Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Leaders at every level have a role in fostering, coaching, and supporting better ways of working throughout an organization.

Creating a psychologically safe workplace requires a lot of conscious effort.

the difference between things going wrong and things going right is not the absence of negatives, it is the presence of positives. Those positives are: •The ability to challenge the status quo; to say stop. •Past success is not taken as an indicator of future success. •There is diversity of opinion. •Conversations about risk and potentially “bad news” are kept alive.

The captain’s job was no longer to tell everyone else what to do; it was to ensure that the intent, the mission, was clear, and then to listen to team members and their thinking process as to how they intended to go about the mission.

Servant leaders, says Greenleaf, listen and exhibit empathy. They acknowledge other people’s perspectives, give people support to be able to meet their goals, involve them in decisions, and build a sense of community.

Engineers were overruled by managers, seniority was a blocker to both psychological and ultimately physical safety, schedule pressure took precedence, and past success was incorrectly viewed as an indicator of future success with tragic consequences.

Time to learning, time to value, time to delighting customers, and the flow itself will have not materially changed. This was a lesson learned in manufacturing a long time ago: improving the performance of a non-bottleneck will only stack up more inventory at the bottleneck itself. It won’t improve the end-to-end flow of value.