Wiring the Winning Organization Quotes

“In the longer term, the developmental leader is not constantly lobbying for more resources, which would otherwise be used in much the same fashion for the same purposes as the resources that are already available. Instead, developmental leaders are always trying to figure out how to improve the problem-solving capabilities of the people for whom they are responsible.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“in the absence of fast, frequent, and useful feedback, systems of any type—technological, biological, social, psychological—will experience instability and even collapse. Systems with reliable feedback that triggers appropriate reactions are stable, resilient, and agile in even the most arduous situations. In the long term, systems that have adequate feedback and are capable of adaptation will improve, sometimes in dramatic ways, both by direction and magnitude.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“•Linearization sequences tasks associated with completing a larger set of work so that they flow successively, like a baton being passed from one person to the next. What follows is standardization for those sequences, for exchanges at partition boundaries, and for how individual tasks are performed. This creates opportunities to introduce stabilization, so that when a problem occurs, it triggers a reaction that contains the problem and prevents it from enduring and from its effects from spreading. This allows for self-synchronization, so the system is self-pacing without top-down monitoring and direction.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“•Incrementalization simplifies problem-solving by converting a few, complex experiments (in which many factors are being tested simultaneously) into many smaller, faster, simpler experiments (in which fewer factors are being tested individually). It does this by partitioning what is already known and validated from what is novel and new, and by adding to the novelty in many small bits rather than in a few large bites.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“•Modularization simplifies problems by partitioning large, complex systems (the elements of which have highly intertwined interdependencies) into systems that are more modular in structure, with each module having clearly defined boundaries and established conventions for interactions with other modules.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Wiring the Winning Organization asserts that outsized performance doesn’t come merely from reorganizing the shop floor or from adjusting how materials pass through machines (literally or figuratively). Doing so still leaves people spending time and energy on heroics to get things they need to succeed (e.g., information, approvals, requirements, time), navigating often bewildering and byzantine work conditions, processes, procedures, policies, politics, rules, and regulations in their daily work (what we call the danger zone). Instead, the most successful organizations are those that create conditions in which people can fully focus their intellects on solving difficult problems collaboratively and toward a common purpose, delivering solutions that have great societal value (conditions that we call the winning zone).”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Dr. Alistair Cockburn made this same observation in the study of software engineering; the most often overlooked, but most important, active components of complex software systems are…the people working within the system. The wonderful title of his paper describes people as the opposite of automatons: “Characterizing People as Non-Linear 1st Order Components in Software Development.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“when we consider that the most precious resource in any organization is people’s ingenuity and creativity, the most common risk is cognitive overload.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“In 2012, a team of researchers at Google found that psychological safety was the top predictor of team effectiveness.8 Similarly, in the State of DevOps research, a high-trust culture, which includes psychological safety, predicted software delivery and organizational performance in technology value streams, as measured by the Westrum organizational typology model, which divided organizations into pathological, bureaucratic, and generative.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Venn Diagram of How Different Practices Slowify, Simplify, or Amplify”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Leaders aren’t obvious in the midst of performance, but their fingerprints are all over the planning and preparatory practice.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Winners win because they have superior approaches for designing, operating, and improving the social circuitry by which individual efforts are harmonized through collective action toward a common purpose.* The best social circuitry simply makes it easier for individuals to put their minds to good use, to give fullest expression to their innate creativity, and to solve the difficult problems in front of them.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Part of wiring an organization to win is to ensure that leaders at all levels are able to create conditions in which people can give the fullest expression to their problem-solving potential, both individually and through collective action toward a common purpose.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Corrective action and validation form one of the key parts of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, from Dr. W. Edwards Deming.¶¶ •Plan: the conceptualization of new ideas and actions to rectify or improve a situation. •Do: the substantiation of those ideas in action. •Study: the deliberate and rigorous assessment of what had happened versus what was expected and an attempt to explain causally the reasons for those inaccuracies. •Act: the new behaviors informed by what was discovered during study; the validation and correction part of the feedback loop.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“the State of DevOps research showed that one of the top predictors of performance in technology environments is to what extent important information can be shared, how messengers of bad news are trained to tell bad news, how responsibilities are shared across functional specialties, how bridging between teams is rewarded, and how failure causes genuine inquiry.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“when information needs are high, that information cannot travel to the top of a functional silo. Instead, we must make direct connections across functional specialties to enable joint problem-solving at the frequency and speed, and with the detail and accuracy, necessary.