Kotter’s Eight Steps
Eight connected activities for organizational change: what they do, how the framework evolved, and why completed activities do not prove sustained results.
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ADKAR
ADKAR guides questions about individual change. Assess understanding, willingness, task performance, and support rather than inferring them from attendance.
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Two-Way Door Decision
Reversibility can support lighter review, but does not grant authority. Check recovery cost, time, evidence, and consequences that cannot be undone.
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Executive Sponsor
A sponsor supports the program and its accountable owner, oversees progress, and makes or refers escalated decisions. The mandate matters more than the title.
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BATNA
What you will do if there is no agreement. The floor beneath any deal, the reason to understand the other side’s interests, and when walking away is right.
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Transformational Leadership
Distinguish the leadership concept from annual survey measures, understand DORA’s productivity estimate, and examine how leaders support useful practices.
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Chief Technology Officer
The organization’s technology strategist: direction, architecture, evaluation, risk, and capability. What a government’s public role definition says the job is.
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Underperformance
Discuss performance concerns early, examine mixed causes, agree on appropriate support, and follow the applicable process with an opportunity to respond.
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Bus Factor
Define what must keep working, identify the smallest critical absence, and verify that alternate operators have the skills, access, and capacity to cover it.
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Working Agreement
Shared norms a team writes together: locations and hours, channels and their purposes, how each person wants feedback, and who decides when consensus fails.
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Low-Context Communication
Explain the request, evidence, and next step for the intended reader. Clear context supports asynchronous work without requiring a question-free message.
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Structured Interview
Same questions, recorded answers, a shared rubric, calibrated interviewers. The published research and Google’s results, and the cost of doing it.
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Career Framework
A written statement of what each level expects and what each competency looks like there. Used with evidence and reviewed against current work.
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Psychological Safety
A shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Edmondson’s definition, the survey items, and why it is not the opposite of accountability.
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Delegation Level
Delegation is a degree, not a switch. Seven levels clarify decision authority, involvement, constraints, and the agreement to review as circumstances change.
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Team API
A Team API tells other teams how to work with this one: what it owns, what it offers as a service, and each interaction’s mode, duration, and review conditions.
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Inverse Conway Maneuver
If organizations copy their communication structure into their designs, change the structure on purpose. The term’s source, three design checks, and its misuse.
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Service Owner
A service owner answers for a capability across its life. The role needs explicit decision authority and a route to approvals beyond that authority.
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Service Community
A service community helps teams investigate and improve a shared journey. Acting on its findings still needs assigned authority and capacity.
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Platform Product Manager
Platform product decisions need evidence, authority, and time. A dedicated manager or another responsible person can carry those duties.
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Perceptual Measure
Perceptual measures capture reported work experience. Design useful questions, protect respondents, and interpret comparisons alongside workflow evidence.
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Flow State
Flow state is absorbed focus, involvement, and enjoyment. Examine delays, goals, autonomy, and collaboration without equating empty calendars with flow.
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Community of Practice
A community of practice develops shared knowledge through ongoing participation. Learn how peer support, curation, ownership, and governance fit together.
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Backlog Coupling
Backlog coupling links one team’s progress to another team’s queue. Reduce handoffs and measure waiting alongside the work and dependencies that remain.
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Stream-Aligned Team
Aligned to a stream, not assigned a component. It owns the outcome end to end, which is why what a platform takes off its plate has to be stated.
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Conway’s Law
Communication paths influence service boundaries. Examine actual decisions and handoffs rather than inferring ownership or design quality from team counts.
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Advice Process
Anyone may decide, provided they first consult those affected and those with expertise. It removes the need for agreement — not anyone’s budget or risk mandate.
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Cognitive Load
Cognitive load is how much a team must hold in mind to work. Treating it as a finite budget helps you judge when added responsibilities may exceed what a team can handle.
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Stakeholder
Identify who can affect an analysis or be affected by its use, distinguish decision authority from impact, and agree on communication each person needs.