Scaled Agile Quotes

I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale-- why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of lobster.

An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth. Let it become known among zoologists. Had Orange Juice been a male, had she loomed as large on the scales as she did in my heart, it might have been another matter. But portly and overfed though she was from living in the comfort of a zoo, even so she tipped the scales at barely 110 pounds. Female orang-utans are half the size of males. But it is not simply a question of weight and brute strength. Orange Juice was far from defenseless. What it comes down to is attitude and knowledge. What does a fruit eater know about killing? Where would it learn where to bite, how hard, for how long? An orang-utan may be taller, may have very strong and agile arms and long canines, but if it does not know how to use these as weapons, they are of little use. The hyena, with only its jaws, will overcome the ape because it knows what it wants and how to get it.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality.

To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude, in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a ‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to even approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently than others).

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.

There is really no bad software development process. There is only how you are doing it today and better.

Bad design is the default mode, since it takes the least effort to create.

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale—why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of a lobster?

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?

20th Century 21st Century Scale and Scope Speed and Fluidity Predictability Agility Rigid Organization Boundaries Fluid Organization Boundaries Command and Control Creative Empowerment Reactive and Risk Averse Intrapreneur Strategic Intent Profit and Purpose Competitive Advantage Comparative Advantage Data and Analytics Synthesizing Big Data

Only once did I perceive a human being, and that was at the intersection of our crossroad with the wide, white turnpike which cuts each cultivated district longitudinally at its exact center. The fellow must have been sleeping beside the road, for, as I came abreast of him, he raised upon one elbow and after a single glance at the approaching caravan leaped shrieking to his feet and fled madly down the road, scaling a nearby wall with the agility of a scared cat. The Tharks paid him not the slightest attention; they were not out upon the warpath, and the only sign that I had that they had seen him was a quickening of the pace of the caravan as we hastened toward the bordering desert which marked our entrance into the realm of Tal Hajus.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

The small scale of the groups within such networks helps them remain agile, while the many-to-many ties in the larger network ensure that even if 10 percent or 20 percent of its membership is eliminated, the network as a whole will continue to function. "How many times have we killed the number three in al-Qaeda? In a network, everyone is number three," notes [US Naval Postgraduate School professor of defense analysis Dr. John] Arquilla, dryly.

While it is not unheard of, most sane people would be embarrassed to take an introductory martial arts class and then develop their own “martial art” from it and teach it to unsuspecting students, exposing them to the danger of miscalculating their effectiveness at defending themselves in a critical situation. Yet agile practitioners do this every day ― some do not even feel any sense of shame for calling themselves “agile coaches” after a year of practical experience.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

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.

She canted her wings and soared toward the top of it, where she could see a never-ending line of trees tossing violently in the wind. The hurricane made one more effort to throw her back into the sea, but she fought with her last reserves until she felt earth beneath her talons. She collapsed forward, clutching the wet soil for a moment, grateful to be alive. Keep going. They’re not safe yet. Clearsight pushed herself up and faced the trees. They were coming. The first two dragons she would meet in this strange new world. What would it be like to face unfamiliar tribes, completely different from the ones she knew? There wouldn’t be any NightWings like her here. No sand dragons, no sea dragons, no ice dragons. She’d glimpsed what these new dragons would look like, but she didn’t know anything yet about their tribes . . . or whether they would trust her. They stepped out of the trees, eyeing her with wary curiosity. Oh, they’re beautiful, she thought. One was dark forest green, the color of the trees all around them. His wings curved gracefully like long leaves on either side of him, and mahogany-brown underscales glinted from his chest. But it was the other who took Clearsight’s breath away. His scales were iridescent gold layered over metallic rose and blue, shimmering through the rain. He outshone even the RainWings she’d occasionally seen in the marketplace, and those were the most beautiful dragons in Pyrrhia. Not only that, but his wings were startlingly weird. There were four of them instead of two; a second pair at the back overlapped the front ones, tilting and dipping at slightly different angles from the first pair to give the dragon extra agility in the air. Like dragonflies, she realized, remembering the delicate insects darting across the ponds in the mountain meadows. Or butterflies, or beetles. She sat up and spread her front talons to show that she was harmless. “Hello,” she said in her very least threatening voice. The green one circled her slowly. The iridescent one sat down and gave her a small smile. She smiled back, although her heart was pounding. She knew she had to wait for them to make the first move. “Leefromichou?” said the green dragon finally, in a deep, calm voice. “Wayroot?” Take a breath. You knew it would be like this at first. “My name is Clearsight,” she said, touching her forehead. “I am from far over the sea.” She pointed at the churning ocean stretching way off to the east behind her. “Anyone speak Dragon?

