The Third Way of DevOps: Continual Learning and Experimentation

The first two ways of DevOps create a fast and reliable system for delivering value and getting feedback. But even the best system will eventually become obsolete if it doesn't evolve.

This is where the Third Way comes in: Continual Learning and Experimentation.
It is the principle of creating a culture that fosters two things: generative (high-trust) patterns of behavior and a habit of daily improvement.

Beyond Flow and Feedback

If Flow is the engine and Feedback is the dashboard, then the Third Way is the driver's mindset. It’s the constant desire to find a better route, tune the engine, and learn from every turn.

In The DevOps Handbook, the Third Way is described as the practice of:

1. Enabling the creation of a high-trust culture.
2. Institutionalizing the improvement of daily work.
3. Transforming local discoveries into global knowledge.

The Core Pillars of the Third Way

1. High-Trust Culture (Generative Culture)

Sociologist Ron Westrum identified three types of organizational cultures: Pathological (power-oriented), Bureaucratic (rule-oriented), and Generative (performance-oriented).
In a generative culture, information is actively sought, failures lead to inquiry rather than blame, and new ideas are welcomed. This trust is the bedrock of innovation.

2. Improvement of Daily Work

In many organizations, "improvement" is something that happens once a year during a special project. In DevOps, improvement is part of everyone's daily job.
It means explicitly allocating time to pay down technical debt, fix defects, and refactor code. As the saying goes: "Improvement of daily work is even more important than daily work itself."

3. Transforming Local Discoveries into Global Knowledge

When one team solves a difficult problem or discovers a better way of working, that knowledge shouldn't stay trapped in that team.
The Third Way focuses on making that knowledge available to the entire organization — through shared libraries, internal documentation, lunch-and-learns, and automated "guardrails" in the pipeline.

Learning and Experimentation for Every Role

For Developers

The Third Way means having the freedom to experiment with new technologies or patterns. It means "failing fast" on a small scale so you can learn what works. It also means contributing back to internal tools and documentation so others don't have to solve the same problems twice.

For Operations

For operations, the Third Way is about building resilience. Instead of just trying to prevent failure, teams practice "Game Days" or use "Chaos Engineering" to inject failures into the system on purpose. This allows them to learn how the system behaves under stress and improve its resilience before a real outage occurs.

For Security

Security teams move from being "gatekeepers" to being "enablers." They share their knowledge by providing automated security tools and training to developers. They learn from security incidents across the industry and proactively apply those lessons to their own systems.

For Managers

Managers in a Third Way organization act as coaches. Instead of telling people what to do, they create the conditions for learning. They protect the team's time for improvement and ensure that failures are treated as valuable lessons rather than performance issues.

How to Foster the Third Way

• Allocate "Kaizen" Time: Set aside 20% of engineering time for technical debt, refactoring, and experimentation.
• Encourage Risk-Taking: Celebrate "intelligent failures" where something was tried, didn't work, but provided valuable data.
• Build a Internal Knowledge Base: Use tools like wikis, shared Slack channels, or internal "Stack Overflow" instances to spread knowledge.
• Practice Game Days: Regularly simulate production disasters to test your team's response and your system's resilience.
• Institutionalize Post-Mortems: Make every incident a learning event for the whole company.

The Risks of Ignoring the Third Way

Without the Third Way, organizations suffer from:

• Stagnation: Teams continue using outdated practices because "that's how we've always done it."
• Silos of Knowledge: One person or team knows how a critical system works, creating a massive bottleneck and risk.
• Burnout: When daily work is never improved, it becomes a grind of repetitive, manual tasks and constant firefighting.
• Competitive Disadvantage: Faster, more agile competitors will eventually out-innovate you.

Conclusion: The Three Ways as a Journey

The Three Ways are not a destination, but a journey.

• Flow gets you started.
• Feedback keeps you on track.
• Learning ensures you keep moving forward.

By applying these principles, DevOps teams can build systems that are not only technically superior but also more human, resilient, and joyful to work on.

This concludes our series on the Three Ways of DevOps. Now, it's time to take these principles and apply them to your own value stream!