Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

The organizations that are thriving are the ones that are leveraging information technology and treating software not as a cost center but rather as central to generating new business value.

Take these learnings and optimize for fast learning. Amplify experiments that work and dampen experiments that don’t.

People have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn. You cannot force the pace of change

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. There is no one way of working that suits every context.

is better to invite change rather than inflict

it is necessary to optimize for early and often learning in a real environment with real customers or consumers. This lowers the risk of delivery, generates value earlier, enables pivoting to maximize value, and locks in progress as you go.

Within your organization, what are you optimizing for?

Are you optimizing for everyone using their brains to run safe-to-learn experiments to continuously improve or for following orders?

These organizations, in the context of new product development, had small, empowered, multidisciplinary teams working in small iterations and with a clear North Star outcome.

multidisciplinary teams work together toward a clear outcome aligned to business strategy. They determine safe-to-learn experiments to test the outcome hypothesis (probe), measure results (sense), and react accordingly (respond). Teams are empowered within minimal viable guardrails (for example, compliance, standards, and regulation). Change and changing how you change, based on feedback loops, is essential to optimize outcomes.

I will use the word “nimble” in place of agile in order to sense check. For example, we want to be nimble (i.e., we want to learn fast, continuously improve, and pivot), rather than we want to do Agile (we’re doing standups, counting points, and doing mandated, top-down two-week sprints, but not necessarily improving and still working within a broader deterministic mindset).

The majority of agility is about behavioral norms, culture, rather than processes or tools. It’s people, process, and tools, in that order.

five lean principles:23 1.Value: specify value from the point of view of the customer. 2.Value Stream: identify the value stream and all the steps in it, from concept to cash. 3.Flow: limit work in progress; stabilize flow; focus on lead time, throughput, and flow efficiency; alleviate impediments to flow. 4.Pull: move from a push-based system of work to a pull-based system of work; go at the capacity of the system of work and don’t over-produce. 5.Perfection: the relentless pursuit of perfection.

Agile, Lean, DevOps, and other bodies of knowledge are all a means to an end, not the end itself. They are shared learning in human endeavor,

Flow efficiency is the percentage of time that work is actively being worked on during its elapsed end-to-end lead time, as opposed to waiting to be worked on. It is one of the most important measures, yet it is rare to find an organization that knows its flow efficiency for knowledge work.

• Lead time is time to market, the time from starting work on an item of value to getting it into the hands of a customer. Reducing lead time enables faster feedback, quicker learning, reduced risk, earlier monetization, and the ability to pivot sooner to maximize outcomes.

Together, Better Value Sooner Safer Happier balance each other.

BVSSH contains two sets of outcomes. Better Sooner Safer Happier are the how outcomes. They measure the improvement in the system of work. Value is the what, the business outcome hypotheses that the system of work produces

A tool-led transformation does not equate to agility.

the bigger problem was a lack of psychological safety.7 Bad news was being buried instead of exposed, discussed, and dealt with.

A capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation, from the perspective of employees, infers involuntary, mandatory change being done to them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are going to change. The capital “T” tells them they have to change. Both of these words carry baggage. They suggest extrinsic (push) rather than intrinsic (pull) motivation.

A similar psychological state is “learned helplessness,” where people are frozen while waiting for the next order, due to a lack of psychological safety and a command-and-control culture.

What will have people delivering better outcomes are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In addition to being clear on the desired outcomes and empowering how those outcomes are improved, there is also a need to clearly articulate the unique why.

We dropped targets and agility levels and made improving outcomes a strategic priority, looking at trends over time rather than absolute values.

“People don’t buy what you do,” Sinek says, “they buy why you do it.”

what is Netlify's why?

“Learning only happens when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety. Learning anxiety comes from being afraid to try something new for fear that we will look stupid in the attempt. It can threaten our self-esteem and even our identity.”24 That anxiety is a threshold that has to be overcome in order to be willing to unlearn, relearn, and take action. If learning anxiety is higher than survival anxiety, there will be inaction. 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.

