Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

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

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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 e

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We assert that greatness is created through three mechanisms, which create the difference between success and failure: •slowification, to make solving problems easier to do, •simplification, to make the problems themselves easier to solve, •and amplification, to make it obvious that there are problems that demand attention and whether they’ve been

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Slowification helps us create better approaches to situations instead of repeatedly exercising old habits and routines. A common objection to slowification is that maintaining operational tempo is the highest, even overwhelming, priority. But, as is warned in Ecclesiastes 10:10, “If the ax becomes dull and he has not whetted the edge, he must exert

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Coupling and coherence are important, not just for Gene and Steve trying to move a couch or Maggie Taraska landing safely. Look around your own work environment and assess whether you are wired to win or not. Have many people have been placed into the same group arbitrarily, when the problems they’re dealing with are not tightly coupled? If so, thi

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Simplification highlights how leaders can manage the conditions in which people are operating, so solving problems—particularly complex ones—is quicker, easier, and more productive. Simplification moves people in the direction of the winning zone via the following: •Easier experiments: Simplification creates opportunities to solve smaller problems;

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Simplification highlights how leaders can manage the conditions in which people are operating, so solving problems—particularly complex ones—is quicker, easier, and more productive. Simplification moves people in the direction of the winning zone via the following: •Easier experiments: Simplification creates opportunities to solve smaller problems;

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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:

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Top-down leadership tries to promote uniformity through the commonality of policies, procedures, routines, and regulations. When everyone adheres to the same standards,¶¶ and those standards are imposed and monitored by a central authority, there’s limited discretion to act locally. In certain situations, this is done in order to minimize variance

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