being open with people and securing their trust is vitally important. “The key to our success has been absolute transparency with the public – sharing every detail of how this virus is evolving, how it is spreading and what the government is doing about it, warts and all.”

there was no lockdown in South Korea. It did, however, close its schools. There have been postponed attempts at reopening them, but reopen they must, according to Foreign Minister Kang.

“Testing is absolutely critical with a fast-travelling virus like this,” says Kang. “We have tested over 350,000 cases so far – some patients are tested many times before they are released, so we can say they are fully cured. Altogether, we’re talking about one out of 145 or one out of 150 people having been tested so far.”

“We took an all-government approach. The Prime Minister created a task force of all government ministries and, crucially, all regional and city governments, too – we are a very devolved democracy.” This joined-up strategy, involving the different regional authorities around the country soon paid off. “When one region ran out of hospital beds we asked other provinces to open up beds in their hospitals. When it ran out of doctors we asked doctors in other regions to help,” she continues.

Kanban vs. Scrumban

People-centric means that you will allocate specific people to focus primarily on the maintenance tasks,

Is the definition of done allowing us to deliver every week?

Each day, workers in the United States attend about 11 million meetings

listen

now

sanity check

sound the decision

4 Checks

organization

ering Accountability Systems — which enable — people to design and redesign their roles — which produces — an optimal match between people’s developmental capability and their work accountabilities as they evolve over time.

What we know from a hundred years of developmental research is that humans develop in a reflective constructive loop with their environment. This development occurs well beyond the end of the structural-physiological growth of our brains. Yet, despite our constant embeddedness within work challenges we don’t use them as developmental opportunities in adulthood. In many ways, “adulthood” is actually full of opportunities to avoid development. For example, have you ever felt afraid to share a criticism, speak your mind, or point out a problem at work? Have you ever understood a situation very quickly and clearly, while your colleagues or superiors just “didn’t get it”?

Rather these experiences or outcomes of behaviors are both ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ of complex, dynamic human systems. Systems of people working, thinking, feeling, interacting, reacting, and developing together. Consider, for example, if you swap out empathy for sympathy (which doesn’t require vulnerability) you cut off your ability to foster psychological safety, and also everything else that comes after it. These are delicate matters (and humans typically have pretty solid detectors for insincerity)

Create a Work Environment That Fosters Flow

At the heart of this doubling sits a complicated cascade of five neurochemicals which, when combined, accomplish intrinsically what most organizations fail to achieve by fiat. In flow, the brain releases norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin. All five affect performance. Norepinephrine and dopamine tighten focus, helping us shut out the persistent distractions of our multi-tasked lives. Endorphins block pain, letting us burn the candle at both ends without burning out altogether. Anandamide prompts lateral connections and generates gestalt insights far more than most brainstorming sessions.  And serotonin, that feel-good chemical at the heart of the Prozac revolution, bonds teams together more powerfully than the best-intentioned offsite.

One of the psychological triggers is the challenge/skills ratio. Our attention is most engaged when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the “flow channel” — the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch; not hard enough to make us snap.

4% appears to be a loose rule of thumb. The challenge must be 4% greater than the skills one brings to it