Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

For developmental leaders, the limitations are not resources but useful knowledge about what to do with the resources that are available and how and why to get it done. In other words, the limitation is lack of knowledge (ignorance), (row a in Table A.1), for which the corrective action is creating and utilizing conditions in which it’s far easier

In effect, Gene and Steve started by thinking that their job was to get the movers and painters to fit into and support the system. By the end, they were trying to figure out, with the help of the movers and painters, how to get the system to be as centered around the movers and painters as possible as well as be supportive of their efforts. Such a

As a leader, this should make you ask the following questions: When you create plans, do you treat them as “finished,” something ready for performance, for execution in operation? Do you expect a “Yes, Admiral” reply? Or, do you treat plans as your first, best guess of what to do, why to do it, and how to get it done? Do you invite challenges to al

As a leader, this should leave you with the following questions about your own organization and social circuitry: In performance, are difficulties, glitches, deviations, and departures called out once seen, swarmed to be contained (stabilized), and solved? And are the lessons learned shared and otherwise systematized for future use?

Slowification helps us create better approaches to situations instead of repeatedly exercising old habits and routines. A common objection to slowification is that maintaining operational tempo is the highest, even overwhelming, priority. But, as is warned in Ecclesiastes 10:10, “If the ax becomes dull and he has not whetted the edge, he must exert

Each year, it took longer and longer to ship features to customers, and the risk of even small changes causing major problems kept growing. In 1998, developers could make changes and deploy them immediately. By 2004, pushing code changes into production required hours, even days, to be deployed.39 Teams were no longer able to solve Layer 1 problems

Simplification highlights how leaders can manage the conditions in which people are operating, so solving problems—particularly complex ones—is quicker, easier, and more productive. Simplification moves people in the direction of the winning zone via the following: •Easier experiments: Simplification creates opportunities to solve smaller problems;

The research for the State of DevOps Reports from 2013 to 2019 was a cross-population study that spanned over thirty-six thousand respondents over six years. It showed that architecture determined if it was possible for teams to:58 •make large-scale changes to the design of the system without the permission of someone outside the team or depending

Top-down leadership tries to promote uniformity through the commonality of policies, procedures, routines, and regulations. When everyone adheres to the same standards,¶¶ and those standards are imposed and monitored by a central authority, there’s limited discretion to act locally. In certain situations, this is done in order to minimize variance