I find this so important that, for me, it’s not a Modern Agile principle anymore, it’s one of my core values now. Professional and personal success is not a pie. The success of other people doesn’t remove anything from the rest of us. Quite the contrary, it actually inspires a lot of people. So I just decided that whatever I can do to help people succeed is good for everyone.  

To ensure people’s success on the workplace though, there is another concept that is absolutely primordial. In this article, I would like to explore my second favorite Modern Agile guiding principle: Make Safety a Prerequisite.

What do you mean by safety?

I mean psychological safety.

Modern Agile, which was brought to life by Joshua Kerievsky, gives us a pretty general idea of what safety means :

Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. And we endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.

All of this, however, sounds like a given to me. I really like to go much further than this. You see, in today’s job market, people have the reflex to put on their “professional mask” when going to work. By professional mask, I mean that they feel compelled to show an image of themselves that provides multiple appearances :

• The appearance of being in control
• The appearance of knowing what they’re doing
• The appearance of not making mistakes
• The appearance of optimal performance

The reason people wear a mask is due to their perception that control, knowledge, perfection, and performance is expected of them at any given time. You’re paid a good salary, so we expect that you should be in control, know what you’re doing, make no mistakes and always be performing. Right?

Wrong.

Wrong because if we wanted this, it would be safer to go with robots or softwares. These things can’t be expected of humans at all times, it’s just not possible, and probably not even desirable.

People shouldn’t be afraid to fail

A safe work environment is an environment where people can grow and learn. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but learning is not possible if you can’t make mistakes. Actually, failing isn’t the opposite of success, it is a huge part of it. People who succeeded are probably people who made more mistakes than others.

One very good example is the story of Thomas Edison. As an inventor, Edison made thousands of attempts at creating an efficient light bulb. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail so often, he reportedly answered this :

Whether the story behind this quote is true or not, you get the idea… And Edison was lucky enough to know what he was trying to achieve. Now, let me list a few things that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t make mistakes :

• Penicillin
• The pacemaker
• X-Rays
• Microwave ovens
• Fireworks
• Ink Jet Printers
• Post-it notes

All of these things were discovered very randomly by people who were trying to do something else. What kind of world would we be living in if mistakes were prohibited? Failure is an incredible opportunity to learn and discover. I’m not the only one to say it. This little fella was able to encapsulate this whole concept on the silver screen, recently :

As managers and colleagues, it is our duty to create an environment where failure is not something to be frown upon.

People are mostly afraid to be blamed

I think this is one of the root causes as to why some people are so afraid of making mistakes. Since pretty much forever, failure in the workplace has been seen as something terrible because people are often blamed for their mistakes.

I always ask “What do you optimize your system for?”

When people are blamed for their mistakes, it is negative reinforcement. It’s the infamous stick that sometimes comes with the carrot. The system is optimized for not making mistakes.

When people are encouraged to learn from their mistakes, it is positive reinforcement. The system is optimized for learning from a situation.

“But some mistakes cost thousands of dollars!” you might say. Fair enough. Are you telling me no one learned anything from the mistake? See it as an investment. Spontaneous training session. Unfortunately, you can’t have tax credits for this kind of training though!

So, how do I make my work environment safe?

There are many ways to achieve this. I don’t know all of them. But I know one thing: if it’s gotta be a safe environment, it’s gotta be safe for everyone, starting with management.

Managers must lead by example

If managers and executives are “always right” and if they “can do no wrong”, the system is optimized to avoid making mistakes. Management mostly set the standard in behavior.

If all managers stay late at work, not a lot of people will be comfortable leaving earlier. If your managers never take vacations, people will feel bad for asking for vacations. So if no manager ever says “I don’t know”, “I need help” and “I screwed up”, you can imagine people will probably try to hide their mistakes.

If managers can’t admit to being wrong or having to improve on something, people will not openly provide constructive feedback. It will actually sound like something very bad. If managers are known for admitting they can improve, people will feel like constructive feedback is something positive.

By admitting our own vulnerabilities, we set a standard in the workplace. We communicate the idea that not being perfect is absolutely fine.

Reward this kind of transparency

If someone admits to having made a mistake, make sure to focus on the lesson that was learned. It should be welcomed, shared and celebrated. Be mindful of not putting people on the spot too much at first. Thank them in person. When you feel people are ready for this and that the culture of safety is strong enough, you can even thank them publicly. What they learned will be useful to others.

A practical action to improve safety at work

In my work unit, we were wondering how to improve the safety of our immediate work environment. There was this idea that I’ve been carrying with me for a few years and that I never brought to reality. A colleague and I decided to make it happen.

We called it “The Wall of Enlightenment”

It could have been called the “Wall of Failure” but we didn’t want it to sound so pejorative to those alien to the concept of psychological safety.

