Ever watched a Little-League team completely forget how to play baseball after the coach yells at a player? Humphrey's Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance, deliberate focus disrupts ingrained habits, spiking error rates. This one is essential for process leaders. People's highest performance physical capabilities occur when they run on autopilot. That's what muscle and movement memories are. Under muscle memory, peopl

Source: xkcd.com New tasks with unknowns over-run estimates no matter how much buffer you build-in. Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." This law really highlights the risk of running any task outside the control of a clear process. To be clear, in a well-designed, trained, and controlled process you will find tasks are repeatable and predictable. When you design process, you design every step to minimiz

Have you ever been in a meeting with a "slick" manager who could conveniently explain how every problem originated outside his department? You start to wonder why nobody calls him out for it. Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute "BS" is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." In practice, a "bad actor" can make statements quite easily which a "good faith actor" can't work fast enough to refute. By being genuine, the "good faith actors