What does it mean to be conscious? Flying across the country earlier this month, I read a recent issue of the Atlantic and in particular an article on anesthesia:  “Awakening“. While general anesthesia is designed to make a surgery patient unconscious, we actually know very little about what consciousness actually is. One of the models of consciousness put forward by Giulio Tononi is that a conscious mind is an integrated mind.

When your nose detects a new smell, your motor cortex might quickly respond by inhaling more deeply. The scent is referenced against what you have smelled before. In an instant, you recognize a perfume your grandmother wore, visualize her, and emotionally respond to the memory. A conscious brain pulls all this together and integrates the experience. An unconcious brain receives the signal from the nose but does little with it. Dr. Tononi is working to measure this by stimulating one area of the brain and measuring the ripples across others. The image below, shows brain activity increasing in different areas in a patient recovering from a coma.

Image Credit: The Atlantic*

A conscious mind integrates an experience, drawing on various regions of the brain to form a coherent understanding and respond accordingly.

Organizational Consciousness

This model of consciousness can be a useful metaphor when choosing how we want to operate as a company or team. Suppose a few software developers are hanging out, playing pool with support guys after work. When asked, “Any cool support questions today?” a support guy responds, “Naw, just the usual people confused by the login screen.” Our friends in development might be surprised to discover a common usability problem, just as most of you readers were surprised by developers hanging out with the support team. Marketing and sales teams that are getting vague feedback about the software not being user friendly would also be able to contribute to this conversation.

At this moment, in a bar around a pool table, a ‘scent’ picked up by one part of the organization is starting to ripple to another area that can respond in the interest of the company. When the login screen is addressed, the company has acted consciously. Continue reading →

This week I presented at the Mile High Agile conference. Along with Urbancode, the usual suspects were there as sponsors. The agile project management vendors Rally and VersionOne had the biggest displays, and a pile of consultants and trainers filled most of the sponsor tables. But, then there was a traditional operations vendor who has little app-dev focus.

As I chatted with some attendees, the general response to Ops vendor and an Agile show seemed to be confusion. It made a world of sense to me. While developers, and managers were the most common types at the conference a number of operations folks attended. They were feeling pressure from Agile development teams to release more often, and while still very suspicious of Agile, wanted to pick up insight into what these teams were doing, and see if any of the Lean or DevOps techniques might apply to their own problems. Vendors who are traditionally in the operations space, will be targetting these people as well as app-dev teams looking to better work with their operations groups. They’ll do that under a DevOps banner.

I fully expect to see Ops vendors sponsoring more frequently at Agile events. Within a couple years, the attendees will also probably expect them, and understand their role in helping operations get nimble enough to support Agile.

Update: I presented at the show and the slides from my session “From XP and CI to DevOps: The evolution of automation and agile” are now posted on slideshare.