Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

Sandboxes, blameless postmortems, and other safe-to-fail learning tactics mitigate the big risks organizations face. They allow teams to learn and to respond to changing conditions. They do this by encouraging small amounts of risk. It’s a trade-off that many organizations find difficult to accept. Instead, many organizations push toward increased process control in order to mitigate all risks. This approach mixes up different kinds of risk. It sees small operational risks and seeks to control them absolutely, while remaining blind to the big existential risks. When you increase operational process control, you decrease the freedom your teams experience. As your teams believe they have less freedom to deviate from “standard” processes, they will become less curious and seek increasingly safer solutions. It means they are likely to stay the same, even as markets shift, technology improves, and new paradigms emerge that challenge your position.