Quotes About Adaptation

We're going way too slowly, with too much wip and too many features in flight. We need to make our releases smaller and shorter and deliver cash back faster, so we can beat the internal hurdle rate.

By the 2000's, because of advances in technology and the adoption of Agile principles and practices, the time required to develop new functionality had dropped to weeks or months, but deploying into production would still require weeks or months, often with catastrophic outcomes.

The Phoenix Project is ultimately a book about transformation, and so it is incredibly gratifying to see it being used as an instrument to create transformations in real life as well.

In 1958, the Fortune 500 tenure was 61 years; now it's only 18 years.

Dan Milstein, one of the principal engineers at Hubspot, writes that he begins all blameless post-mortem meetings by saying, "We're trying to prepare for a future where we're as stupid as we are today." In other words, it is not acceptable to have a countermeasure to merely "be more careful" or "be less stupid"— instead, we must design real countermeasures to prevent these errors from happening again.

But remember, we're doing this so that we can be better prepared for the next crisis, when we will be equally ignorant of entirely new things that are just as important and will be just as obvious in hindsight

Maybe not," I say. "I'll tell you what I do know, though. Every time that we let Brent fix something that none of us can replicate, Brent gets a little smarter, and the entire system gets dumber.

little fish learn to be big fish in little ponds.

When we have a tightly-coupled architecture, small changes can result in large scale failures. As

INCREASE THE VISIBILITY OF WORK In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There are many ways to make the current state visible, but what's most important is that the information we display is up to date, and that we constantly revise what we measure to make sure it's helping us understand progress toward our current target conditions.

we can only win by innovating and understanding our customers, which we can only do by mastering data.

Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don't stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.

Every industry and company that is not bringing software to the core of their business will be disrupted.

Technology keeps changing faster and faster, and it's nearly impossible to keep up anymore.

David J. Anderson's book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business; it's

Just how many times can you throw out everything you know to keep up with the latest new-fangled trend

All the firefighting displaced all the planned work, both projects and changes

Unplanned work

business projects, like Phoenix,

In tightly coupled and complected systems, it's nearly impossible to change anything, because you can't just change one area of the code, you must change one hundred, or even a thousand, areas of the code. And even the smallest changes can cause wildly unpredictable effects in distant parts of the system, maybe in something you've never even heard of.

The opposite of the Third Ideal is someone who values process compliance and TWWADI," he says with a big smile. "You know, 'The Way We've Always Done It.' It's the huge library of rules and regulations, processes and procedures, approvals and stage gates, with new rules being added all the time to prevent the latest disaster from happening again.

If we know it's that prone to crashing, why do we need to change it?

technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.

Mike Rother says that it almost doesn't matter what you improve, as long as you're improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.