This post is an excerpt from Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach does not optimize outcomes for the infinite unique contexts in organized human endeavor. Instead, find your unique VOICE and use it. You Have a Unique VOICE: Use It The alternative to imposing one set of prescriptive practices across an organization without considering the many unique … [Read more...]
Better Ways of Working at Nationwide Building Society
Nationwide Building Society is the world’s largest building society, with 16 million members. In 2020, Patrick Eltridge, Chief Operating Officer, and Janet Chapman, Mission Leader, discussed their continued journey to better ways of working at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London-Virtual. As a larger, older organization, Nationwide faces a number of challenges. As Patrick Eltridge puts it, they are part of a “hyper fluid and hyper competitive environment.” Like many organizations, they started … [Read more...]
Lack of Psychological Safety at Boeing
This post is an excerpt from the book Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, with Myles Ogilvie, Zsolt Berend, and Simon Rohrer. 787 Dreamliner Factory, North Charleston, South Carolina Cynthia Kitchens was a quality manager at the Boeing North Charleston factory, which makes the 787 Dreamliner. According to an investigation by the New York Times in 2019, Kitchens said that her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on … [Read more...]
Bonus Interview with Jonathan Smart on Sooner Safer Happier
Gene: You use the Cynefin model to frame a picture of everything from known knowns to unknown unknowns. What about this model is essential to the necessary mindset shift and business success in the digital age? Jon: I find Cynefin, a sense-making model, to be a great frame of reference for optimizing the approach to the work, to the domain of the work. Cynefin articulates five domains. Within the Clear domain, there are known-knowns. There is best practice.The relationship between cause and … [Read more...]
Leading through Better Value Sooner Safer Happier
Gene Kim Interviews Jonathan Smart, author of Sooner Safer Happier (Part 1) Gene Kim: Why Better Value Sooner Safer Happier? What about those five words is so revolutionary. Jonathan Smart: The world of work has fundamentally changed. We are living through a tipping point in the latest of a succession of technology-led revolutions, which have a socio-economic impact. We’ve gone from the Age of Oil and Mass Production to the Age of Digital. Like going from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, we … [Read more...]
Choosing a Narrator for Sooner Safer Happier
“Would you narrate the book, Jon?” said Anna, Editorial Director at IT Revolution. “The intonation, the emphasis, is more natural when the author reads their own words,” Anna explained. I was in a dilemma. I wanted to read it for that reason, the subconscious passion that comes across when reading out loud the words you’ve written and have viscerally lived. Likewise narrating the words of the co-authors, where we have shared journeys and learnings together. We discussed how long it would take, … [Read more...]
Pattern 1.2: Start with Why; Empower the How
This post is adapted from Chapter 1 of Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. In Antipattern 1.2: Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working, we saw how a capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation feels to an employee like involuntary, mandatory change being inflicted upon them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are going to change and the capital “T” denotes that they have to change. … [Read more...]
BVSSH Principles
In Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer, each chapter's essence is distilled into guiding principles, to guide behavior and the millions of decisions that we make every day. For example, “Invite over Inflict” and “One Size Does Not Fit All.” They apply across contexts. Specific practices emerge by applying the principles to a unique context and by using coaching and experimentation, … [Read more...]
Antipattern 1.2: Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working
This post is adapted from Chapter 1 of Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. Focusing on “Agile,” “Lean,” or “DevOps” as the end rather than the means to an end is using old ways of thinking to apply new ways of working. A capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation, from the perspective of employees, infers involuntary, mandatory change being done to them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are … [Read more...]
Pattern 1.1: Focus on Outcomes
In our last post, we looked at Antipattern 1.1: Doing an Agile Transformation. Now we'll look at the corresponding pattern: Focus on Outcomes. Focus on the outcomes, on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, as the goal, not on Agile, Lean, or DevOps as the goal in order to achieve true business agility. In his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, sociologist Everett Rogers described how innovation tended to spread first to a small number of Innovators, then reached Early Adopters, was taken up by … [Read more...]
