Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Values and Principles: behavioral guardrails that apply across contexts.

Outcomes and Purpose: outcomes such as Better Value Sooner Safer Happier along with a clear articulation of Why that is unique to your organization (as we saw in Chapter 1), with measures for the outcomes and fast feedback loops.

Intent-Based Leadership: empowerment that decentralizes decision-making, strives for high autonomy with high alignment, and fosters an environment that leads to teams building a new muscle memory, the ...

Coaching and Support: to unlearn old habits, learn new ones, achieve mastery, and remove organizational impediments. Coaches draw on many bodies of knowledge and employ the practices that are hypothesized to optimize outcomes in context.

Experimentation: is carried out at all organizational levels with fast feedback, as change is emergent and organizations are complex adaptive systems. We need to minimize the time to learning. Probing, sensing, and responding take place at the team, value stream, business unit, and organizational levels.

An organization’s values and principles are its behavioral guardrails.

organization. The first source is the existing, organization-wide values.

The second source is the Agile Manifesto.

The third source is the values and principles that come with an agile framework being used, whether that’s Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Disciplined Agile, or Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), and so on.

And the fourth source is the intentionally long list of principles in this book! The key point is to come up with values and principles that work for you, in your organizational context, and at your current point, taking inspiration from many sources.

Practices = Principles + Context11

If a leadership team is not willing to role model desired behaviors, it is unrealistic and inauthentic to expect teams to do so.

A success pattern is to start with a small Ways of Working Center of Enablement (WoW CoE) with as broad a scope as possible, ideally across the whole organization. The purpose of the WoW CoE is not to inflict the rollout of one set of prescriptive practices. It’s not to saturate the organization with Scrumor to drop everyone into mandated en masse training, or to run an Agile Imposition. The purpose of the WoW CoE is to orchestrate the continual improvement of the system of work and support everyone in the organization to be able to do that on a daily basis, in order to see a positive trend on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier measures; to achieve big through small; to coach at the enterprise level; to run experiments to alleviate organizational constraints that bubble up; and to provide clear minimal viable guardrails, so that it’s agile, not fragile. The WoW CoE supports teams and plays whack-a-mole on new impediments that pop up, which they will, frequently. It ensures that training in many forms is available on demand, shares learning, collates data on multiple outcome measures, generates insights and feedback loops, and makes sure that desired behavior is recognized and rewarded.

Note that it is a Center of Enablement rather than a Center of Excellence. This is a small, central, servant leadership function, alleviating impediments (servant) and providing enablers (leadership) to improve on the outcomes.

There are different levels of coaching: at the team level, at the level of a self-contained business unit with a handful of value streams, and at the level of a large global organization of organizations with thousands of value streams. There is technical coaching and ways-of-working coaching. There is no one size coach fits all.

Coaches and change agents should strive to be omnists: they must recognize and respect all bodies of knowledge without framework fundamentalism. They must understand that different contexts suit different practices, within the guardrails of the organization’s values and principles. Dan Terhorst-North and Katherine Kirk have called this “SWARMing”—Scaling Without a Religious Methodology.15

Other ways that people have described fast feedback loops and testing hypotheses are W. Edwards Deming’s Plan Do Study Act (PDSA), John Boyd’s Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA), and Eric Ries’s Build, Measure, Learn.

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).

The organization needs to learn the important ability to say “No,” or “Not yet,” or “What do we stop in order to do this?” in order to optimize for BVSSH.

PATTERN 3.2 Invite over Inflict

Provide additional ways in which people closest to the customers and the work can contribute and shape their own destiny, beyond their sphere of control. This can include approaches such as Dan Mezick’s OpenSpaceAgility, Mike Burrow’s Agendashift, a Ways of Working Community of Practice (WoW CoP), and regular reach-outs to colleagues requesting ideas and suggestions with voting, which can be done either virtually or in person and so on.

ANTIPATTERN 4.1 Do as I Say, Not as I Do

A commonly observed antipattern is people in senior roles not exhibiting the behaviors that they are asking or expecting from people within their remit. There is a request for others to change without that change “starting at home.” It is a case of do as I say, not do as I do. 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.

ANTIPATTERN 4.2 Psychologically Unsafe

ANTIPATTERN 4.3 Deterministic Mindset

PATTERN 4.1 Leaders Go First

PATTERN 4.2 Psychological Safety

PATTERN 4.3 Emergent Mindset with Servant Leadership

ANTIPATTERN 5.1 Local Optimization

ANTIPATTERN 5.2 Milestone-Driven Predicted Solutions

ANTIPATTERN 5.3 Headless Chickens

ANTIPATTERN 5.4 Start Starting

PATTERN 5.1 Optimize for Fast End-to-End Flow

The Value Outcome Lead focuses on the what, with an outward view toward the customer, the stakeholders, and the economic, human, and environmental outcomes. Value should not come at any cost to society or the planet.

The Team Outcome Lead focuses on the how for the system of work and people. The Team Outcome Lead supports and facilitates the team to have a positive trend on Better Sooner Safer Happier and hence having a positive impact on Value.

The Architecture Outcome Lead focuses on the how of the technical implementation within the organization’s broader technical architecture and engineering principles and standards. (Credit to Scott Ambler for inspiration on this role in an agile team.9) The behavioral stance in this role should be one of coaching and servant leadership. At the team level, this does not need to be a dedicated role; it can be a hat that someone wears, typically a senior developer in an IT product development context.

PATTERN 5.2 Outcome Hypotheses

Due to <this insight> We believe that <this bet> Will result in <this outcome>. We will know that we’re on the right track when <leading behavioral value measures (such as the number of call center calls or app downloads) and lagging behavioral value measures (such as volume sold, market share, customer NPS or carbon emissions)>: Measure 1: quantified and measurable leading or lagging indicator Measure 2: Measure 3:

PATTERN 5.3 Intelligent Flow

PATTERN 5.4 Stop Starting, Start Finishing

ANTIPATTERN 6.1 Lack of Safety within Safety

ANTIPATTERN 6.2 Role-Based Safety Silos

1: Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) Rule Their Niches . . . and Only Their Niches

2: Hierarchies Control and Limit Organization

3: Template and Process Zombies Eat Brain Work

4: Control Tools Optimize Reporting . . . and Duplicate Actions