparently there's amazing book called How to Measure Anything, and Douglas Hubbard is here to do the talk today, which is super cool. But one of the thing Douglas described is when you're thinking about shifting to outcome-based thinking is that you need to describe examples of what it looks like. So that was really interesting to me. So when I sat down with Rich and I was like, rich, why don't you tell me a story about how you will know when you've digitally transformed? And instantly he could start telling me stories.

(31:15):

He was like, well, we will increase the number of customers that interact with us digitally, our product, we'll have a new product suite that are digital first products. Our teams will say this is the best place to work. And instantly he was starting to describe outcomes that were not only understandable, but started to become measurable because his team didn't stop here. They were like, well, these are great objectives, let's make them measurable. So Capital One then started writing these hypothesis based statements for what their transformation was about. So we believe by investing in digital transformation, we'll have a stronger faster bank. We'll know this is true when these are great metrics, 30% of customers reinvest their spend in their wallet back into our products. In the next two years we'll see a reduce or reduce actually the time to do deployments. This was my favorite one.

(32:11):

40% of revenue comes from products generated in the last two years. Now what's really powerful about this is I guarantee as all of you are sitting there and looking about this, you don't even have to work in a bank, but you're probably coming up with ideas about how you could drive those metrics. Imagine I told you, you just had to have a mobile app done by the 1st of December, your brain just goes into this critical roadmap, all your creativity dies. So what they got was an instant uplift and it didn't stop there. We did it everywhere and we had a clouder meter. So one of the things they would do was measure what percentage of cloud infrastructure every team had in the cloud and what was its cost of operation and how quickly they were deploying. And we would publish all of these outcomes every week. And now people would panic because everyone looks at this diagram and goes, wow, that orange teams suck.

(33:11):

But they were actually one of the most performant teams because they were working on secure systems and data centers and they just basically moved from the right down in the bottom, right into the middle, which was a massive performance improvement. But this was talking about outcomes. And today if you obviously Capital One or AWS's star case study for Amazon Web Services and their adoption and all of it came from this. But one of the challenges again that many companies struggle with is they think big and they want to build big. And again, this is another massive problem. You've got to think big and start small. Another great company had a chance to work with was here at Wells Fargo and they were in the trap of a feature factory. They had these massive big programs, multi-year programs, multimillion dollars, hundreds of people involved in any small change that was happening.

(34:07):

And Wells Fargo run all the finance for Amazon. So her biggest customer was Bezos at the time. And they were trapped in this massive feature factory mentality where everything was output based, loads of people busy. But if you asked them about an outcome, they struggled. Now when the pandemic kicked in, does anyone remember the PPP program or the paycheck protection program? All the small businesses. So on a Friday night, the government made an announcement to say we're going to distribute relief funds to small to medium sized businesses to help you get through the pandemic and we're going to distribute it through your local bank. SEL found that out at the same time that the government made the announcement publicly. So he literally Friday afternoon, her phone starts hopping off the thing going, how the hell are we going to build a program to deliver something of this magnitude?

(35:02):

But what she did was super smart. She didn't go think about multimillion dollar roadmaps, she didn't think about tens of thousands of people. She rang around on the weekend and found the 10 problems that they were going to have to solve the most, who were the 10 best people to work with her to get those done. And she started a team to start working on it. And that small team very quickly started to think about what's the first problem we've got to solve and how can we respond to all of our customers on Monday who are going to have this massive ask? And they started really simple. They just set up a page where people could sign up and register interest so they could understand the demand that they were going to get, the amount of money they would have to get, but they could start to learn in real time what their customers wanted, what they needed, and how much they were going to have to deal with.

(35:54):

And then do the next little thing. And these are some of the mentalities that are so important when you're trying to radically transform your company. We fall into these traps of activity of people being busy, but there's not enough impact. I also had the pleasure of working with American Airlines and again, the world's largest airline company where they were sort of trapped in this behavior of doing all the same things that had delivered the outcomes they weren't happy with. So Steven Leist was the VP of customer technology. So he owns everything that's customer facing, that's aa.com, anything a customer touches, he was responsible for it and they were struggling. All of their projects were these big long projects a year and a year and a half. It never really delivered what they wanted. They would throw more people at the problem, the budget would go up and then the outcome would still go down.

