Sooner Safer Happier Quotes

“deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“In a leader-nurturing culture, people can build psychological safety, the single most important ingredient of a high-performing team.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“Some knowledge can only be shared by socialization, through the kind of shared learning experiences found in brainstorming sessions, pairing, face-to-face interactions, and a bias to action. Learning by doing, like a blacksmith training an apprentice.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“In 2009, Apple’s why was: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently.” Today the why is: “Apple’s employees are dedicated to making the best products on Earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“This is what happens when you take a “big through small” approach. There are still dips, but they are shallower and shorter lived. Failing is learning; there will inevitably be setbacks. New skiers fall over. New musicians hit the wrong note and new language learners struggle to find the right word. A willingness to fail fast and often results in learning sooner. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. There is learning.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“minimal viable compliance (#MVC)”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“There are bubbles of agile in a sea of Gantt charts with predetermined solutions, dates, and spending predicted at the point of knowing the least, an annual, bottom-up financial planning process that takes six months of the year to plan and re-plan and focuses on output over outcomes. There are “drop dead dates” and “deadlines” (in most cases it’s not life or death); RAG (red, amber, green) statuses and change control processes; a change lifecycle with twenty mandatory artifacts, most with their own stage-gate governance committee; a traditional waterfall Project Management Office; sixty-page Steering Committee decks; project plans with the word “sprint” ten times in the middle; a lack of psychological safety; a performance appraisal model that incentivizes mediocrity (underpromise to overdeliver) and uses a Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow approach. The good news, with a charitable intent, is that the organization wants to improve.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

“Rather than the domain of work being repetitive, knowable, and deterministic with known-unknowns (you know how to fix it if something goes wrong), unique product development is unknowable and emergent with unknown-unknowns instead. For something that has not been done before, you don’t know what you don’t know until you do something and get feedback.”
― Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility