Foundations
What high performance actually is, and how you'd know.
Before you change anything, you need a definition worth optimising for and a way to see the system you're standing in. This track gives you both.
What high performance actually means
Speed is a symptom. A high-performing org is one that converts judgment into shipped outcomes with very little loss along the way.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
The four loops every org runs
Delivery, learning, people, and strategy each run as a loop. Your org moves at the speed of the slowest one, and it is almost never delivery.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Throughput beats utilisation
A team booked at 100% has no capacity to absorb variance, so everything queues. Deliberate slack is what makes an org fast.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Measuring an engineering org without lying to yourself
Every engineering metric is gameable. Use them as conversation starters and outlier detectors, never as scoreboards.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Operating cadence: the org's heartbeat
Weekly is the only standing cadence that earns a permanent slot. Anything slower should be written, not met, and most dysfunction is one missing meeting or one extra one.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Trust is a price, not a poster
Psychological safety is not niceness. It's the observed cost of telling the truth, and you set that price with your own reactions.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Diagnosing an org in two weeks
You can find an engineering org's real constraint inside a week, if you follow work items rather than opinions. Ten days is the padded version you promise other people.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
New value versus keeping the lights on
Most orgs can't say what fraction of their capacity built something new last quarter versus kept the lights on. Look at the split occasionally. The moment it becomes a target, it starts lying to you like every other metric does.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+