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

The best leaders create, sustain, and improve their organizations’ social circuitry,* the overlay of the processes, procedures, routines, and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well. While individual specialists are focusing their attention on the problems immediately in front of them, this social circuitry establishes the pattern

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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

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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

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actual practice at Toyota, its best suppliers, and those organizations that have been high-fidelity learners—also employs all three mechanisms. There’s process simplification by way of linearization. This is not just for assembly line operations but, in the extreme, all processes, such as onboarding of new employees, ramp-up production in new produ

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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;

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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

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Coupling and coherence are important, not just for Gene and Steve trying to move a couch or Maggie Taraska landing safely. Look around your own work environment and assess whether you are wired to win or not. Have many people have been placed into the same group arbitrarily, when the problems they’re dealing with are not tightly coupled? If so, thi

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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

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What we have found is that in winning organizations, leaders are deliberate about ensuring that Layer 3 (social circuitry) is supportive of people’s efforts in solving Layer 1 (technical object) and Layer 2 (tools) problems. Their role is less supervisory, in the characterized fashion of directive leadership or command and control (e.g., “I say; yo

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