Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi

In my experience, SAFe is a great body of knowledge in the context of many software development teams working on one large software product or solution with a high level of dependencies and coupling, with deterministic quarterly commitments, and a relatively low level of mastery of agility, where synchronized cadences, normalized story points, and

The approach to ways of working pivoted from a deterministic change program to a facilitative enabling team, working at all levels, on a hypothesis-led evolution over time, focused on enabling teams to achieve Better Value Sooner Safer and Happier. Recognizing that all teams and colleagues are at different stages of their own journey, the WoW CoE d

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. The g

Agility needs to emerge in an agile way. Empowerment, experimentation, respect for people, self-determination, learning, everybody bringing their brains to work and continuously improving how they do what they do, are core tenets of an agile and lean mindset. The work itself is emergent and so is improving the system of work for that work.

Outcomes have dates (more on fixed dates later); that said, the focus is not on the activity, it’s on the outcomes, how the leading and lagging value measures (the key results of OKRs) are doing in terms of putting potential value into the hands of customers early and often. It’s about maximizing the value curve, as per Figure 5.8. It’s not a conve

Another scenario often observed is Water-Scrum-Fall, sometimes referred to as “Hybrid Agile.” It consists of a predictive, deterministic-mindset project plan that attempts to predict the future at the point of knowing the least, with the traditional big, up-front planning, analysis, design, and solutioning, then the word “sprint” ten times in the m

Silence is unhealthy. In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson describes how she discovered a correlation between the number of reported errors in hospitals and surveys on hospital team effectiveness. Some teams, she noted, were stronger than others, with higher levels of mutual respect, collaboration, satisfaction, and confidence in their abili

As per the Cynefin framework introduced in Chapter 0, in the “Clear” and “Complicated” quadrants work is predictable and a fixed, standard approach to mitigating risks may be appropriate. However, “Complex” quadrant product development is unique. It has not been done before, either at all or in context, and there are unknown-unknowns. There is a ne