Agile is quite simple. The most popular Agile approach, Scrum, has just three roles, a handful of activities, and one major artifact: running tested software. That doesn’t mean Agile is easy. It’s still hard to decide what product would be desirable, and it’s still hard to write software that does what is asked for. It is, however, quite simple. Simplicity is the essence of what makes up Agility, as we described in our chapter on Value. So if Agile is simple, what about “Scaled Agile”?

Astonishingly, these results demonstrate that there is no tradeoff between improving performance and achieving higher levels of stability and quality. Rather, high performers do better at all of these measures. This is precisely what the Agile and Lean movements predict, but much dogma in our industry still rests on the false assumption that moving faster means trading off against other performance goals, rather than enabling and reinforcing them.4

SAFe® helps to improve the flow of value from the strategic level to the customers.

heard things like “DevOps is the new Agile,” “Lean doesn’t apply to software delivery,” “Of course this worked for the mobile app team. They are a unicorn.

If you are going to use automated testing and Continuous Integration (CI) to dramatically improve your productivity, you need to treat your testing investments as being at least as important, or even more important, than your development investments, which is a big cultural change for most organizations. In

The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We

If this feedback takes days or weeks to get to them, it is of limited value to the developers’ learning. If

every time you see a branch you should ask why it’s there and look for process changes that will address the same need without creating branches.

When we have a tightly-coupled architecture, small changes can result in large scale failures. As

limit on [team] size ... ensures the team has a clear, shared understanding of the system they are working on. As teams get larger, the amount of communication required for everybody to know what's going on scales in a combinatorial fashion.

This mind-set of motivating people to do evolutionary process improvement is the basis of both Agile and Lean.

But that doesn’t mean the plan is as stable as the plan to build a house. In middle development, teams still have learning to do, but the team’s focus is more on producing the deliverables that their partners need to produce the product at scale, sell it and support it in the field. While the team still has some Key Decisions to make and Knowledge Gaps to close, their focus turns more towards executing decisions that have already been made.

The world we live in and the world we work in changes rapidly and changes at scale. It demands more than one thinker. It demands more than one voice. It demands inclusive dialogue. Rapidly changing situations—globally, socially, competitively— “require people to act independently far more often, rather than waiting for direction from above.

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

having a development process that integrates stable code across the enterprise is one of the most effective ways of aligning the work across the teams,

When the frequency of the build and deployment process is fairly low, your organization is able to use brute force to work through these issues. When you increase the frequency, this is no longer possible.

one client who went out of their way to regularly thank the team when they said ‘no’—as this client had suffered the effects of wishful thinking all too often.

In 2013, for example, a seventeen-year-old Australian teenager living in England built a content-shortening app, called Summly, in his bedroom, which he promptly sold to Yahoo for a reported thirty million dollars. Now, imagine the next seventeen-year-old with a 3D printer, and you begin to sense the dimensions of the potential upheaval.

There needs to be a process for moving people or whole teams across initiatives to ensure the right overall business priorities are being developed first.

Executives need to understand the basic challenges of their current architecture and work to improve it over time. The build process needs to support managing different artifacts in the system as independent entities. Additionally, a solid, maintainable test automation framework needs to be in place so developers can trust the ability to quickly localize defects in their code when it fails. Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.

This is the worst-case scenario for automated testing: where developers start ignoring the results of the tests because they assume it is a test issue instead of a code issue.

Expect to create, architect, and maintain at least as much test code and automation scripts as you create production code. Soundly architected test code leads to soundly architected production code that is easy to understand and maintain.

James Grenning, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Kenji Hiranabe, Greg Hutchings, Michael James, Clinton Keith, Joshua Kerievsky, Janne Kohvakka (and team), Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Shiv Kumar MN, Kuroiwa-san, Diana Larsen, Timo Leppänen, Eric Lindley, Steven Mak, Shiva-kumar Manjunathaswamy, Brian Marick, Bob Martin, Gregory Melnik, Emerson Mills, John Nolan, Roman Pichler, Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck, Jukka Savela, Ken Schwaber, Annapoorani Shanmugam, James Shore, Maarten Smeets, Jeff Sutherland, Dave Thomas, Ville Valtonen, and Xu Yi.

financial statements classify advertising costs as expenses, they are often better conceived of as investments. This reclassification makes sense because advertising is also a far more flexible expenditure than most costs. Amid challenging economic times, advertising can be scaled back relatively quickly, adding agility to protect and manage cash flows. However,

The Microsoft study revealed the top three perceived problems with the agile approach to be not scaling to larger projects, too many meetings, and insufficient management buy-in.

Therefore, organizations need to decide whether their primary objective is to deliver long-term accurate plans to its executives or if it is to deliver business value to its customers.

intent. Additionally, if executives don’t design the planning process correctly, it can end up using a lot of the organization’s capacity without providing much value.

how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect.

Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.

We’re all designers now. It’s time to get good at it.