(36:50):

And they were really, really struggling. They even tried to transform if you will themselves, but they started with just transforming the technology department. So they were off talking about user stories and continuous delivery and customer feedback. And the rest of the company was like, what are you talking about? Where's the stuff that I want? And one of the things that was a huge transformation for them is they started to figure out how they could have more partners, how they could work together more as a team. And this was sort of one of the magics, if you will, that they were figuring out that they needed to go on a journey, they needed to have collaboration partners to find somebody in the business that would work with them to work in a new different way. And again, their results were amazing. This is one of my favorite examples, the check-in kiosks. I know you're all probably familiar with these for flying around.

(37:46):

The airlines don't actually own the infrastructure. This is really interesting to me. They don't own the terminals. There's a number of different providers that provide them, but they can ship the software onto it. And one of the things that was really interesting to them is that they wanted to try and do these experiments around doing smaller things more frequently. When we started to experiment with contactless check-in, this is DFW where their head office is based, there's also a check-in kiosk downstairs in the parking lot. There's just one. And what we would start doing was practicing doing automated deployments to it. And then as customers would come in from the parking lot and try to check in downstairs, we had this small little experiment we could run and do deployments to see what worked and what didn't. And when we got it working downstairs, then we took it upstairs to one of these flights and then we got it working on one flight.

(38:40):

We started doing it in all the different airports. So when the time Covid hit, they had some amazing outcomes that they could do automated deployments to all of this infrastructure all over the us. They were able to deploy things like verifying people were safe to fly. And every single experiment they started to come up with, they started asking themselves, well, how could we think big and start small? They went from doing a release every two months to 40 releases in a week on aa.com, really shrinking down at the software deployment cycle. And they actually had their NPS go up, would you believe during the pandemic? Which is ridiculous for an airline. So again, some of the things that were just super fascinating. And then the last story I just really want to share is about stories because you're going to hear so many great stories from speakers over the next couple of days, and I think it's a huge important part of sharing both the successes and the failures.

(39:42):

One of the pleasures over that time in the community we went on to build was working with Stephen Franchetti who's the CIO of Slack at the time. And we set up this group of executives and Fortune 500 companies around the US to begin with that we could share stories and experiences of shifting to remote work, of experimenting with new tools. And one of the things that was really amazing is that we did a series of webinars, but people would identify topics that they wanted to learn about and different leaders from different companies all over North America would come on and share things that worked, things that didn't work. And I have to say, it was one of the most empowering, inspiring communities that I've ever been a part of because they would do ask me anythings where people would like, oh, we have to shift all of our team remote.

(40:35):

How do you do that? What tools have you used? What worked? What didn't? It was really sort of interesting to understand how when you bring great people together to share stories of what worked and what didn't, it really changed the conversation. And this Slack community was one of the greatest I've certainly ever been involved in. And three years later it's still going because this group like to share what they're doing with one another, which is this idea of collaboration and co-creation is what drives impact. So while you're here at this fantastic event that Bryon and the team have put on, it is a really great opportunity to connect and meet new people and learn from one another about what worked and what didn't. So much of what we do is sort of counterintuitive to innovate, and that's only happening more and more and more. This idea of thinking big and starting small to learn fast, thin slicing of work, shipping software more frequently, focusing on the end-to-end process and figuring it out.

(41:44):

So what I'd really encourage you all to do over the next three days is sort of have a think for yourself. How can you think big, but start small? Maybe there's one new uncomfortable behavior you can try to adopt while you're here. Maybe it's going up to speak to someone and introducing yourself. Maybe it's telling them a thing that you tried and didn't work and you'd never do again. When I started writing Unlearn, I'm actually dyslexic. So writing a book was the weirdest thing in the world for me. My english literature teacher probably still doesn't believe it, but I didn't write Unlearn. I talked it. I got a journalist to interview me and we would talk and transcribe it using AI and then he would copy edit it and send me the first chapter and then I'd copy edit and we'd start iterating.

(42:34):

I used continuous talking or continuous delivery to write a book in that manner. But one of the big inspirations for me was Serena Williams and her story, how she's one of the greatest athletes of all time and well into her forties, she was still winning Grand Slams. So when I published a book, somebody sent me this photo, which was Serena reading it before the Australian Open, which was pretty amazing. So you never know when you put your ideas out there, what kind of amazing things can happen, but when you have a great community and great people around you, it can be super inspiring. So again, welcome to the conference. I hope you have an amazing three days. There's so many fantastic speakers that you're going to hear great inspiring stories from. I'm excited to be a participant and enjoy the show. Thank you very much, and thank you for having me.

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