Prioritizing Safety with Modern Agile

Agile is modernizing. Modern Agile has no roles, responsibilities, or practices. While Modern Agile doesn’t tell you what to create, it does state that your purpose is to Make Partners Awesome. Making partners awesome isn’t possible if people are not safe. Safety is a basic human need. Safety is the key to unlocking high performance. Fear is dense on too many teams. People are afraid to make changes, afraid to voice their opinions, and fearful of making mistakes. The trouble is fear kills performance. If you have a culture of fear, you will need more fancy processes or practices to help you. Blaming increases negativity and helps no one. Make Safety a Prerequisite means establishing safety before engaging in hazardous work. If security isn’t improved after each accident or near-miss, excellence will be elusive.

People aren’t afraid of failure. They’re afraid of blame. — Seth Godin

If you don’t deliver, you delay learning about what delights customers. Showing value does not mean releasing a product or feature to the general public. Anything valuable that hasn’t been given isn’t helping anyone. In Modern Agile, we ask ourselves, “How might we deliver the right outcomes faster?” Doing this requires discovering smaller increments that may be deployed now rather than later.

Providing value enables us to experiment and learn. Delivering value helps make customers happy and safe (for example, by releasing a bug fix). Such safety comes when you can roll back or roll forward deployments or releases. “What are our biggest threats to safety?” “Are people afraid at work?” “Do we have a clear vision of how to make partners awesome?” “What experiments can we try today?” “Are our experiments safe to fail?”.

Young people think Agile is for old people. Product thinks Agile is about story points and velocity, not end-user needs. Programmers who once liked Agile have abandoned it for Software Craftsmanship. Designers prefer Design Thinking. It’s time to send our essential but now antiquated processes and practices into retirement. It’s time to return Agile to a lightweight, joyful way of helping people achieve excellent results.

[¹]: Modern Agile • Joshua Kerievsky • YOW! 2017

[²]: Modern Agile