Patterns, anti-patterns — The opportunities and challenges of being a great business.
“Advocating for sooner, safer, happier value delivery. In that, dedicated to enabling better organisational outcomes and a more humane world of work with the four core values of empathy, credibility, uniqueness and community.”
It’s great when you arrive upon something you’ve been looking for a long time but didn’t know what it was until you saw it in front of you.
This happened to me in 2018 when I attended the London DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) and heard Jonathan Smart’s & Morag McCall’s talk, ‘The PMO is Dead. Long Live the PMO’ [1].
Jonathan and Morag were hitting on a key realisation I was having at the time: Namely, “It isn’t about Agile for the sake of Agile, or DevOps for the sake of DevOps. It’s about what business outcomes are you going to achieve? One of which is survival.”
At the time I was working as a business agility thought leader and practice coach with IBM. The company had started its Agile journey in 2015 initiated by the then CEO, Ginni Rometty [2]. It was at the time now struggling in some key areas of change adoption and scale. Soon after the the DOES talk in early 2020 the book ‘Sooner, Safer, Happier — Anti-Patterns and Patterns for Business Agility’ [3] came out. I immediately read it and was genuinely really impressed by it. Of all the books I’d read and my years experience of agility, transformation and change at individual to organisational levels, this book in particular stood out for its honesty, wisdom and pragmatism. Many of its examples and case-studies were identifying the kinds of anti-patterns of behaviour I was seeing at the time at IBM. Crucially the book provided insights and pragmatic ways forward to better outcomes.
I contacted Jonathan and shared my appreciation for the book and his work. In our early conversations we established a connection based on a shared vision of better organisational outcomes and a more humane world of work for the people involved. A vision with a commitment to both the operational and cultural elements of a business —
“Deliver better value, sooner, safer and happier through the correct application of agile, lean and DevOps principles and practices organisation wide.”
Back at IBM I started to integrate the Sooner, Safer, Happier patterns into practice. Quickly we began to see the impact, particularly within the layers of middle and upper management that had been struggling with the adoption of agility. Leaders were now seeing the blindspots of dysfunction in their own organisational operations and culture — and most importantly the unintentional anti-patterns of behaviour. Targeting these anti-patterns and their costs, leaders and teams could replace them with new patterns of behaviour that were having a direct impact on the operations and culture of their business areas. Greater outcomes of value were being created. Many copies of the book were purchased at IBM during this time!
Escaping the Language Trap
A lot of what I learned from this experience relates to language. For better or worse, language matters. Misunderstood slogans and terminology lead to anti-patterns of behaviour. Words when overused or misused lose their meaning, and their well intentioned impact. We start to ignore or even resent these ‘tired’ words, twisting their original meaning and then blaming them as the cause of our problems. “Doing an Agile Transformation” comes to mind!
This is mistaken. We must pay attention and be critical of this tendency. Specifically we must separate the wheat from the chaff and see the words again for their originally intended meaning. Below I’ve attempted to do this for a handful of terms through the lens of beneficial patterns of behaviour over the anti-patterns that led to the misunderstanding and misuse of the terms originally —
Transformation
An internal, lasting change at the level of the individual based on new insight, understanding and realisation towards an intended direction. Collective, individual transformation of its people leads to transformation of the organisation.
From Anti-Patterns of:
. Doing An Agile Transformation
. The Bigger the Capital ’T’ Transformation, the Bigger the Change Curve
. Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working
. One Size Fits All
. Going Faster Leads to Going Slower
—> To Patterns of:
. Start with Why
. Empower the How
. Achieve Big Through Small
. Not One Size Fits All
. Smart People and Smart Teams with Robot Friends
Agility
The inherent responsiveness of individuals and teams who are open to change towards an agreed upon, aligned and measurable set of valued outcomes.
From Anti-Patterns of:
. Scaling Agile before Descaling the Work
. Grass Roots hits a Glass Ceiling
. Lack of Safety within Safety
. Role-Based Safety Silos
. Fixed Mindset to Risk
. Agile Hallow Shell
. Applying a Deterministic Approach to an Emergent Domain
—> to Patterns of:
. Descale before you Scale
. Scale Agility, not Agile
. Go Slower to Go Faster
. Measure for Learning
. Be Comfortable with Uncertainty
Operations
The capability of the organisation and the effort required of it to produce value and deliver it.
From Anti-Patterns of:
. Local Optimisation
. Milestone-Driven Predicted Solutions
. Deterministic Mindset
. Start Starting
. Headless Chickens
. Tools over People
. Misalignment of Teams and Architecture
. Outputs over Outcomes
—> To Patterns of:
. Focus on Outcomes
. Stop Starting and Start Finishing
. Architect, Organise and Optimise for Fast End-to-End Flow
. Outcome Hypothesis
. Intelligent Flow & Control
Culture
How we see and relate to others, specifically in how aware and accountable we are for the impact we have on others in doing the operations part of our business. Organisations aspiring to be ‘better value, sooner, safer, happier’, it’s not enough to just do the operations of value production and delivery. As people within an organisation, we must take into account too the impact of our work on others in how it affects them in being able to do their work successfully or not. This I define as the culture of the organisation. Both culture along with functional operations are essential to creating a successful business of better value, sooner, safer, happier.
From Anti-Patterns of:
Inflict over Invite
Psychologically Unsafe
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Information and Learning Silos
Weaponised Metrics
Bubble Effect
—> To Patterns of:
Invite over Inflict
Leaders go First
Psychological Safety
Emergent Mindset with Servant Leadership
Continual Technical Excellence
Optimise for Learning, nested with Built-in Feedback
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!
Advocate
Since the release of the book, Jonathan along with Myles Ogilvie co-founded the Sooner Safer Happier organisation. This is a global consultancy providing training and coaching services, building a community movement that as an advocate I am proud to be a part of in enabling organisations to achieve better outcomes for all and a more humane world of work. It’s not about software development or necessarily the computer industry. This is about applying agility across an entire organisation. It is about putting you at the front of change and ahead of the competition.
Sooner, Safer, Happier Patterns for Business Agility
The conscious behavioural application of operational and cultural practices, organisation-wide resulting in better value and a more humane workplace.
If you’d like to understand how Sooner, Safer, Happier can help you, your business operations and culture or to learn more about the work we do and how we can help you, see here: https://soonersaferhappier.com/
[1] ‘The PMO is Dead, Long Live the PMO’ - Jon Smart, Barclays
— IT Revolution / DevOps Summit 2018
https://youtu.be/R-fol1vkPlM
[2] Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity
— Lex Fridmen Podcast 362, 2nd March 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiCxj-bXu5M
[3] ‘Sooner, Safer, Happier - Anti-patterns and Patterns for Business Agility’, IT Revolution 2020.
Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie and Simon Rohrer
