Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership … Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you.” – David Marquet

“Trust is purely a characteristic of the human relationship.” – David Marquet

“Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” – David Marquet

“If you walk about your organization talking to people, I’d suggest that you be as curious as possible.” – David Marquet

“Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.” – David Marquet

“Whatever sense we have of thinking we know something is a barrier to continued learning.” – David Marquet

“When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.” – David Marquet

“People tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” – Amara’s Law

“Exec quiz: How do you expect your org to innovate if your governance model is fundamentally based on adherence to long-term implementation plans? Just imagine, in order to innovate, your employees would have to put their careers at risk every time.” – Alex Yakyma

“Don't trade uncertain earliness with certain lateness” – Unknown. On deciding too early, pretending we can plan in advance.

“Alignment is a force multiplier” – Unknown

“The point of estimation is not to predict the future but to understand if we are even in with a chance of managing our way to success” – Steve McConnell

“Failure is an option to start again … this time with more information” – Henry Ford

“More is coming at us faster.” – John P Kotter

“Being relentless is key.” – John P Kotter

“Be unfailingly respectful.” – John P Kotter

“But our decisions and actions always increase the probability of what we call “luck,” good or bad.” – John P Kotter

“Innovation requires risks, people who are willing to think outside their boxes, perspectives from multiple silos, and more. Management-driven hierarchies are built to minimize risk and keep people in their boxes and silos. To change this more than incrementally is to fight a losing battle.” – John P Kotter

“We can’t work in silos to solve systemic problems” – Bar Yam

“[J]ust as the essence of medicine is not urinalysis (important though that is), the essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make [people and their expertise] productive. Management, in other words, is a social function.” – Peter Drucker

“Managerial effectiveness today is, as it has ever been, based on management engaging the three tasks that Drucker identified as uniquely its own: Focusing the organization on its specific purpose and mission; making work both productive and suitable for human beings; and taking responsibility for the organization’s social impacts.” – Peter Drucker

“We spend a lot of time looking for systemic risk; in truth, however, it tends to find us.” – Meg McConnell of the New York Fed. I think this is applicable to organizations and the need to focus on resiliency

“Teams not individuals are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the rubber meets the road; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.” – Peter Senge

“People change because smart companies make them want to change. It usually involves techniques borrowed from gamification, behavioral economics, and habitualization.” – Jurgen Appelo

“When does any waterfall project become agile? When you're out of time or money. That's when you negotiate.” – Harry Koehnemann

“If you dig deep enough you will eventually find that at its core, every mindset is a belief system. That’s why it is so horrifically difficult to change. People don’t like their core beliefs to be shaken up and gravely endangered.” – Alex Yakyma

“There is truly some magic to this planning thing – the magic of addressing complexity with the most powerful weaponry there is: face-to-face communication.” – Alex Yakyma

“The teams themselves can have flawed instincts and regularly take on more work than they can actually accomplish.” – Alex Yakyma

“As long as I do not see that I’m blind, I’m blind.” – Unknown

“Make them jealous that their peers are doing something dangerously cool. Nothing drives large-scale adoption better than that.” – Alex Yakyma

“A successful change agent must ensure that there’s no unproductive tension between themselves and the stakeholders. Any antagonism, even latent, may inhibit the transformation and must be promptly resolved. It’s up to you to make the first step.” – Alex Yakyma

“No demo, no numbers”. If you can’t demonstrate a fully integrated system, don’t fool yourself with metrics. It’s better to accept the defeat and focus on solving the underlying problem. – Alex Yakyma

“Nothing strengthens trust between teams and business owners better than the PI System Demo.” – Alex Yakyma

“In adopting a new operating paradigm, the ways of working are only the tip of the iceberg. The real target of a change agent — the mass of ice below the surface — is the mindset of those who lead the organization.” – Alex Yakyma

“So why is it that we acknowledge face-to-face communication as the best way of conveying information at the team level, but at the program level this simple, yet absolutely fundamental tenet of Agile is demonstrably ignored?” – Alex Yakyma through Adi

“Our customers don’t buy components or even features; they buy systems. That’s why an iteration can be successful only if it produces an increment of the entire system, end-to-end.” – Alex Yakyma

“Longer lead times seem to be associated with significantly poorer quality. In fact, an approximately six-and-a-half times increase in average lead time resulted in a greater than 30-fold increase in initial defects.” – David Anderson

“Adding a WIP limit to fix the overburdening causes the average time a work item spends in the system to get much shorter.” – Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene

“We would never run the servers in our computer rooms at full utilization — why haven’t we learned that lesson in software development?” – Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

“If stupid enters the room, you have a moral duty to shoot it, no matter who’s escorting it.” – Keoki Andrus, Beautiful Teams

“It’s widely known that it takes time (usually between 15 and 45 minutes) for a developer to get into a state of “flow,” a state of high concentration in which she’s highly productive.” – Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – Linus’s Law - can be applied to source code, plans, designs, etc.

“Let the team fail: Certainly, don’t stand idly by while the team goes careening off a cliff. … Teams that fail together and recover together are much stronger and faster than ones that are protected.” – Lyssa Adkins in “Coaching Agile Teams”

“Cockburn points out just how “distressingly Zen” this can sound. In Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, he talks about how people at the ri stage of learning say things that are difficult for a shu-level learner to understand” – Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene

“Without concrete practices, principles are sterile; but without principles, practices have no life, no character, no heart. Great products arise from great teams — teams who are principled, who have character, who have heart, who have persistence, and who have courage.” – Jim Highsmith (and why we worry about Principles and Values)

“In short, software is eating the world.” – Marc Andreessen

“Value occurs only when the end user is operating the solution. The value stream can’t have a model that involves ideation and development, but excludes deployment. The DevOps pipeline is simply part of the value stream.” – Dean Leffingwell, quoted at VersionOne Webinar "Top 7 Questions

“When an organization focuses on driving optimization of each individual project, many seemingly logical efforts to improve product development unintentionally undermine the very goal they intend to accomplish.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Just like air traffic controllers establish the landing patterns and cadence of airplanes to synchronize arrivals regardless of size, distance traveled, experience of the crew, or any other attribute, so that the planes follow an identical, predictable pattern when landing, a pattern and cadence that encompasses all aspects and varieties of projects in the development portfolio must be established in product development.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“When a project fails, the failure is generally blamed on the project leader rather than recognizing that the system in which the project leader operates is a much greater determinant of success and failure than the project leader.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"