Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Loss Aversion

Forcing change on people and dictating how they have to change creates extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation.

It did not optimize for outcomes, and it is not living the values of agile and lean.

autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

autonomy (you have to do this

thing, you have no choice)

lack of mastery (you’re a beginner again, possibly aft...

of being invited and incentivized to create better outcomes.

“The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.”16

“agentic state,” complying with orders without question, thought, or ownership of the outcome.

initially with smaller, traditional waterfalls and a focus on outcomes with autonomy on the how,

the ability of an organization to improve by itself, not waiting for an order, which is a new “learned self-helpfulness”

Focus on the outcomes, on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, as the goal, not on Agile, Lean, or DevOps as the goal.

avoided imposing a particular agile framework or approach, preferring to empower teams to decide the how for themselves

“Hi, I’m Jon, and I’m here to make you adopt agile; you choose how.”

I’m here to help you deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier if you want to and if you want help.”

end is full autonomy and hence intrinsic motivation. Resistance

new mobile app, producing an internal audit report, processing payments, or onboarding new customers, no one is exempt from choosing to improve, to be the best at being better.

looking at trends over time rather than absolute values.

Start with Why; Empower the How

employee like involuntary, mandatory change being inflicted upon them,

Imposing Agile is not agile, nor is treating it as a deterministic project.

“Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently.”

“Apple’s employees are dedicated to making the best products on

Earth and to leaving the world better tha...

“Learning only happens when survival anxiety

rather than by increasing survival anxiety, which is what most organizations intentionally or unintentionally do.

Customer:

Company:

•Team:

Individual:

The pattern here is to craft a why for change, that people will buy and that is unique to your organization.

Communicate this why three more times than you think you need to and you’re a third of the way done.

have the organization’s unique why at the start of every session.

Improving Ways of Working Is Emergent; Empower the How

the so-called Spotify Model, and declaring that the horse has transformed into a unicorn.

Organizations are adaptive because behavior mutates in response to change events. They look to increase what they perceive to be their survivability. Acting in the space changes the space. Any experiments that take place in a complex adaptive system are not really experiments because you can’t undo them, like adding milk to coffee.

“Visualize, Stabilize, Optimize.”

role-based silos and long lead times to small, multidisciplinary

teams, new job roles

may also be a top-down mandated change to Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and...

Spotify Model. This is often r...

Most frameworks are largely

prescriptive and are explicitly described as immutable.

nail. And when you’ve paid a lot of money for a gold-plated hammer, when you’ve trained a lot of people and are paying renewal fees to use th...

The focus is on doing an immutable framework rather than on improving outcomes.

a framework can explicitly adapt to context.

framework is adaptable if a team can inspect and change its way of working entirely,

Frameworks should be treated as a departure point, not a destination.

Copy everyone. Optimize to context within minimal viable guardrails.