Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

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

Which brings us to Gantt charts. In Chapter 0, I gave an overview of the Gantt chart. Created by Henry Gantt, who worked with Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s, it was originally called a Man Record Chart. A line represented whether a worker had shoveled enough coal or moved enough crude iron for the day, as determined by the “foreman.” The “shor

People have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn. You cannot force the pace of change in the same way that King Canute could not hold back the tide. Forcing the pace of change will likely lead to real, lasting change either not happening at all (with new labels on the same old behavior) or taking longer and with more risk. Lasting behavioral c

During World War II, America had airbases on a number of Melanesian islands in the South Pacific. Planes would land regularly, dropping off cargo such as medicine, foodstuffs, tents, and weapons that the islanders had never seen before. Once the war ended, the planes stopped coming. The islanders responded by creating what anthropologists called a

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.

Implementing Scrum is revolutionary because the implementation of Scrum requires the creation of new roles (such as Product Owner and Scrum Master), new team structures, new artifacts, new events, and new behaviors. It is unadaptable. The official Scrum Guide states: “Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and rules are immutable and although implementi

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

Which brings us to Gantt charts. In Chapter 0, I gave an overview of the Gantt chart. Created by Henry Gantt, who worked with Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s, it was originally called a Man Record Chart. A line represented whether a worker had shoveled enough coal or moved enough crude iron for the day, as determined by the “foreman.” The “shor

Organizations are complex adaptive systems, and 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 pe