Sooner Safer Happier Quotes

This is what happens when you take a “big through small” approach. There are still dips, but they are shallower and shorter lived. Failing is learning; there will inevitably be setbacks. New skiers fall over. New musicians hit the wrong note and new language learners struggle to find the right word. A willingness to fail fast and often results in learning sooner. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. There is learning.

minimal viable compliance (#MVC)

Some knowledge can only be shared by socialization, through the kind of shared learning experiences found in brainstorming sessions, pairing, face-to-face interactions, and a bias to action. Learning by doing, like a blacksmith training an apprentice.

In a leader-nurturing culture, people can build psychological safety, the single most important ingredient of a high-performing team.

In 2009, Apple’s why was: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently.” Today the why is: “Apple’s employees are dedicated to making the best products on Earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.

deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

Rather than the domain of work being repetitive, knowable, and deterministic with known-unknowns (you know how to fix it if something goes wrong), unique product development is unknowable and emergent with unknown-unknowns instead. For something that has not been done before, you don’t know what you don’t know until you do something and get feedback.

There are bubbles of agile in a sea of Gantt charts with predetermined solutions, dates, and spending predicted at the point of knowing the least, an annual, bottom-up financial planning process that takes six months of the year to plan and re-plan and focuses on output over outcomes. There are “drop dead dates” and “deadlines” (in most cases it’s not life or death); RAG (red, amber, green) statuses and change control processes; a change lifecycle with twenty mandatory artifacts, most with their own stage-gate governance committee; a traditional waterfall Project Management Office; sixty-page Steering Committee decks; project plans with the word “sprint” ten times in the middle; a lack of psychological safety; a performance appraisal model that incentivizes mediocrity (underpromise to overdeliver) and uses a Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow approach. The good news, with a charitable intent, is that the organization wants to improve.