Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Specific practices emerge by applying the principles to a unique context and by using coaching and experimentation, leveraging many bodies of knowledge. As Dan Terhorst-North has said: “Practices = Principles + Context.”

The successful pattern is to identify the top ten or so principles that you feel are most important to encourage across your organization, communicate them relentlessly, and recognize behaviors in line with them. They are positive behavioral guardrails.

Henry Gantt, the creator of Gantt charts, worked with Taylor in the early 1900s. According to Wallace Clark in The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management (written in 1923), what we call a Gantt chart used to be called the Man Record Chart.

W. Edwards Deming states: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

“Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential.” The focus is on outcomes over output. That is, maximizing outcomes with minimal output, the most value for the least effort. The definition of “productivity” is the number of units of output for each unit of input, which for unique emergent work is not optimal. Instead, the focus should be on “value-tivity,” maximizing outcomes for the least output.

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).

five lean principles:23 Value: specify value from the point of view of the customer. Value Stream: identify the value stream and all the steps in it, from concept to cash. Flow: limit work in progress; stabilize flow; focus on lead time, throughput, and flow efficiency; alleviate impediments to flow. 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. Perfection: the relentless pursuit of perfection.

When considering the optimal approach to the type of work, it’s not about agile or waterfall. It’s about agile (unknowable, unique) and lean (knowable, repetitive). Waterfall is “Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow,” for which, in my opinion, there is no excuse.

Both software systems and human systems lose information over time. Left alone they become less efficient and less maintainable.

we need to be tending to the garden continuously, keeping it “evergreen,” nurturing culture, upgrading the plane while flying, and avoiding behavioral, process, and technical debt, which accumulates with compound interest. Change and continuous improvement should be a sustainable habit, a constant process of experimentation, feedback, learning, and pivoting to optimize for outcomes.

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 outcome hypotheses that the system of work produces

the most confident employees can suffer from imposter syndrome. There is fear that changing a system of work that has brought them to their current position will reveal an inability, a weakness, or a vulnerability.

From an evolutionary perspective, depending on the messaging of the why and depending on how the change is approached, especially for those with a fixed mindset, change drives a fear of survival. That leads to resistance and less rational thought as the primitive brain takes over: Can I change? What if I can’t adapt? Will I still be able to pay the bills?

What will have people delivering better outcomes are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We all want to feel that we control our own lives, that we’re good at what we do, and that what we do matters. These are all intrinsic motivators.

“People don’t buy what you do,” Sinek says, “they buy why you do it.”23 People buy Apple’s why.

Edgar Schein, former professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said: “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.”

If the path ahead is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. —Joseph Campbell

a revolutionary approach in command-and-control cultures and the success of an evolutionary approach. A business area with servant leadership, empowerment, a generative cultural norm, and recognition for learning will be much more open to experimentation. This environment is willing to fail fast and often in order to succeed sooner. A more revolutionary approach may be both feasible and optimal, while still inviting change and starting small.

Imposing a process on a team is completely opposed to the principles of agile, and has been since its inception. A team should choose its own process—one that suits the people and context in which they work. Imposing an agile process from the outside strips the team of the self-determination which is at the heart of agile thinking.4

Edgar Schein has noted: “You cannot understand a system until you try and change it and when you do try to change it, only then will underlying mechanisms maintaining the status quo emerge.”

Shu: Follow the rules (beginner). Ha: Break the rules (intermediate). Ri: Make the rules (expert).

people become conditioned to exhibit learned helplessness, waiting for the next order and obeying it with little sense of agency, control, or ownership. In this culture, “bad news” (learning) is buried until it’s too late, until it is firmly in the jaws of defeat.

There is nothing in the etymology of lead, leader, or leadership to do with order, command, direct, commit, or control.

Commander is a position. It is for a few. A commander orders. Obeying is mandatory. Power is positional. For example, “commander in chief.” Leader is not a position. Anyone can lead. A leader inspires; following is voluntary. Power is given by followers.

“Guiding on a journey,” the origins of the word lead, nicely encapsulates modern leadership.

A commonly observed antipattern is people in senior roles not exhibiting the behaviors that they are asking or expecting from people within their remit.

The lack of role modeling and incongruent behavior is clear to see. One thing is being said and another thing is being done. Actions do not match the words. That is not being a leader. Leaders go on the same journey.

could be a pandemic, an IT system outage, or a cyber attack. In the face of chaos, people come together; they rally around a common shared mission and address it. This is without the usual three-month wait for a seventeen-step gated approval process. The right thing is done to respond to the situation at hand. In a crisis, people generally use their initiative and don’t wait to be given step-by-step orders. The trick is to maintain this without the chaos.

Leadership behavior is a culture amplifier. Behavior change requires incentivization, safety, recognition, and social proof, which requires communication.

Greenleaf distinguished between leaders who are motivated by leadership and leaders who see their role as helping others to achieve their potential. The best test of leadership, he argued, is whether those served grow as persons, whether they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servant leaders.82

Instead of a cycle of work, review, and learn, employees went through cycles of rush, handover, and hide.

Milestones do not exhibit agility. They’re made of stone. They are hard to move, and when moved, they are no longer valid. They’re more like tombstones than measures of progress. People also refer to them as “deadlines” or “drop dead” dates.

Activity should not be mistaken for achievement. The teams become a self-fulfilling prophecy of backlog replenishment.

the business is usually already set up as value streams: it’s usually the org structure of people in Information Technology that is partially or not at all aligned to business value streams. It’s often organized by job role (such as a group of PMs, or BAs, or Dev, or Test).

Data leaks may be software-enabled, but the issues are not software issues; they are commercial imperatives.

there is this inverse correlation between the number of incidents reported, the honesty, the willingness to take on that conversation about what might go wrong, and things actually going wrong. The airlines that report more incidents, have a lower passenger mortality risk.

Organizations reporting the fewest incidents showed the most devastating accidents.

psychological safety is “the underpinning” for organizational learning, and that individuals who experience greater psychological safety are more likely to speak up at work.

A naive reorganization of people from monolithic, role-based, large teams into small, multidisciplinary teams aligned to value streams without attention to how the technical architecture landscape will also evolve will lead to suboptimal improvements at best. At worst, the reorganization adds another layer of coordination and dependency management. The new teams could be working with an application architecture in which features require changes across a number of components and demand coordination with other value streams, slowing lead time and reducing flow efficiency.

As described by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in Team Topologies, “Organization design and software design are two sides of the same coin, and both need to be undertaken by the same informed group of people.”

Rather than tooling first, it should be People Process Tooling in that order.

There are also leading measures of quality, such as static code analysis metrics. Tools such as SonarQube allow high-quality data visualization of at least some aspects of code level design quality.

John Shook, chairman of the Lean Global Network, has argued that you don’t change culture or mindset before behavior; you change behavior first, typically in a small way—“act your way to a new way of thinking,” and the mindset will follow.28 You lead by example—not by mandating a process, but by sharing or suggesting a practice in the context of the people.

every new team formation has to go through Tuckman’s stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing

Watermelon Effect, when a project is green on the outside but red on the inside, occurs when the output is fixed in a context that is unknowable, as it’s not been done before and the environment is changing at a faster pace than yesterday.

Jeff Bezos’s famous quote articulates: “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”