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In Atomic Habits James Clear writes: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” For individuals, systems are habits and for an organization, systems are the processes and behaviors put in place and displayed (or tolerated) by leadership. If you ever wondered how leaders shape (directly or indirectly) organizations, now you know.

Inspired by Matthew Skelton's comment on Wholehearted I decided to read the book . This is not a review of the book, merely a note of the most important (to me, at least) take-aways. Being "whole" Why is it called wholehearted? The answer is given in the introduction and this helped me file the book in the right "box": a thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, [...] it is unwhole. Mike Burrows then gives examples of situations in which we experience that "magical chemistry" that makes performing (in a group of people) effortless. This is (at least to me) a powerful revelation and a great way to define what I get to experience from time to time when my organization just performs. When that happens we are whole. And it's an awesome experience. The other insight that I got is that a business is always "at war": with the market. But when it also goes to war against itself because of...

Collaboration : working together towards an output . For example: collaborating on a presentation, book, song, etc. Cooperation : working together towards an outcome . For example: "customer centricity", volunteer fire departments protecting communities, different departments sharing resources but working separately Which one do you need, and when?

An enabling constraint is a limitation or rule that, rather than hindering creativity or progress, actually promotes innovation and problem-solving. In software development, we've all experienced the positive effects of enabling constraints. Examples of enabling constraints in sw development are: trunk-based development continuous integration static code analysis/checks, i.e.: enforcing rules such as function or method length, number of parameters, naming conventions, etc Recently, I've been thinking about the use of enabling constraints at the organizational level. One example I think I heard here was about strengthening the cooperation between engineering and marketing. The solution can be remarkably simple: have marketing prepare the material for a feature  before  its implementation. What I was wondering is: how should we think about this change in terms of Team Topologies? Before diving into the topologies and interactions I would observe that this change adheres to som...

A bad system will beat a good person every time. W. Edwards Deming at a February 1993 seminar.