Just off the top of my head: An effective responsibility culture and structure. Those who are responsible for something must have the means to effect it. There

Just off the top of my head: An effective responsibility culture and structure. Those who are responsible for something must have the means to effect it. There must be a means of agreeing who is responsible for something and an effective way to find who is responsible when someone is blocked. Things should not languish because no-one is responsible, nor be trampled in because everyone wants a piece. (This is culture as well as structure, because everyone needs to internalise what a good responsibility structure looks like so that they negotiate it into place in a distributed way, rather than having it imposed top down.) Prioritise making intelligent decisions over raw speed. In my effective employer, if your project was late, you were required to take a step back and really work out when it was realistically deliverable and make sure you genuinely understood what was now needed - better to say ONCE 'it needs another 3 months' than 'just a another 2 weeks' 8 times. (The ineffective company had a 5 day horizon and would burn everyone out constantly trying to deliver next week) Related to this is that profligate agility can work against intelligence. The effective org could afford what would seem like a huge amount of process, but it actually took less of our time than the agile process in the ineffective org because we didn't need to change our minds as often. Making effective use of staff's skills. The means everything from: Leaders need to recognise what they aren't expert in, not having a destructive people culture, giving people larger pieces of work that they can master rather than splitting everything into a million fragments, allowing for development rather than people getting type-cast.