Organizational Agility Quotes

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.

Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Most change strategy models are not very strategic – change strategy is an important lynchpin between business strategy and change tactics.

The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.

The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.

Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

It is time to euthanize change management.

Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.

The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

At any organizational level people are leaders not because of what they do, but because of who they are.

much of what has been implemented is faux Agile—people following some of the common practices while failing to address wider organizational culture and processes.

Doing scrum” is as meaningless (and impossible) as creating an instance of an abstract class. Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction. It is not a process and it is not prescriptive.

Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.

Use of analytics is accelerating, and that means more data-driven decision making and fewer hunches. Evidence-based management complements analytics by adding validated cause-and-effect relationships between policies and effects.

Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but also about business effectiveness, agility, innovation intelligence, and people-centricity.

An organizational norm that says, “We value practice over theory but we value theory-informed practice over ad-hoc practice” helps to restore some respect for theory. We

What do you miss, no longer working at Toyota?” He replied, “No longer discussing perfection with people.

after you have chosen an approach, you don’t need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the disadvantages of your organizational choice.

Values matter most when they are least convenient.

We define agility as: The organizational capacity to effectively detect, assess and respond to environmental changes in ways that are purposeful, decisive and grounded in the will to win.

Lean-Agile Leadership describes how Lean-Agile leaders drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Organizational Agility describes how Lean-thinking people and Agile teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt the organization as needed to capitalize on new opportunities.

Leaders have to understand the principles and practices of change leadership and organizational change management. They must become curators, caretakers, and defenders of the new way of working.

This kind of service-oriented architecture allows small teams to work on smaller and simpler units of development that each team can deploy independently, quickly, and safely. Shoup notes, “Organizations with these types of architectures, such as Google and Amazon, show how it can impact organizational structures, [creating] flexibility and scalability. These are both organizations with tens of thousands of developers, where small teams can still be incredibly productive.

The overall organizational health needs to be measured via employee engagement, culture readiness, business agility, and customer-centricity, etc.

Feedback loops not only enable quick detection and recovery of problems, they also inform us on how to prevent these problems from occurring again in the future. Doing this increases the quality and safety of our system of work, and creates organizational learning.

Our goal with a product-based funding model is to value the achievement of organizational and customer outcomes, such as revenue, customer lifetime value, or customer adoption rate, ideally with the minimum of output (e.g., amount of effort or time, lines of code). Contrast this to how projects are typically measured, such as whether it was completed within the promised budget, time, and scope.

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.

The QMO, worked closely with the PMO throughout the Kanban transformation, but we never tried to change them. Our stance was to help them understand what was different about how projects were governed with the new Agile practices so they could decide what to change.

1) What will be different about my interactions if I genuinely and authentically believe that every person in the organization I am coaching is completely competent and they do not need me to fix them, 2) In what ways have I been judging the people in the organizations I have coached to be incompetent, which means they need me to learn to do things properly.

We will continue to concentrate our energies entirely on prescription medicines and in vitro diagnostics, rather than diversify into other sectors like generics and biosimilars, over-the-counter medicines and medical devices.” ■ “With our in-house combination of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, we are uniquely positioned to deliver personalized healthcare.” ■ “Our distinctiveness rests on four key elements: an exceptionally broad and deep understanding of molecular biology, the seamless integration of our pharmaceuticals and diagnostics capabilities, a diversity of approaches to maximise innovation, and a long-term orientation.” ■ “Our structure is built for innovation. Our autonomous research and development centres and alliances with over 200 external partners foster diversity and agility. Our global geographical scale and reach enables us to bring our diagnostics and medicines quickly to people who need them.

Perhaps the greatest difference between coaching and consulting is where the intellectual authority lies. Coaching is a partnership, with the coach and client collaborating primarily using the client’s intellectual authority and experience to design new experiments, decisions, and ideas. With coaching, the client is the one with the answers. It is not the coach’s job to advise and instruct, but to ask challenging questions, make observations, and open new perspectives, so the client can see options and plan the best solutions for their environment. Coaches help clients take time to reflect, learn, and develop new ways of thinking. With consulting, the intellectual authority is typically in the hands of the consultant. Clients turn to consultants for advice, instructions, and professional opinions because the consultant can provide answers in areas where the client does not have the experience or expertise. Consultants often step in and do work for the clients.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

The collaboration between LPM and TBM is a harmonious blend of strategic alignment, financial responsibility, data-driven decision-making, and a commitment to efficiency and continuous improvement. An excel-lent meal results from the perfect combination of ingredients and techniques. Organizational success is the outcome of the harmonious integration of LPM and TBM. This recipe for excellence satisfies both the palate and the bottom line.

My goal is to honor the client and partner with them to design the right solutions for them. I should make an impact on the client’s world. However, I should never produce carbon copies of myself. I want people to think and to solve problems in ways that work for them.

Strong contracts are the basis for strong working relationships. They clearly define how we work together and we know how we will handle things when problems arise. With that out of the way, we can trust each other and put all our energy in collaborating and focusing on the work at hand.

Emerging operating models also mean that talent and culture have to be rethought in light of new skill requirements and the need to attract and retain the right sort of human capital. As data become central to both decision-making and operating models across industries, workforces require new skills, while processes need to be upgraded (for example, to take advantage of the availability of real-time information) and cultures need to evolve. As I mentioned, companies need to adapt to the concept of “talentism”. This is one of the most important, emerging drivers of competitiveness. In a world where talent is the dominant form of strategic advantage, the nature of organizational structures will have to be rethought. Flexible hierarchies, new ways of measuring and rewarding performance, new strategies for attracting and retaining skilled talent will all become key for organizational success. A capacity for agility will be as much about employee motivation and communication as it will be about setting business priorities and managing physical assets. My

VersionOne indicated that the top three reasons for agile project failure are: Inadequate experience with agile methods Little understanding of broader organizational change required Company philosophy or culture at odds with agile values

It doesn’t take much leadership ability to understand why mutual trust and competence are important. The next two aspects of this organizational climate for operational success may be less familiar. Both the concepts of mission and focus allow a superior to make sure that the intent of his subordinates harmonizes with his own, without stifling the subordinates’ initiative and in consequence, without slowing down the organization’s OODA loops. Between individuals, the device the Germans came up with is the mission, which we can consider as a contract, or Auftrag, between superior and subordinate. Back in chapter III, on agility, I described how this works in war. In today’s chaotic, ruthlessly competitive commercial environment, business needs such a device, and a little experimenting should convince

DevOps astonishingly enables us to simultaneously improve organizational performance, achieve the goals of all the various functional technology roles (e.g., Development, QA, IT Operations, Infosec), and improve the human condition.

Digital equilibrium is the optimal state of operational excellence, business agility, and organizational maturity.

whether Ops used version control was a higher predictor for both IT performance and organizational performance than whether Dev used version control.

a way, the Agile community is suffering from the same insecurity as the CIO community. While CIOs feel that they need to justify their existence and claim a seat at the table, the Agile community is stuck on the idea that it has no place until dramatic cultural and organizational changes happen.†