Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

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

Software development teams can improve all they like, but if the time from customer need identified to need met hasn’t changed because of bottlenecks in the flow, any local optimization of agility in IT will make little or no difference in the end-to-end time to value.

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

The human employees on the factory floor do work that is specialized and in harmony with the machines. Toyota calls this “autonomation” or jidoka in Japanese, which can be roughly translated as automation with a human touch.

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

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

The idea of servant leadership was proposed by Robert Greenleaf in a 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader.” Greenleaf distinguished between leaders who are motivated by leadership and leaders who see their role as helping others to achieve their potential. The best test of leadership, he argued, is whether those served grow as persons, whether they b

To recap, in order to optimize for the fast flow of safe value end-to-end, have multidisciplinary long-lived teams on long-lived products on long-lived value streams.

Optimizing for the fast flow of safe value is critical. The most important factors for investing in product development according to Douglas Hubbard, author of How to Measure Anything, is first whether a product or feature will be used at all and second how quickly it will be used.11 These are more important factors than all other data including co