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unique product development is unknowable
Better is quality. Quality is built in rather than inspected in later. With smaller slices of value and multidisciplinary teams, changes are within a team’s cognitive load (that is, complexity that fits in your head) and there is a limited “impact radius.” There are fewer incidents and outages. There is less rework, less failure demand. More time is spent proactively rather than reactively.
In these situations, a waterfall approach would have been too risky, with late learning and back-loaded risk. Due to agility and fast time to learning, having got early learning on the least understood and the riskiest bit of these activities,
I start by looking at how agile and lean are not the goal and how, instead, it is important to start with why and focus on outcomes.
It’s also not unusual to find people taking false comfort in having plotted the future in detail in the context of unique work and then proverbially holding people’s feet over the fire for a nigh-on impossible task, with rallying cries of “Have fun!” and team-building exercises while constrained by a system of work and incentivization that cannot lead to high levels of engagement.
Intellectual Stimulation: the leader challenges followers to think about problems in new ways, challenges the status quo, and questions assumptions. Experimentation and new ideas are encouraged. Ideas are not criticized (initially there is no such thing as a bad idea) and failed experiments lead to learning and inquiry, not personal blame. There is psychological safety.
customer onboarding, helicopter engines, passport applications,
of Digital, technically those value streams can be served up via APIs. Effectively, it’s bringing the business, people, and technology architectures all into alignment, with high cohesion (doing one thing well) and low coupling (minimizing dependencies, maximizing flow and agility). Ultimately you have a value stream network with interdependent services.
People have “T”-shaped skills—they are generalizing specialists with a deep expertise in a skill set and an expectation and willingness
Tuckman’s stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing all over again.5 They lose the learning, cohesion, and social bonds that the team has built up.
An automated pipeline with a lack of technical excellence does not mean that the team is delivering the right thing; it might be functioning as a feature factory, pushing out low-quality code faster.
Some knowledge can only be shared by socialization, through the kind of shared learning experiences found in brainstorming sessions, pairing, face-to-face interactions, and a bias to action. Learning by doing, like a blacksmith training an apprentice.
In a leader-nurturing culture, people can build psychological safety, the single most important ingredient of a high-performing team.