When employees are asked what motivates them most in their work, their answers are split equally between five forms of impact: •Society: They want their work to have a positive effect on society (for example, creating or protecting employment, helping those less fortunate, or improving sustainability for the benefit of our planet). •Customer: They want to positively impact customer satisfaction and create brand advocates. •Company: They want to have an effect on the company and its shareholders, which enables the other four forms of positive impact. •Team: They want to have a positive impact on their colleagues, such as by creating a more engaging and rewarding environment or by helping team members to improve. That’s an effect that people can see around them each day on people they value. •Individual: They want a why that has a positive impact on themselves, on their levels of autonomy, purpose, and mastery, on their growth and personal development.

the preoccupations of leaders shape a unit’s culture. A leader's actions and ability to provide rewards and inflict punishments communicate their preferences,

Cultures that are pathological or bureaucratic have little psychological safety. A command-and-control culture is prevalent and there may even be a culture of fear with learned helplessness.

Evolution and revolution represent two ends of a spectrum for how change is approached. Evolution honors current roles and responsibilities, makes clear the desired outcomes, shines a light on the current system of work, and asks people to pursue continuous improvement with support.

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

Imposing a process on a team is completely opposed to the principles of agile, and has been since its inception.

organization’s values and principles are its behavioral guardrails.

Practices = Principles + Context11

To sense if the experiments are moving you in the right direction, you first need to be able to “see” and measure your current system of work.

You first need to be able to visualize steps in a value stream from left to right. You need to be able to see the amount of work in the system at each step (the work in progress), how the work is flowing (lead time and throughput), and how long the work has been there (wait time and aging).

Having shone a light on the system of work, next stabilize flow. Apply work in progress (WIP) limits at each stage in the value stream.

I’ve observed Scrum-damentalist behavior, where Scrum is the answer in the absence of knowing the question or context.

Humans have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn. Keep change at a low level initially, the start of the S-curve, and invite over inflict.

organizations need behavioral norms where, at a minimum, everyone feels confident enough to speak out, challenge authority, voice concerns, and be listened to when they do.

Anyone can be a leader. A leader is not defined by seniority or role. There are leaders at all levels. Being a leader requires, amongst other attributes, self-awareness, humility, and the ability to listen.

In order to maximize positive outcomes, everyone, especially those in senior roles who have a disproportionate impact on organizational culture, need to (1) be more leader and less commander, (2) foster psychological safety, and (3) leverage the fact that product development and organizational change is emergent, not deterministic. There is a need to be able to challenge the status quo, to be supported, and to be able to run safe-to-learn experiments to improve on balanced outcomes.

In all of these reported cases, there is a lack of psychological safety, people are fearful for their jobs and afraid to speak up. It takes extreme courage to speak up in an environment of fear of retaliation.

In order to optimize for outcomes, organizations need to listen to employees at all levels, creating an environment free of fear and capable of acting on feedback. There should be a focus and incentivization on a balanced set of outcomes (over output), including quality, the flow of work, safety, happiness of colleagues and customers, as well as value. With a positive trend in quality, flow, safety, and employee engagement, such that improvements are sustainable (not through allegedly working eight weeks without a day off52), cost and schedule will come down.

A person no longer sees themselves as responsible for their own actions but as an instrument for carrying out someone else’s wishes. Their role is to obey, to do as they’re told, if the person commanding it is in a position of authority and takes responsibility for the outcomes.

All non-trivial change and product development in organizations is emergent. There is a need to focus on outcome hypotheses and fast feedback in order to maintain optionality and pivot to optimally achieve desired outcomes. Or to realize that the hypothesis was not correct, change the bet mid-race, and move on to the next one, with the cheapest cost of learning.

A culture with a deterministic mindset in the context of product development focuses on the wrong things: on milestones, predetermined detailed plans, velocity, output, and busyness. Often there is a focus on resource utilization, which increases lead time exponentially and slows flow, as we will see in Antipattern 5.3. This mindset often comes with a focus on cost rather than value.

Instead, leaders should guide people on a journey from the front, role modeling desired behaviors, exhibiting vulnerability, and learning in the process. There needs to be psychological safety, the number one determinant of high-performing teams.

“The consciousness of an organization cannot exceed the consciousness of its leader.”