John Looney, Intercom
Google's project Aristotle discussed significant research into Psychological Safety and its impact on teams’ performance (it would be useful to read that research before attending this talk). I will discuss how I personally think Safety and Dependability apply to SRE teams, what happens when it's present, what happens when it's not present, and how managers and technical leaders can build environments that foster a sense of security that lets teams enjoy taking sensible risks.
This talk will go through various facets of Psychological Safety and how they may apply in an SRE setting. I will talk about the importance of being sure that you can depend on yourself, your team, your software, your partners and your company. Finally, I'll discuss how to build teams that enjoy being safe, enjoy working together, and are confident they can deliver results to their organisation.
John Looney, Intercom
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/looney_john_100x115.png?itok=W9yIQfS5)
John Looney did 24x7 support for a webhosting company, spent nearly 12 years in Google as an SRE (compute, storage, datacenters and Ads) as well as running team-build courses. He is now applying SRE to Intercom's infrastructure. He is passionate about ensuring that engineers know the best use of their time and energy, but still hasn't worked out how to not burn himself out occasionally.
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/all/modules/usenix/usenix_files/images/usenix-locked.png)
author = {John Looney},
title = {Psychological Safety in {SRE} Teams},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}