The message here is never to blindly trust anyone’s advice on how to improve your project. By definition, other people’s fitness landscapes are different than yours. It’s your hike. Nobody else can walk for you.

Are we changing as fast as the world around us? As we’ve already seen, the answer for many companies is “no.”

The introduction of a system into an environment changes the environment.

People should specialize in something, but they must be flexible enough not to claim exclusive job titles in support of their specialization.

Competence is achieved through self-discipline, coaching, certification, peer pressure, tools, and supervising. In that order.

But the more you’re imposing them as fixed rules, the more you are constraining the innate rulemaking capabilities of your team members. And then they have lost the ability to be really Agile.

Я не допускаю, чтобы существо, наделенное волей, пока бьется его сердце, пока оно способно двигаться, могло бы предаться отчаянию

And so we have identified three responsibilities for a manager when setting up constraints in an organization: 1) developing the system; 2) protecting the system; and 3) directing the system

Directed self-organization in businesses is a matter of manipulating the constraints so that a group of people produces results that are valuable to the organization as a whole.

The universe itself is a boundary. Our planet forms a boundary. Natural resources form boundaries. And cultural constraints in a group of people also form a boundary. What we can learn from this is that there’s always plenty of opportunity for self-organization to take place, and quite often at least something will emerge from that.