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Leaders consumed with maintaining operational tempo can’t pause long enough to develop new approaches, validate them, and then use them in practice.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“No matter how well or loudly a signal is transmitted, it may not be effectively received. We suspect Dr. Claude Shannon, who created information theory, would agree with author Simon Sinek, who wrote, “Communication is not about speaking what we think. It’s about ensuring others hear what we mean.”26”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Dr. Ron Westrum described information flow as a “prime variable in creating safety, but also it is an indicator of organizational functioning.”19 This was based on studying human factors in system safety in complex and risky industries, including aviation and healthcare. Westrum asserted that “When information does not flow, it imperils the safe and proper functioning of the organization…and second, information flow is a powerful indicator of the organization’s overall functioning.”20”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Leaders can set expectations for everyone to strive to achieve perfect understanding and performance of the system, calling out anomalies and things they don’t understand. Or they can do the opposite. Through their actions or words, they can encourage everyone to “go with the flow” and can ignore imperfections in the system and their own understanding. They ignore everyone’s talents, experiences, ingenuity, and creativity, making them passive participants in the system. By doing this, leaders are complicit in the dismal outcomes that follow.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Leaders of an organization, whether deliberately or inadvertently, set and reinforce the organizational values, norms, and expectations through their actions. Audit, accounting, and ethics experts have long observed that the “tone at the top” predicts the likelihood of fraud and other unethical practices. We believe that “tone at the top” also determines what signals are generated or not generated.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“The discipline of control theory is attributed to physicist James Maxwell and his work regulating the velocity of windmills in the nineteenth century.† Control theory addresses a broad variety of situations where no static plan can achieve the desired goal. These are circumstances where, no matter how good the plan is, enough changes occur, both internal to the system and in the environment in which it is operating, that it is unworkable. Instead, feedback mechanisms are needed to achieve the intended outcomes. These mechanisms assess what is actually going on (versus what the plan predicted) and how that departs from what was expected. This generates a signal that triggers and informs corrective actions to re-steer the situation”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“The discipline of control theory is attributed to physicist James Maxwell and his work regulating the velocity of windmills in the nineteenth century.† Control theory addresses a broad variety of situations where no static plan can achieve the desired goal. These are circumstances where, no matter how good the plan is, enough changes occur, both internal to the system and in the environment in which it is operating, that it is unworkable.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Amplification is the act of calling out problems loudly and consistently enough so help is triggered to swarm them. Once the problems are swarmed, they are contained so they neither endure locally nor spread systemically. Then, they are investigated to determine their causes and create corrective actions that prevent recurrence.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“In software, Dr. Melvin Conway independently observed that any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. The larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and the more pronounced the phenomenon. What Conway observed was that once an organization’s social circuitry (Layer 3) is set, it will dictate the architecture of the technical systems (Layer 1).”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“Don Reinertsen has written extensively on the need for people in a system to have “slack time” in software development. The wait time for a service (such as a functional expert working on a job) increases exponentially as their utilization goes up. For instance, the wait time is nine times longer when that resource is 90% utilized versus 50% utilized. (For the curious reader, this is a property of queues such as those at supermarket checkouts and customer service calls, known formally as M/M/∞ queues.)”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“There is a common theme that organizations siloed around functions and technical specialties have trouble integrating individual effort into collective action toward a common purpose. Because of that inability to integrate easily, performance suffers.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“There are two aspects of incrementalization: (1) partitioning what is known from what is novel and (2) adding novelty in many small bites rather than a few large bites. The Apple iPhone team did just this. They were a small team in the larger enterprise (i.e., a model line). In other words, they created a Layer 3 partitioning of processes and procedures.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“In 1997, the Brooklyn Museum staged an exhibition, Monet and the Mediterranean, which included seventy-one paintings Claude Monet created during trips to the French and Italian Rivieras (in 1884 and 1888) and to Venice (in 1908).7 Instead of single, signature works, the exhibition showcased how Monet experimented, changing one variable at a time. For instance, for his Grand Canal series, Monet painted the same church from the same location but at different times of day to study changes in lighting. He also painted the Doge’s Palace for another series, showing the same building from different perspectives. Monet used this method of painting the same subject with small variations to perfect his technique.8 This illustrates the aspect of incrementalization in Layer 1, isolating and iterating the novel parts of the problem from what is considered already developed, tested, and validated”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

“incrementalization is not limited to early-stage innovation of new technology. The strategy of incrementalization is common across disciplines. Breaking large problems into smaller pieces, around which it is easier to experiment and learn, is a common feature of some great achievements.”
― Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification