Matt Stratton | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Matt Stratton is a Transformation Specialist at Red Hat and a long-time member of the global DevOps community. Back in the day, his license plate actually said “DevOps”.

Matt has over 20 years of experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase to internet firms including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including DevOps Enterprise Summit, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matt is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best phở in the world. You can find him on Twitter at @mattstratton.

Current position (1)

Transformation Specialist

Red Hat

Degrees (1)

Theatre

Millikin University

1993 to 1995

Presentations

Presentations (6)

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

When humans are faced with a traumatic experience, our brains kick in with survival mechanisms. These mechanisms are the familiar fight or flight response, but can also include the freeze response - which occurs when we are terrified or feel that there is no chance of escape.

In this talk I will explain the background of fight, flight, and freeze, and how it applies to organizations. Based on my own experiences with post-traumatic stress (PTS), I will give examples and suggestions on how to identify your own organizational trauma and how to help heal it.

Avengers Assemble - The Thanos Incident

Over the course of the Avengers storyline, everything has been leading up to the ultimate outage—when Thanos snapped his fingers, eliminating half of all life in the universe.

Come along with me on a journey to perform a retrospective on this greatest of all incidents in the Marvel universe. What were the contributing factors? How could the Avengers have followed better incident response procedures? And can this be reviewed in a truly blameless fashion?

In this talk, I will revisit the storyline across the Marvel Cinematic Universe that led up to a critical event: the “Snap,” when Thanos removes half of all life in the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, as well as the resolution displayed in Avengers: Endgame. We will explore the activities of the incident response teams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more), to discover what they did well, what they could have done better, and why S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to invest in better Incident Response training.

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

Richard Dawkins described memes as being a form of cultural propagation, which is a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other. Not unlike the way that DNA and life will spread from location to location, a meme idea will also travel from mind to mind.

Getting your organization to take a step back and look at how ops affects people (awareness of alert fatigue, burnout risk, proactive/reactive approaches) can be a tough challenge.

In this talk, I will discuss how the very DNA of an organization can evolve through the use of actionable communications from all levels - management, strategy, and practitioners. The “virus” of humane ops will infect your organization, providing a more sustainable approach to on-call, incident resolution, post-mortems, and more. There also will be copious references to the Neal Stephenson classic novel, Snow Crash.

The Psychology of Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering, failure injection, and similar practices have verified benefits to the resilience of systems and infrastructure. But can they provide similar resilience to teams and people? What are the effects and impacts on the humans involved in the systems? This talk will delve into both positive and negative outcomes to all the groups of people involved - including users, engineers, product, and business owners.

We will explore the changes in attitude that these practices create. This talk will include a brief overview of chaos engineering practices for unfamiliar members of the audience, but the main focus will be on human elements. I will discuss successful implementations, as well as challenges faced in teams where chaos was a “success” from a technical perspective, but contained a negative impact for the people involved.

The Four Agreements of Incident Response

Major outages, incident calls, war rooms, whatever you want to label them, can be stressful and frustrating experiences. In this talk, I will use the lessons of the book “The Four Agreements” by don Miguel Ruiz, to illustrate an easy-to-remember modality for effective and humane incident response.

Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, The Four Agreements, presents a code of personal conduct based on ancient Toltec wisdom to help remove self-limiting structures and beliefs.

Each of the Four Agreements can help us understand a more mature, effective, and humane approach to incident response in our organizations. In this talk, I will address how the Agreements can be expressed as a modality for Incident Response. Using the Agreements, it is easier to understand modern approaches to resolving incidents as effectively as possible, and even help reduce burnout as well!

Everything Is A Product - How To Apply Product Management Practices to Technology Services

As we continue to work on improving our technology processes, there is much we can learn from the discipline of product management. I believe that by applying the techniques and approach of treating your infrastructure and service offerings as products, we can provide a more delightful experience and continuously improve.

Using principles and concepts from people like Marty Kagan and other experts in the product space, I will demonstrate applicable examples of applying the concepts of feedback, planning, and interative improvement to practices including software delivery process, service desk response, and infrastructure as code.

