READING NOTE · UPDATED 2026
Leadership creates the conditions for improvement
A top-level Lean initiative needs more than an announcement and a set of team metrics. Examine which decisions leaders make about priorities, capacity, escalation and learning. The original discussion provides a starting point for observing those decisions. A team’s local improvement may fail if the surrounding system continues to reward a conflicting behaviour.
A practical next step
- Identify a leadership policy affecting the workflow.
- Observe its effect on one recurring problem.
- Agree a bounded policy change with a review of consequences.
This 2026 reading note is written by the Durnall editorial team. Richard Durnall’s original text follows below.
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Source capture · 2009-01-29 ↗…XP from the bottom.
It’s been an age since I’ve posted. I’ve been distracted by a hectic few months of work, a big chunk of leave and the new Led Zeppelin biography (which is awesome!). From now on I should be getting back into my regular posting pattern of at least a post a week.
I thought I’d start the new year by stealing something from someone else and relabeling it as my own work; I’ve made a career of it until this point so I see no good reason to stop now!
So what have I stolen? Well, I’ve come up with a new phrase that at some point in the future Dan North may claim was his first (he’d be completely correct). “Lean from the top, XP from the bottom”. I really like this turn of phrase because it nails my thinking around the best organisational patterns for IT in 2009.
I think XP is great. It’s values and principles are closely aligned to that of Lean and it has the technical smarts and discipline that I feel are missing from other Agile methodologies. It’s a great starting place at the bottom of the organisation for project delivery; XP is now a proven model that has been successful at an enterprise level for a number of years. Of course we can apply our Lean knowledge to help us optimise the approach we use to introduce XP to the organisation and apply our Lean techniques to ensure that we’re continuously improving our new process.
But what about the rest of the organisation? Those that have tried to introduce XP (or another Agile methodology) at an enterprise scale will know that this alone doesn’t complete the picture. How do we restructure our IT organisation to be more customer and process focussed? What about our friends in IT Operations & Support? How do we change incentive policies to encourage the right behaviours? How do we change our financial controls and governance processes to support our new working level philosophies? The Agile methodologies themselves are largely silent in this space leaving a large gap with enterprise adoption. Thankfully Lean, as well as being useful at a project level, can help us in this space too with concrete tools and countless large-scale examples. Hence “Lean from the top, XP from the bottom.”.
I think this will be particularly important in 2009. With the current economic conditions pressure is going to increase on IT divisions to do more with less. Cost controls alone can’t do this; we can squeeze our people to get more out of them but there is a limit - it’s fundamental economics. To get beyond that point we have to change our underlying models and thinking.
NOTE :: Thanks to Jonathan for pointing out that the time stamping on my blog posts seems to be screwed. For the life of me I can’t work out what’s wrong with it. The investigations continue.