Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

The loop begins by clearly calling out Align, to ensure that there is clear alignment to the higher level intent, goal, North Star, mission, or outcome hypothesis. This is the first step of the learning loop—it installs vertical transparency (as we saw it in Pattern 5.3), and it connects the otherwise disconnected bubbles of strategy and delivery teams. Determine your aligned hypothesis that you want to learn about here. Once aligned, it’s time to Sense the context, the customer, terrain, history, behavioral patterns, antipatterns, underlying mental models, values, and one’s own learning so far. It is fundamental to learn and understand the starting point, the unique context. As G.K. Chesterton is attributed as saying, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” Start where you are. Subscribe to learning from others, and sense the outside world to learn new potential patterns of success. Next Respond by designing one or more experiments in order to test the hypothesis. These could be new or they could be the amplification or dampening of previous experiments. Then, run the Experiment and Distill the results to generate insights and metrics. Discuss it with participants in the experiment; run a retrospective or debrief to identify learnings. Finally, Share by publishing the learning and updating doctrines and patterns. This enables others to pick it up when at the Sense step. This final Share step in the loop is essential, and I find it is rarely done.