I recently finished reading Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart and his collaborators, and it's not your typical agile transformation book. In fact, one of its central messages is pretty bold: “Do you want to do or are you currently doing an agile, lean, or DevOps transformation? If so, my best advice is: don't. Instead, focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, then you will achieve agility.”
Smart argues that focusing on "doing agile" misses the point entirely. Instead of obsessing over whether you're following agile methodologies correctly, you should focus on delivering better value sooner safer happier (a phrase so often used in the book, it gets shorten to “BVSSH”). It's like the difference between following a cookbook versus understanding the principles of cooking; one makes you good at following recipes, the other makes you a chef.
Where Agile Fails: Feature Factories
Smart points out a common trap many teams fall into when doing agile. As he puts it, "Agile, Lean, and DevOps are not the goal. An organization can score highly on a ‘How Agile Are We?” test […] without producing better business outcomes. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. The wrong thing can be produced more quickly. Teams can become feature factories, a self-fulfilling prophecy of backlog replenishment with a focus on ‘More Output!’ rather than a focus on better outcomes."
Smart takes a deep dive into how organizations often create what he calls "water-scrum-fall," which I found best summarized by this meme:
Smart describes how it usually plays out: "a waterfall project with big up-front planning and big up-front design, the work 'sprint' ten times in the middle of the Gantt chart, the work for each 'sprint' having been pre-planned, and then late learning with big-bang testing and implementation."
All of this adds up to what Smart refers to as a "Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow” approach. It’s the exact opposite of what agile should be. Worse yet, Smart highlights that it can lead to a psychological state of learned helplessness, “where people are frozen while waiting for the next order, due to a lack of psychological safety and a command-and-control culture.” People will not think for themselves, instead they will follow an order “without question, thought, or ownership of the outcome” and wait for the next one. Smart adds, “I’ve come across cases where people are following orders while also wanting the change to fail. They are sabotaging it specifically by following it to the letter in order to prove their point.” They will execute tickets rather than build products. “I've seen this number of times with teams following mandated robotic maneuvers of agile. It did not optimize for outcomes, and it is not the values of agile and lean.”
How To Achieve Agility: Creating a Learning Ecosystem
So what's the solution? The book emphasizes that "culture change is emergent, so the interventions chosen need to be applied uniquely in context. There is no cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach. There is no silver bullet, no snake oil, no Panasia." So instead of focusing on "doing agile," Smart advocates for focusing on outcomes.
Learn Fast
The key is to “Think Big, Start Small, Learn Fast.” It's about creating a culture where teams are empowered to experiment and learn. If there is no feedback loop, either through a lack of metrics or time to reflect on the metrics, you are not learning fast, you’re only shipping fast.
“It’s a mindset shift from a focus on local ‘productivity,’ the number of units of output per unit of input, to end-to-end ‘valuetivity,’ the soonest realization of the most value with the least output.” I will repeat it again because I like the wording so much: “the soonest realization of the most value with the least output.” Building high-performance teams isn’t about maximizing output, it’s about maximizing value while minimizing output.
“Producing the wrong thing faster isn’t going to improve outcomes if there no recognition that it’s the wrong thing. This is the pivot from a deterministic mindset to an emergent mindset, from project to product, from output to outcomes.”
Form Testable Hypotheses
The book introduces a better way to think about work as outcome hypotheses. “Articulating unique product development work as outcome hypotheses creates a clear expectation that it is a hypothesis and may be invalid, and that there are unknown-unknowns that will only be uncovered when the work takes place. It also creates clear expectation that experimentation is required, with people empowered to use their own brains to discover how to best achieve the outcome or even if the outcome hypothesis is worth continuing trying to achieve.”
Here’s how Smart recommends a hypothesis should look:
Due to <insight>
We believe that <bet>
Will result in <outcome>
We will know we’re on the right track when:
Measure 1: <quantified and measurable leading or lagging indicator>
Measure 2: <quantified and measurable leading or lagging indicator>
etc
“Importantly, to reiterate, this is a hypothesis, and the value is articulated with the leading and lagging measures that are relevant to customer behavior, citizens, and/or the climate so that it’s not at any cost to society or the planet. The business outcome measures not the completion of testing or the implementation of an IT system, which is a means to an end. They are the definition of business value.”
Do less
One useful analogy from the book warns against starting too much work simultaneously: "Starting more will further slow everything down, like adding more cars to the road on the Friday evening of a holiday weekend. It hides the impediments to flow; it hides the rocks under the high tide of concurrent initiatives and waiting work. It builds up queues and reduces flow efficiency. Instead of ‘start starting,’ stop starting and start finishing."
The book resonated with me because it’s not about following a methodology, it’s about creating an environment of growth, autonomy, ownership, and psychological safety where we can deliver business value without compromising the well-being of the team.