Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

For something that has not been done before, you don’t know what you don’t know until you do something and get feedback.

Project management and Gantt charts come from two technological revolutions ago, optimized for the primary context at the time, which was repetitive, knowable, deterministic, and generally physical activity.

Where work is emergent there is no such thing as best practice. There is no one size fits all. Your context is unique.

Better is quality. Quality is built in rather than inspected in later. With smaller slices of value and multidisciplinary teams, changes are within a team’s cognitive load (that is, complexity that fits in your head) and there is a limited “impact radius.” There are fewer incidents and outages. There is less rework, less failure demand. More time is spent proactively rather than reactively.

Value is unique; it’s why you are doing what you are doing. It is of value to someone. It could be financial; it could be maintaining public safety; it could be charitable.

Sooner is time to market, time to learning, to pivoting, to de-risking, to avoiding a "sunk cost fallacy," to locking in ...

Safer is Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), information security, data privacy, regulatory compliance and resilience in chaos, be that a cyber-attack or a global pandemic. It is customers trusting your organization. It is agile rather than fragile. It is speed and control, not one or the other. It is cultural, k...

Happier covers customers, colleagues, citizens, and climate, as it is not about “more for less” at any human or climatic cost. It is high levels of customer advocacy and colleague engagement with a positive impact to society and ...

An antipattern is a common response to a situation that, more often than not, is ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive.

A pattern is a response to a situation that, more often than not, is effective and improves desired outcomes, of course with ups and downs, backs and forths, and swings and roundabouts, as it’s all about people.

“Practices = Principles + Context.”

As Barry O’Reilly, author of Unlearn, has subsequently put it, “Think Big, Start Small, Learn Fast.”

They determine safe-to-learn experiments to test the outcome hypothesis (probe), measure results (sense), and react accordingly (respond).

Software benefits from both an agile and lean approach. The software binary is agile-created and the path to production is lean, as the build, test, deploy process should run repetitively and with a high degree of automation many times a day. Periodically there will be step-change agile experimentation in the path to production and then back into lean again. Software is an agile-created box on a lean conveyor belt.

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.

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.

Throughput is a count of items of value delivered into the hands of a customer in a given time period.

ANTIPATTERN 1.1 Doing an Agile Transformation

ANTIPATTERN 1.2 Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working

PATTERN 1.1: Focus on Outcomes

PATTERN 1.2: Start with Why; Empower the How

Focus on Outcomes Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

Whole Organization Agility Agile in IT only is a local optimization. Everything is in scope.

ANTIPATTERN 2.1 The Bigger the Capital “T” Transformation, the Bigger the Change Curve

An Innovator will experience a much shallower and shorter Kübler-Ross Curve. A Laggard will have a deeper and longer curve (with some people wanting to sabotage change, which is why it’s a good idea to start with the Innovators). Nor do people always move forward. It’s not unusual to fall back to a previous stage, and each stage can last for a different period of time. Equally, it will be a case of cycling through all the stages repeatedly as more people come on the journey and as new people join an organization. Each time the before and after points are higher than they were previously.

The bigger the change, the deeper and longer the dive into chaos. In my experience, if done as a big bang across the whole firm, the time for collective learning anxiety, the time for unlearning, the time for behaviors and processes to become fit for purpose, the time for morale to fall through depression and return to the place where it started before the change process began—and before it rises through the stage of acceptance—is several years depending on the size and culture of the organization. This assumes that the organization does climb out of the hole.

ANTIPATTERN 2.2 Scaling Agile Before Descaling the Work

ANTIPATTERN 2.3 Grass Roots Hits a Grass Ceiling

PATTERN 2.1 Achieve Big through Small

Adopt the “Rule of One”: 1 experiment 1 customer or team 1 location in production

small, central servant-leader Ways of Working Center of Enablement (WoW CoE) team. The Wow CoE should be complemented with a small WoW CoE per business unit, in a federated and fractal manner. Each WoW CoE supports the S-curve per business unit or top-level value stream, bubbling up any systemic impediments.

PATTERN 2.2 Descale Before You Scale

In order to increase agility, in order to optimize for the fast flow of safe value, work and the system of work needs to be descaled. Scaling agility is descaling.

As the organization scales agility by descaling the work and the system of work, it is important to ensure that teams with high autonomy also have high alignment. That is, the work is aligned to strategic outcome hypotheses and the decoupled teams are rowing in the same direction.

PATTERN 2.3 Scale Agility, Not Agile, Vertically Then Sideways

when starting small, it’s best to work first with a vertical slice of an organization. That first group should have representatives from every level of the company, including—even especially—the Executive Committee. That is, a multidisciplinary team with leaders at all levels, a connected stripe including senior leaders, the pressurized middle, and team level. Everyone learns together, and no one is left behind.

Rother recommends using two processes, or “kata,” the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata, which are a way of practicing scientific thinking, avoiding jumping to conclusions with our many cognitive biases.

ANTIPATTERN 3.1 One Size Fits All

1: Your “Scaling” Context Is Unique: There Is No One Way

2: Your Cultural Context Is Unique: There Is No One Way

There are a number of possible sources to look to for this, including the Laloux Culture Model, the Schneider Culture Model, or the Westrum typology of organizational culture.

Table 3.1: Westrum’s Three Cultural Types2 Pathological Bureaucratic Generative Power oriented Rule oriented Performance oriented Low cooperation Modest cooperation High cooperation Messengers shot Messengers neglected Messengers trained Responsibilities shirked Narrow responsibilities Risks are shared Bridging discouraged Bridging tolerated Bridging encouraged Failure scapegoating Failure justice Failure inquiry Novelty crushed Novelty problems Novelty implemented

3: Revolution vs. Evolution: There Is No One Way

ANTIPATTERN 3.2 Inflict over Invite

PATTERN 3.1 Not One Size Fits All

1: You Have a Unique VOICE: Use It