Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Leading as a gardener meant that I kept the Task Force focused on clearly articulated priorities by explicitly talking about them and by leading by example.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“I found that, by ignoring the Perry Principle and containing my desire to micromanage, I flipped a switch in my subordinates: they had always taken things seriously, but now they acquired a gravitas that they had not had before. It is one thing to look at a situation and make a recommendation to a senior leader about whether or not to authorize a strike. Psychologically, it is an entirely different experience to be charged with making that decision.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”. And related …

“More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“I was most effective when I supervised processes — from intelligence operations to the prioritization of resources—ensuring that we avoided the silos or bureaucracy that doomed agility, rather than making individual operational decisions.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“I began to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“A Bank of America call center … Success is measured by AHT (average call handle time), which ideally should be as low as possible. Pentland gave workers sociometric badges all day for six weeks, and measured levels of interaction and engagement. When he shifted the coffee break system from being individual to being team based, interaction rose and AHT dropped, demonstrating a strong link between interaction and productivity.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“When Pentland surveyed a number of R&D labs, he found that he could predict the labs’ creative output with an extraordinary 87.5 percent accuracy by measuring idea flow.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“However, as interfaces became increasingly important, we realized the potential for bolstering our relationships with our partner agencies by way of a strong linchpin liaison officer (LNO). As it turned out, some of our best LNOs were also some of our best leaders on the battlefield. … Everyone hated removing some of our best operators from the battlefield, but we reaped enormous benefits” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams” on the use best people as interfaces taking them away from day to day work - not efficient but effective

“The critical first step was to share our own information widely and be generous with our own people and resources. From there, we hoped that the human relationships we built through that generosity would carry the day.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“I’ve always believed that management’s ability to influence work habits through edict is limited. Ordering something gets it done, perhaps. When you turn your back, though, employees tend to regress to the same old ways.” – Michael Bloomberg

“We don’t know what connections and conversations will prove valuable.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Teams can bring a measure of adaptability to previously rigid organizations. But these performance improvements have a ceiling as long as adaptable traits are limited to the team level.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“We had to find a way for the organization as a whole to build at scale the same messy connectivity our small teams had mastered so effectively.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Their structure — not their plan — was their strategy.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” – Amy Edmondson

“In a command, the connections that matter are vertical ties; team building, on the other hand, is all about horizontal connectivity.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“SEAL teams accomplish remarkable feats not simply because of the individual qualifications of their members, but because those members coalesce into a single organism. Such oneness is not inevitable, nor is it a fortunate coincidence. The SEALs forge it methodically and deliberately.” … “The purpose of BUD/S is not to produce super-soldiers. It is to build super teams.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“We needed flexibility but we also needed the advantages of scale that accompany efficiency. We had to find a way to create that adaptability while preserving many of our traditional strengths. This would prove difficult—many of the practices that are most efficient directly limited adaptability” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats.” – Zolli

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.” – Peter Drucker

““Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Data-rich records can be wonderful for explaining how complex phenomena happened and how they might happen, but they can’t tell us when and where they will happen.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“In such settings, the ritual of strategic planning, which assumes 'the future will be more or less like the present,' is more hindrance than help.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Frederick Taylor’s managerial solutions were unequivocally designed for complicated problems rather than complex ones.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Complex systems are fickle and volatile, presenting a broad range of possible outcomes; the type and sheer number of interactions prevent us from making accurate predictions. As a result, treating an ecosystem as though it were a machine with predictable trajectories from input to output is a dangerous folly.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”, and related …

“The average forecasting error in the U.S. analyst community between 2001 and 2006 was 47 percent over twelve months and 93 percent over twenty-four months. As writer and investor James Montier puts it, 'The evidence on the folly of forecasting is overwhelming . . . frankly the three blind mice have more credibility than any macro-forecaster at seeing what is coming.' In November 2007, economists in the Survey of Professional Forecasters—examining some forty-five thousand economic-data series—foresaw less than a one-in-five-hundred chance of an economic meltdown as severe as the one that would begin one month later.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with 'leverage' - the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence: the garage band, the dorm-room start-up, the viral blogger, and the terrorist cell.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“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.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“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”)” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.” – General Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams”

“What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context.” – James Corey in “Abaddon's Gate”

Coordinate cross-functionally but work independently - take responsibility. Work with details, but understand the context. Act now—think long-term. Build know-how through continuous learning. Stimulate commitment through involvement. – Scania leadership principles

“Lean development is a careful elaboration of a single idea—learn from reality. And learning from reality has the great advantage of enabling you to live in a rational universe.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“Succinctly, “grownups” learn to value “power-to” over “power-over.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development” on role of management

“Put key information in the physical environment where it is available at a glance and people are reminded of it in appropriate places.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development” on why we seem to want to keep information hidden and pass it through workflows.

“The answer is simple: establish a cadence. Start projects at standard intervals, and finish them at standard project lengths, so that the entire development organization is marching to the beat of the same drummer” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“A plan that is more than one page is much too long to be understood and followed.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“Conventional project management attempts to answer these questions by defining a detailed plan and trying to stick to it. Instead of learning to surf, conventional organizations try to control the waves! This almost never works.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“Remain “off-line” from product development. Don’t allow research or advanced development to select a concept for product development. Product Development may use any of the data and ideas created, but research/ advanced development should always start with complete freedom to do whatever makes sense. Research or advanced development concepts are unproven because they have not been produced in volume or used by customers. Development teams must search many concepts to be confident of success.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“Every specification is a trade-off between what really is wanted and what the state of the art allows. At the beginning of the project, only the old state of the art is known.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“Your basic negotiating ploy is simple: “Given support A, I can do X. Given support B, I think I can only do Y. X makes 50% more money for the company.” – Allen Ward in “Lean Product and Process Development”.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs