Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

The why has to be about more than higher profitability, shareholder returns, or stock price. It can’t only be about the company’s short-term financial returns. When employees are asked what motivates them most in their work, their answers are split equally between five forms of impact: •Society: They want their work to have a positive effect on soc

Mandating specific practices on people and teams is an antipattern. As Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist of ThoughtWorks and Agile Manifesto signatory, put it in 2006: Imposing a process on a team is completely opposed to the principles of agile, and has been since its inception. A team should choose its own process—one that suits the people and conte

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. The behavior of a complex adaptive system is emergent. It is not predicted by the behavior of its parts, which, for large companies, are networks of complex adaptive systems themselves. Organizations are adaptive because behavior mutates in response to change events. They look to increase what they percei

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

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

If a pathological or bureaucratic culture is prevalent (see Table 3.1); if the organization or business area is not receptive to upheaval; if there have been failed capital “T” Transformation attempts; if there is little psychological safety; if there is fear; if there are strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo; or if the locus of co

In my experience, the application of Agile frameworks usually leads to a revolutionary approach. Most frameworks are largely prescriptive and are explicitly described as immutable. When all you have is a hammer, every context will be treated like a nail. And when you’ve paid a lot of money for a gold-plated hammer, when you’ve trained a lot of peop

The pattern here is to craft a why for change, that people will buy and that is unique to your organization. And then repeat that why. Communicate this why three more times than you think you need to and you’re a third of the way done. A tip here is that when training for any way of working, whether that training is run internally or externally, ha