Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech

Introduction

I was recently asked to give a keynote speech at the Rolls-Royce Submarines Developer Conference in February 2025 which took place in Derby, UK. The talk was titled: Unlocking Innovation: Enterprise Software and Culture. The post below contains some sanitized details of the talk for both attendees to reference and others to learn from.

The talk was broken down into five main sections outlined below. Each section had an image / icon associated with the topic and was displayed on the slides and which were handed out as stickers after the conference.

01 - Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety is the first topic because it's, in my mind, the single most important aspect of a high-performing team. Without it, you can't have trust, and without trust, you can't have a high-performing team. It's the foundation of everything else we'll talk about today. I discussed this topic by referencing three books as I often do. These books are:

1. Culture Code by Daniel Coyle: This book really taught and convinced me of the importance of psychological safety and how it's the foundation of a high-performing team.
2. The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson: This book is a deep dive into how to implement psychological safety in your team or organization. I've implemented many of the practices in this book and have seen great results.
3. The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson: This book is acts as a manual for teams and leaders to understand the key role of failure in an organization and how to do it in the right way to learn, grow, and deliver at pace.

02 - Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the second topic because it's the single biggest killer of innovation in an organization. It's the enemy of agility and speed. I discussed similar things here as I did in my podcast and in my Calvium interview. I referenced the book The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy by Mark Schwartz which is great on this topic. We talked about methods to work through the bureaucracy, why it exists, and some outside-the-box ways to deal with it.

03 - Special Unicorn

The third topic was all about how it is common in a company to feel like our problems are special and unique. This leads to people trying to invent totally new ways to do things when there are already proven methods out there. I mentioned that we should be using technologies that are neither unique, nor cutting edge.

Projects and technologies which are well established within organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and The Linux Foundation are solid candidates. It would also be a good idea to pick topics that someone can learn by watching YouTube videos. If we are heading in a special company specific direction, it's likely the wrong choice.

I referenced the book The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim which are great books on this topic. I also referenced the book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim which is a great book on how to measure and improve your software delivery performance.

04 - Sacred Cows

05 - Partnership