Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

As we wrap up 2024, I find myself reflecting on what has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years for IT I’ve ever witnessed. This was the year when the unexpected happened: the IT sector faced inflation—a first in history. 📈

As highlighted in the Pragmatic Engineer’s State of the Engineering Market 2024, the industry faced unprecedented struggles that reshaped its landscape.

• Economic Pressures: Inflation impacted budgets, resulting in tighter hiring pipelines and a shift in priorities.
• Layoffs and Instability: Many companies resorted to restructuring and layoffs, further destabilizing the workforce.
• Shift in Skills Demand: While AI and automation tools took center stage, traditional engineering skills remained critical, leading to a bifurcation in job opportunities.

This year has not just been about adapting to external pressures but also about reevaluating internal practices and cultures to create a more resilient, future-ready workforce. Organizations have struggled to strike a balance between innovation and efficiency while grappling with a workforce that’s increasingly disengaged and burned out. For IT leaders, this represents a crucial moment to invest in human-centric, behaviorally engineered strategies that can stabilize teams and reinvigorate organizational focus.

The workplace dynamics revealed striking insights into employee engagement and well-being, shedding light on the broader catastrophic socio-economic impact. The Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report paints a stark picture:

only 23% of employees globally reported being engaged at work, a figure unchanged from 2023. 🙀

The financial repercussions are staggering:

disengagement drained $8.9 trillion from the global GDP.

Complementing this, the State of Workplace Burnout 2024 Report revealed that:

burnout rates among IT professionals remained alarmingly high at 38%, unchanged from last year. 😱

2024 mirrored 2023 in more ways than one, with employee engagement stagnating at 23% and burnout persisting at 38%. These parallel crises highlight an unsettling trend:

efforts to improve workplace wellbeing and engagement have largely plateaued, raising serious concerns about their long-term implications.

This phenomenon can be aptly framed by Peter Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation, which posits that the expected benefits of interventions are often overestimated. Despite increased focus on workplace wellness programs and cultural initiatives, their impact has fallen short, leaving IT organizations grappling with entrenched challenges.

The implications are profound: disengagement and burnout not only hinder productivity but also ripple across industries, threatening the global economy and workforce sustainability. As leaders and investors seek solutions, a critical question emerges: how can organizations break free from this cycle of stagnation and foster environments where employees truly thrive?

📰 The Birth of The Forge of Unicorns Newsletter

One of the year’s defining moments was launching The Forge of Unicorns—a newsletter that turned our 14 years of research and field experiments into actionable insights for digital warriors like you. From behavioral engineering to socio-technical evolution, The Forge of Unicorns became a platform for sharing, learning, and challenging the status quo of IT.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate some of the most impactful articles from 2024:

• 📰 EP23 - The Deadly Price of Cheap Code: An in-depth analysis of Boeing’s software failure, spotlighting the catastrophic cost of IT shortcuts.
• 📰 EP21 - Ferrari Driving School and the Dojo: Drawing parallels between Ferrari’s precision engineering and the dojo’s immersive learning methodology.
• 📰 EP18 - The CrowdStrike Disaster: Lessons from the major 2024 IT failure in the cybersecurity domain.
• 📰 EP25 - VW’s CarID Debacle: A deep dive into how dysfunctional IT led to Volkswagen’s CarID program failure, resulting in over $20 billion in debt, the shutdown of two German factories, and leaving thousands of families in crisis.
• 📰 EP24 - AI-Generated Code’s Ugly Truth: Revealing how current AI tools are far from delivering quality software, instead creating legacy code right from the start.
• 📰 EP28 - OKRs + KBIs = Success: Showcasing the power of blending bold objectives with behavioral change metrics, driving impactful transformations.

🌱 Evolving the Unicorns’ Ecosystem

We started the year by taking our model to the next level. After 14 years of research, experiments, and lessons learned, we consolidated our findings into the most advanced version of the Unicorns’ Ecosystem. This holistic digital evolution platform directly challenges the conventional, big-bang transformative approaches.

Why?

Because evolution works better than transformation when it comes to sustainable, impactful change. And this year, we proved it again and again.

🤝 A Strategic Partnership for Craftsmanship Excellence

In 2024, we also decided to elevate our approach by collaborating with intellectual leaders who share our vision for evolution. Joining forces with Alcor Academy, we enhanced the Unicorns’ Ecosystem by integrating Alcor’s deep expertise in technical practices, legacy code refactoring, and real-world software craftsmanship into our SW Craftsmanship Dojo®, our unique behavioral and social engineering framework to inject socio-technical mastery in every modern digital company.

Together, we’ve built something unique—bridging the gap between social transformation and technical excellence to create a seamless evolution for teams and organizations.

🎥 Global Impact Through Conferences

This year was our most prolific yet for sharing our ideas and learning from others. Here’s a quick recap of the highlights:

• 🎤 IT Revolution Enterprise Leadership Summit Europe: Sharing the stage with Gene Kim to discuss the role of the SW Craftsmanship Dojo® in fostering digital evolution.

• 🎤 XP2024: Where I shared the stage alongside Jon Kern, Diana Larsen, and many more to deep dive with my experience report into the cultural aspects of proper software development embracing the motto “stop transforming, start evolving.”

• 🎤 IAD24: Closing the conference with a power-packed 30-minute talk that distilled 14 years of research into the transformative essence of our Unicorns’ Ecosystem. This wasn’t just a presentation—it was a carefully crafted experience designed to leave a lasting impact. Using a new engagement technique, I seamlessly connected the talk to the Digital Transformation Failures mini-series (Episodes (26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31)), providing attendees with a wealth of additional material to explore and reflect upon long after the session ended.

🎖️ A Recognized Voice in Tech Leadership

I was honored to be featured by Gergely Orosz on The Pragmatic Engineer’s highly-regarded list of speakers for European tech events. This recognition, highlights the growing impact of behavioral engineering and socio-technical evolution in shaping the future of tech leadership. The listing is not just an acknowledgment of past achievements but a reminder of the responsibility to continue driving meaningful conversations and actionable change in our field.

🙏🏻 A Personal Note of Gratitude

Finally, a heartfelt thank you to Bob Marshall. Having someone of Bob’s stature recognize and engage with our work was one of the year’s most unexpected but rewarding surprises. Our shared interest in behavioral engineering and organizational psychotherapy lays a promising foundation for collaboration in 2025. 🙌

Looking Ahead to 2025

2025 is shaping up to be a different one, where a lot of seed we soiled will come to fruition, and here’s what’s on the horizon:

🖊️ Focusing writing “Stop Transforming, Start Evolving”—a book that distills everything we’ve learned into an actionable guide for investors, leaders and organizations. 🎯 Notching up the SW Craftsmanship Dojo® model with Alcor Academy—a unique blend of technical and social engineering that will empower organizations to evolve with true software craftsmanship. 🌍 Continuing to share, learn, and evolve through conferences and collaborations worldwide.

As we close the chapter on 2024, I want to thank each and every one of you who joined us on this journey. Whether you’ve been a part of our dojo, attended a talk, or simply read an article, you’re contributing to a larger movement—one that’s shifting the IT landscape from transformation to evolution.

Let’s make 2025 the year of exponential growth and shared success. Ready to evolve? 🚀

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