Past talks (43)

The Psychology of Chaos Engineering

Conf42: Chaos Engineering 2020

London, UK

January 23, 2020

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays Tel Aviv 2019

Tel Aviv, Israel

December 17, 2019

The Psychology of Chaos Engineering

Agile + DevOps East 2019

Orlando, FL

November 7, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019

London, UK

June 25, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

Monitorama PDX 2019

Portland, OR

June 3, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays Boise 2019

Boise, Idaho

May 29, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays Nashville 2019

Nashville, Tennessee

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

2019 NanoConf

Redmond, Washington

May 2, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

GOTO Chicago 2019

Chicago, Illinois

April 27, 2019

The Proactive Approach: Data Driven Observability & Incident Response

GOTO Chicago 2019

Chicago, Illinois

April 27, 2019

The Psychology of Chaos Engineering

DevOpsDays Baltimore 2019

Baltimore, Maryland

April 24, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays Copenhagen 2019

Copenhagen, Denmark

April 2, 2019

The Four Agreements of Incident Response

DevOps Talks Auckland 2019

Auckland, New Zealand

March 25, 2019

The Four Agreements of Incident Response

DevOps Talks Melbourne 2019

Melbourne, Australia

March 20, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

SCaLE 17x

Pasadena, California

March 6, 2019

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

Microsoft TechDays 2019 - Finland

Helsinki, Finland

February 27, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays Charlotte 2019

Charlotte, North Carolilna

February 6, 2019

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

DevOpsDays New York City 2019

New York

January 24, 2019

DevOps & Lean Thinking Panel

QCon San Francisco 2018

San Francisco, California

November 4, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

DevOpsDays Philadelphia

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

October 22, 2018

Don't Panic! Effective Incident Response

DevOpsDays Kansas City 2018

Kansas City, Missouri

October 16, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

DevOpsDays Kansas City 2018

Kansas City, Missouri

October 16, 2018

The Four Agreements of Incident Response

PolarConf 2018

Helsinki, Finland

October 10, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

PagerDuty Tour Amsterdam

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

October 3, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

DevOpsDays Riga 2018

Riga, Latvia

September 26, 2018

Hot Takes, Myths, And Fake News - Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps Except For Me

DevOpsDays Riga 2018

Riga, Latvia

September 26, 2018

Everything Is A Product - How To Apply Product Management Practices to Technology Services

DevOpsDays Boston 2018

Boston, Massachusetts

September 23, 2018

Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma

REdeploy

San Francisco, California

August 15, 2018

Incidents & Accidents

Triangle DevOps

Morrisville, North Carolina

August 14, 2018

Hot Takes, Myths, And Fake News - Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps Except For Me

DevOpsDays Indianapolis 2018

Indianapolis, Indiana

July 22, 2018

Don't Panic! Effective Incident Response

DevOpsDays Minneapolis 2018

Minneapolis, Minnesotta

July 11, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2018

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

June 26, 2018

Talk Selection As Mockumentary Film Editing

DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2018

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

June 26, 2018

Incidents & Accidents

San Diego DevOps - Incidents & Accidents

San Diego, California

June 19, 2018

Incidents & Accidents

DevOps Kansas City - Incidents & Accidents

Kansas City, Missouri

June 18, 2018

Talk Selection As Mockumentary Film Editing

DevOpsDays Toronto 2018

Toronto, Canada

May 29, 2018

Don't Panic! Effective Incident Response

DevOpsDays Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley, California

May 16, 2018

How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?

DevOpsDays Salt Lake City 2018

Salt Lake City, Utah

May 14, 2018

Everything Is A Product - How To Apply Product Management Practices to Technology Services

DevOpsDays Charlotte 2018

Charlotte, North Carolina

February 21, 2018

The Handwaver's Guide to Contributing To Open Source

ChefConf 2017

Austin, Texas

May 21, 2017

Shifting Left Securely

DevOpsDays Denver 2017

Denver, Colorado

April 9, 2017

The Five Love Languages of DevOps

DevOpsDays Detroit 2015

Detroit, Michigan

November 10, 2015

How To Train Your(self) Dragon-Style To Submit Talks

DevOpsDays Detroit 2015

Detroit, Michigan

November 10, 2015

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Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma by Matt Stratton

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Books & Articles (2)

Fight, flight or freeze: Releasing organisational trauma

CI/CD series - PagerDuty: the pipeline is only as good as you build it

Expertise (7)

Technology

Reviews

Testimonials (1)

Matt gave a fantastic talk at All Things Open in Raleigh NC in Oct 2019. He used the Avengers as an example of an incident response team. The talk was incredibly engaging and insightful. He has really shaped the way I approach DevOps as someone new to the role in ways that make a lot of sense. Afterwards he was generous with his time in talking to folks about the topics covered and even things not covered by the presentation. If he were giving a talk at another conference I attended, his presentation would be at the top of my list of talks I wanted to attend.
Lincoln Sward
Verified

Why choose me?

I bring a unique approach to the human factors in DevOps and IT operations - the people parts!