As a leader, this should make you ask the following questions: When you create plans, do you treat them as “finished,” something ready for performance, for execution in operation? Do you expect a “Yes, Admiral” reply? Or, do you treat plans as your first, best guess of what to do, why to do it, and how to get it done? Do you invite challenges to

Dr. Diane Vaughan’s concept of “normalization of deviance” similarly highlights the risks of diminishing signals that something is amiss. In her work, it’s not so much someone with more authority deliberately silencing those with less; it’s more people becoming conditioned to accept as normal what once was not. Nevertheless, the effect is the same:

the common issue across all situations is creating conditions in which people’s ingenuity can be liberated for its best possible use.

Our organizational wiring also dictates the type of feedback that is generated. Ideally, everyone gets direct and fast feedback on the work they do, so they can see the effects of their actions, which can be used to stabilize systems and improve. After all, in any complex, adaptive system, there are unexpected events and a general tendency toward

The best leaders create, sustain, and improve their organizations’ social circuitry,* the overlay of the processes, procedures, routines, and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well. While individual specialists are focusing their attention on the problems immediately in front of them, this social circuitry establishes the

As a leader, this should make you ask the following questions: When you create plans, do you treat them as “finished,” something ready for performance, for execution in operation? Do you expect a “Yes, Admiral” reply? Or, do you treat plans as your first, best guess of what to do, why to do it, and how to get it done? Do you invite challenges to

As a leader, these examples of slowification should make you ask: Are you regularly looking at situations? And before you must begin performing, are you regularly conducting some version of dress rehearsal? If not, you may be missing chances to identify flaws in your thinking and to see gaps in what you can do. If you miss those chances, they will

It was mathematically proven over fifty years ago that it is often impossible to compute a correct and optimal scheduling solution in finite time for schedules of any significant size.§

Each year, it took longer and longer to ship features to customers, and the risk of even small changes causing major problems kept growing. In 1998, developers could make changes and deploy them immediately. By 2004, pushing code changes into production required hours, even days, to be deployed.39 Teams were no longer able to solve Layer 1 problems