In large, traditional organizations, however, most of the time individual teams can’t independently deliver value to the customer because it requires integrating work across hundreds of developers and addressing all the inefficiencies of coordinating this work. These are issues that the individual teams can’t and won’t solve on their own. This is why the executives need to lead the transformation. They are uniquely positioned to lead the all-important cultural changes and muster the resources to make the necessary organization-wide technical changes.

how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect. Therefore,

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.

Process is only a second-order effect. The unique people, their feelings and qualities, are more influential

It is important to remember that although it is relatively easy to write code, it is very difficult to create a sustainable platform.

Always trust that engineers are doing the best they know how or can in the situation. People want to do a good job;

One of the most important roles for management is ensuring architectural integrity and sustainability when developing code. One

It’s said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others’ mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others’ successes.

False. While imitating best practices of WSC could lower costs, the major cost advantage of WSCs comes from the economies of scale, which today means 100,000 servers, thereby dwarfing most internal datacenters.

The human organization and its inner engineering are cornerstoned and based on the indispensable foundation of collected deeds, which invest energies and outfit actions in their psychological nerves, constantly configuring their functioning updates. Placed and compiled in selected agilities and activities through the goal's stages, they perform mandatory feedback on the scale of upshots and are notified for conviction dimensity. If they crop, demonstrate, and abridge their correct updations and pointed efficiencies amid frequent interoception. The purpose of their acquired doings and all the liabilities will not be wrong and misgiving reinvestment but will be energetic, abridged, controlled, and outfitted with categorised methods at the right pace without any base of inalienable sequel to prequel. There will be accurate introspection in tends of apprehension; that's ultra-rigour, exactly following the aspirant aims of the Karmas evolution and its amenableness path. It will announce the rightness root of the widest sense, not a narrow sense, after wanting outgrown confirmations and the arrival of the unabstract from subsided dogma, quandary, and dread.

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning, we recreate ourselves. Through learning, we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning, we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning, we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.” —Peter M. Senge,

Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change … agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.” —Jim Highsmith

As the organization becomes more Lean and Agile, the version control system usually needs to be evolved as well. So, keep an eye on this. Find out how long it takes to change one single line of code and get it into production. That may well be the most important metric in the project!

New entrants have something the incumbents don’t: agility. It is really hard to make decisions when you have seven layers of management. It’s hard for new ideas to percolate up when there are so many people and priorities. That was our M.O. at Nest: Be fast. Make quick decisions. Evolve more quickly than anyone thinks you can.

here are some steps to identify and track code that should be reviewed carefully: Tagging user stories for security features or business workflows which handle money or sensitive data. Grepping source code for calls to dangerous function calls like crypto functions. Scanning code review comments (if you are using a collaborative code review tool like Gerrit). Tracking code check-in to identify code that is changed often: code with a high rate of churn tends to have more defects. Reviewing bug reports and static analysis to identify problem areas in code: code with a history of bugs, or code that has high complexity and low automated test coverage. Looking out for code that has recently undergone large-scale “root canal” refactoring. While day-to-day, in-phase refactoring can do a lot to simplify code and make it easier to understand and safer to change, major refactoring or redesign work can accidentally change the trust model of an application and introduce regressions.

the psychological structures and incentive systems that we are trying to help the client change affect us as well.

Therefore, when talking to top managers, addressing the ability to deliver reliably so they can keep their promises is paramount.

There are unfortunately too many coaches who once they have secured a high-paying year-long contract will not use that time to help the organization along, but suddenly develop a lot of understanding for the PMO, partially to have a more comfortable life (sometimes under the disguise of not being a Scrum Nazi)

humans are as much controlled by their emotions (system 1 thinking) as their logic (system 2 thinking) and the threat to their status and position will make fierce resistance often inevitable.

there is a lot of tension between top management and the middle layer in any organization.

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.

Examples of slowification practices: using mock-ups, prototypes, simulations, scale model tests, offline problem-solving, land-based models, etc. §§ Examples of simplification practices: simple workflows, agile software development, modularization, just-in-time, pull systems, etc. ¶¶ Examples of amplification practices: stress tests, andon cords, smoke detectors, etc. to flag problems sooner rather than later.

Understanding the gravity of the situation, QYK Brands leveraged its existing infrastructure and expertise to scale up production rapidly. The company's agility and adaptability allowed for the seamless transition from its traditional product lines to the manufacturing of critical healthcare items. This nimble response not only showcased QYK Brands' resilience but also highlighted its commitment to being a proactive participant in the collective effort to combat the virus.

What I envision is an architecture that brings all the data management areas much closer together by providing a consistent view of how to uniformly apply security, governance, master data management, metadata, and data modeling, an architecture that can work using a combination of multiple cloud providers and on-premises platforms but still gives you the control and agility you need. It abstracts complexity for teams by providing domain-agnostic and reusable building blocks but still provides flexibility by providing a combination of different data delivery styles using a mix of technologies.

