Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Expect resentment – and eventual trouble – if you micromanage remote workers. You provoke resistance when you demonstrate that you don’t trust your distant workers and monitor everything they do.” — Lisette Sutherland and Kirsten Janene-Nelson in “Work Together Anywhere”

“Whether we like it or not, it’s almost like each of us have personal ‘Net Promoter Scores’ in our workplaces.” — Dynamic Reteaming - Heidi Helfand

“People think they want to be co-located. What they really want is high-bandwidth communication.” – Bill Krebs

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste” – Rahm Emanuel

“Waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Do you want a team of hamsters – with lots of effort that get you nowhere – or people that produce results?” —- Felipe Castro on OKRs

“On the topic of goals, the academic research agrees with your intuition: Having goals improves performance. Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not. It takes way too much time and it’s too hard to make sure all the goals line up. We have a market-based approach, where over time our goals all converge, because the top OKRs are known and everyone else’s OKRs are visible.” — Laszlo Bock, Google’s former VP of People Operations

“To outdo your competition, you don’t need certainty. You just need to deal with uncertainty better than they do.” – Mike Cohn

“John, the kind of control you’re attempting simply its … it’s not possible.” – Ian Malcolm [Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park]

“If you don’t tell the story, someone else will” – Unknown

“I’ve been really proud of being involved in three things in my career: agile, DevOps, software craftsmanship. This should have been one initiative.” – Martin Fowler (State of Agile 2018)

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

“The best way to deliver value isn’t more, more, more, it’s to do small valuable things frequently.” – Ron Jeffries in "Story Points Revisited"

“In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision-making.” – Scrum Guide

“… for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change” — Kent Beck

“Traditional teams attempt to drive out uncertainty by planning and analysis. Agile teams tend to drive out uncertainty by developing working software in small increments and then adjusting.” — Jim Highsmith

“Build the teams that we want to be a part of” – Mike Adrian

“You cannot change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust our sails” – Jimmy Dean(?)

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is engraved in the lives of others” – Perecles

“The impediment to action advances the action. What stands in the way becomes the way” – Marcus Aurelius

“The true method of knowledge is experiment.” – William Blake

“We are not critical thinkers; we think to criticize” – Unknown

“Radical change, one PI at a time” – Mike Adrian

“It great that you do the work, but it is even better if you bring someone along” —- Cynthia

“The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time.” – Annie Duke “Thinking in Bets”.

“To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” – Unknown

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” – Aldous Huxley

“For knowledge workers it is during the doing of work we discover the work that needs to be done.” – Vasco Duante

“A primary cause of software complexity is that vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. People seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication. The incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.” – Niklaus Wirth

“You are doing a great job of fragmenting work” – Unknown. Not necessarily a compliment.

“Sometimes when people seem lazy, it could be that they are just exhausted” – Unknown. On too much organizational change.

“Absolutely #noabsolutes” – heard at Value Stream Analysis workshop

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” – Strathern (variation on Goodhart’s Law)

“There is no question that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.” – New Scientist. 9th April 2011 pp 40-43

“Inspection is too late. The quality good, or bad, is already in the product.” – Deming

“Stop controlling people, start controlling value delivered” – Unknown

“We have a whole bunch of cute puppies running around. We need to drown some of them” – Heard at leadership prioritization meeting

“Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work” – Gene Kim

“There is no ‘my’ work; there is no ‘your’ work; there is only ‘our’ work” – Dojo quote on team dynamics

“Our projects are like watermelons; green on the outside and red in the middle.” – Unknown

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowel

“Zero failure is a failure” – Unknown

“Success is not typically measured by cost and schedule …” – Unknown

“Everyone is doing DevOps; most are doing it poorly” – Heard at DevOps for the Agile Enterprise

“Respect the ceremony” – Unknown

“If you are a manager and you are not uncomfortable during an agile transformation you are probably not doing a transformation to the agile mindset”. – Unknown

“No, I feel that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.” – David Marquet

“The procedure has become the master not the servant.” – David Marquet