Rachel Sanders gave a presentation at PyCon UK about engineering systems of people and lessons learned from changing organizational culture. She discussed how recognizing human factors and focusing on goals, progress, support and meaning can increase employee happiness. Changing a safety culture at an industry through leadership rather than management, by empowering teams and addressing root causes, resulted in an 88% decline in lost workdays. Human design patterns can be applied to make software that is loved rather than just tolerated.

1. RACHEL SANDERS
PYCON UK

3. people -> systems

4. unhappy
mediocre
stagnant

5. is this inevitable?

7. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
it depends

8. large
scalable
fault-tolerant
systems of people

9. Lessons from Strangers:
Better Engineering
through
Not Doing Engineering

11. what makes people happy at work?

12. people are happiest when they
can get work done

13. What contributes most to your employees’ happiness?
• Money
• Recognition
• Interpersonal support (respect, camaraderie)
• Clear goals
• Meaningful progress on work

14. 5%

15. you can be trained
out of seeing the obvious

16. we are makers
people use our work to do theirs

17. code performance
latency
O(n)

18. what’s the human time complexity?

19. what you can’t see, you can’t fix

20. ENGINEERING UI /UX

22. there’s no magic
to design

23. Nobody wants to use your stuff.
They want to HAVE used it.

24. the 2 steps of user evaluation
1. What is this?
2. What can it do?

25. Make these answers
as obvious as possible to find

26. duh. documentation.

27. “If you have to refer to the documentation
every time you use a module,
find (or build) a new module.”
- Kenneth Reitz

28. get the API right,
and the rest will follow

29. Your users have better things to do.
Let them.

30. “I want to make software that’s tolerated”
- nobody, ever

31. You ask, and you listen

32. why don’t we use this?

33. like we got time for that

34. how do you change a culture?

36. “safety culture”

38. 2
Lost workdays per 100 workers, 2012 (u.S)
3
4 4
7
11
12
9
6
3
0
Chemical Steel Construction Mining AIr Transport Firefighting
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

39. happens

40. Problem:
sometimes happens

41. Attempt #1

42. Problem: People

43. people
make mistakes
push the envelope
don’t follow the rules

44. Attempt #2
Industry used More Bureaucracy!

45. It wasn’t very effective.

46. “Management systems are primarily rational inventions,
defined on paper in offices and capable of
objective evaluation in audits.”
-Patrick Hudson

47. Attempt #3
Acceptance

48. People are going to screw up
People have free will and opinions
Nobody wants to read the damn manual

49. …but most people want to do the right thing

50. Solution: change the culture

52. “We believe that to influence culture
you need more than management.”

53. leaders drive culture, not management

54. each team responsible for safety
address root cause for accidents
plan for mistakes

55. 88% decline in lost work days
Zero incidents in 2013

56. 10
LOST WORKDAYS FOR AIR TRANSPORT PER 100 Workers
8 9
8
7 7
11
10
9
8
7
6
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

57. Culture can be changed

59. Let’s make this a thing

60. human design patterns

61. we’re all (potential) leaders

62. make stuff that’s loved, not tolerated
(and not explodey )

63. Thank you!
@trustrachel

64. BIBI LOGRAPHY
• Teresa Amabile, The Power of Small Wins
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40244
• Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle
• Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
• Patrick Hudson, Safety Management and Safety Culture: The Hard and
Winding Road,
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/105439/PyConUK/Hudson%20Long%
20Hard%20Winding%20Road.pdf

65. BIBI LOGRAPHY
• Target Zero: A Culture of Safety, Defence Aviation Safety Centre Journal
2008, p22
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/105439/PyConUK/DASCJournal2008.
pdf
• Patrick Hudson, Achieving a Safety Culture in Aviation,
http://www.atec.or.jp/sympo2010/ATEC_Sympo10_Presentation_1.pdf

66. AT TRIBUT IONS
• RAF Helicopter - https://www.flickr.com/photos/defenceimages/7502339574
• Horizon Fire 2 https://www.flickr.com/photos/visionshare/4578360732/
• Patrick Hudson: Screenshot from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDxV_6sNUQ

67. AT TRIBUT IONS
• Oops! https://www.flickr.com/photos/terry_wha/426980617/
• See no evil https://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_ellis/482381094
• The Pink Nightmare
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lessapathymorecake/4209375193
• D3 Line Chart http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3883245