The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.

Regin pretended not to notice, directing his gaze at Smitty.  “I know that the lad Steelbender be makin ye a sword, and scale armor.  And Max here be holdin’ enough scales fer a complete set fer ye both.  I see’d ye admirin’ the bow Max lent ye, so I made ye one o’ yer own.” Regin produced a bow and a quiver filled with arrows, and handed them over.  Smitty followed Dalia’s lead, dropping to one knee and bowing his head as he accepted the gifts.  “Thank you, Regin.  You are one kickass god!” “Ha!  This one learns quick!” Regin chuckled as Smitty checked out his gift. When Smitty saw the name in the description, his face split into a wide grin.  “Yesss!” Smitty’s Bow of Shootyness Item Quality: Unique, Epic Attributes:  Agility +5;  Strength +5, Dexterity +4, Luck +3 Enchantment: Sure-flight. This weapon set was crafted for Smitty the Battleborne by Regin himself.  The metal alloy used in both the bow and the arrows will not bend or break, and has a 50% increased chance of accepting enchantments.  The bowstring is made from the hamstring of a troll, and will regenerate itself when damaged.   Sure-flight Enchantment increases user’s chance of hitting intended targets by 50%.

One of the biggest challenges implementing agile is the reward system. For example, individual salary scales and rewards can be decoupled from the function and substituted by group valuation rewards linked to the capacity of both the employee and/or the team. Or, it is possible to make a distinction between the fixed salary and flexible performance bonus, detached from the annual budget and not considered a personnel expense. The reward system is always the last to change, but it is crucial to include this subject in the initial conversations with the different stakeholders around agile projects.

In the age of software, every business is a software business. Agility isn’t an option, or a thing just for teams; it is a business imperative.” —Dean Leffingwell, creator of SAFe

This model, which Kotter calls a dual operating system, restores the speed and innovation of the entrepreneurial network while leveraging the benefits and stability of the hierarchical system.

With SAFe, organizations can better link strategy with execution, innovate faster and deliver high-quality solutions to the market more quickly.

interconnected, real-time world in which every industry depends on technology and every organization is (at least in part) a software company.

Lean Portfolio Management aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.

Overloading teams and ARTs with more work than can be reasonably accomplished causes too much WIP, which confuses priorities, causes frequent context switching, and increases overhead and wait times. Like a crowded highway at rush hour, there is simply no upside to having more WIP than the system can handle. Experience shows that excess WIP drives high utilization, which results in the inability to respond to change, burnout, late product launches, reduced profits, and poor economic outcomes.

The last insight to improve flow is to manage and reduce the length of the work queue. Long queues of work create all sorts of undesirable results.

Leaders set the example through coaching, empowering, and engaging individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

If you can't scale, you can't scrum.

Waste is more than a crime; it's a mistake.

The Lean-Agile mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking and apply it in their daily lives.

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.

Pioneers take all the arrows.

Complexity is death.

It is not the physical distance that matters that much, it is the lack of Einheit.

To begin the Lean-Agile journey and instill new habits into the culture, everyone must adopt the values, mindset, and principles provided by SAFe, Lean thinking, and the Agile Manifesto. This new mindset creates the foundation needed for a successful Lean-Agile transformation.

The first step to correct the problem is to make the current WIP visible to all stakeholders. The simple Kanban board in Figure 4-8 provides one example of how to do this.

Just because architecture is supposed to be stable, it does not mean that it should never change.

Deploy or die.

There seems almost a shared society-wide delusion at play where we all accept that wasted effort is just a fact of life. And that is fine. Or rather, it would be fine if we had already conquered hunger in the world. Or if half of the world’s children would not live in poverty. Or had we become a multi-planetary species, protecting us from a planetary catastrophe. But we have not. Quite the opposite, our species is actually threatened from several quarters, yet we insist on having some of our best people waste their lives LARPing instead of contributing.

No Rick, your Gantt chart is not working, and it never has!

When you decide to take a step to the right, you expect all parts of your body to work in unity to take that step. Actually, you do not even expect it; it is just as natural a feature of our existence as drawing breath. You would be dumbfounded if not outright terrorized if your left leg suddenly moved in the opposite direction. While this is an everyday occurrence in the corporate world, with organizations aimlessly ambling about like zombies, the problem of moving in unity becomes even more urgent if we truly aim to achieve business agility. It is only when we can harmonize the decentralized decision making in the teams with the intent of senior leadership that we can achieve real business agility. Imagine your organization moved like your body: If there is an unexpected noise in your environment, your whole body turns in that direction to assess the situation and address possible threats that might come towards you. How great would it be if your organization did the same? Flexibly reacting to changes in the environment without friction, discussion, or delay, just a seamless and natural response — would that not be true agility?

If releasing is hard, people will always find a reason not to release.