Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Project management and Gantt charts come from two technological revolutions ago, optimized for the primary context at the time,

Great, now I don’t feel guilty for not finding them at all useful.

There is no such thing as “best practice”; there is no one-size-fits-all set of practices that optimizes for all contexts.

Ideally, that learning anxiety should be lowered by creating a psychologically safe environment in which to learn, with support and coaching, rather than by increasing survival anxiety, which is what most organizations intentionally or unintentionally do.

Recognizing that all teams and colleagues are at different stages of their own journey, the WoW CoE doesn’t seek a “one size fits all” design for agility—forming long-lived Enablement Team partnerships with teams to test, learn, and adapt while sharing emerging patterns of success across the wider organization.

That is what a big-bang transformation does. It front-loads the biggest challenges. It piles them all into the toughest stage and spreads them across the largest number of people at the same time.