The idea is simply to create a place where people can share their mishaps, and what they learned from them. It’s a very simple arts and craft project, with one very simple rule.

We started in February. In our weekly announcement session, we explained the concept. Managers had already started filling the first column with their own mishaps. I also explained that I went to see the CEO and made him commit to thanking each and every person who would share their adventures on the Wall of Enlightenment.

After the first month, though, only managers had posted their mishaps. I was a little disappointed, but I kept going. A few days into March, there were 2 new mishaps on the wall, and they were put there by people from the staff. I knew then that at least 2 people out of 23 feel safe in our environment. It’s a wonderful start.

So far, I’m ahead with 4 mishaps shared on this wall, some very embarrassing ones. Instead than being ashamed and hiding those mistakes, I feel safe to have a good laugh with my colleagues and discuss freely how majestic some of my failures were. My colleagues will remember and will probably avoid repeating my own mistakes in the future.

The most interesting thing is how people who visit our office are amazed by this very simple concept. Which reminds me how far we are from fixing the job market. But hey, one has to start somewhere…

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

Still, we see many of our corporate clients dismiss the idea of creating a safe culture, lest their employees would have free reign and would avoid accountability for their actions. Employers would lose control! Chaos and pandemonium would ensue!

The problem is that safety is often confused with immunity or absolution. In an unsafe environment, where failure leads to witch hunts and retributions, it can be easy to make that jump.

In this post I will go into what safety is and how it differs from immunity and absolution. The idea of safety is not … ahem… “a hippy concept not fit for a real business”. It is, in fact, a powerful tool that can be leveraged to spur innovation, excellence, engagement and ownership.

To create a good work culture, safety is not an option. That’s why Joshua Kerievsky lists make safety as a prerequisite as one of Modern Agile’s guiding principles. That’s also why Jurgen Appelo makes it a central argument in his books Management 3.0 and Managing for Happiness, and why writers such as Daniel Pink, Dave Grey, Frederic Laloux, Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan spend a large portion of their arguments on it. And yet, not one of them argue for a culture of immunity to consequences or absolution.

A culture of safety

Let’s start by defining what is a culture of safety.

In a nutshell, a culture of safety is a culture where members of the team do not have to hide for fear of retribution because of who they are, what they think or what they do.

In a safe culture you will see people readily admitting to failures or mistakes. As a result, remedy to problems happens much faster and are much more efficient since no ones tries to save himself. Education about those issues can be shared across the company, raising awareness and reducing the risk that the same mistake will happen again.

In a safe culture, people will speak their mind and ideas will be debated, leading to better solutions. “Sparks must fly”, says James M. Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, in his book The Open Organization. A bit of friction while debating ideas is a good sign that people care about the subject and want the best outcome. But stay vigilant that those debates do not degenerate in spiralling arguments. Still, an occasional spiralling argument is much better than no argument at all.

In a safe organization, people feel safe to be transparent about their strengths and weaknesses, making it easier to get help working on weaknesses and raising one’s overall usefulness to the organization.

As desirable as safety might be, no organization will reach that state naturally. It requires the right conditions, time and a concerted effort. The very first step is actually the hardest one to take: get rid of the blame.

Stop the blame

When something goes wrong, it is important to react to it. React. Note that I haven’t said either how to react nor who should react. What is important is that there is a reaction to something going badly.

In a blaming culture, the first reaction is either finding out who is to blame or making sure someone else will be blamed. Neither reaction addresses the problem, nor do they lower the chances of the failure happening again. The goal in this scenario is for individuals to protect themselves.

In a blameless culture, there is little need to react with self-preservation. The reactions tend to be swifter, as no one is trying to cover their tracks. The reaction is first focused on fixing the issue, then making sure it does not happen again.

Etsy has such blameless culture, where it is common for employees to receive a communication along the lines of “I messed up. Here’s what happened. Here’s how we reacted. Here’s what to watch out for”. They even have a good-natured annual three-armed sweater award given to the most surprising failure of the year, awarded in a ceremony and accompanied with the testimonies of the people involved on how they handled it and what has been learned. The goal here is not to humiliate them, but to spread lessons learned and raise awareness.

The only purpose of blame is to bring fear of consequences, from share to loss of employment.. It is no wonder then that in a blame-based environment, many employees opt to never try anything, to do the strict minimum, and often waiting until they get direct orders from a manager so their tracks are covered and they can divert the blame toward the manager when the results end up being unsatisfactory.

React appropriately

There are three types of failures: Smart failures, accidental failures and negligence failures. Each comes with their own type of reactions. These reactions are consequences of sorts, but with the aim of making things better.

Smart failures are, as far as failures go, the type you should aim for. If you are careful with your actions, including your experiments, you should plan to limit the impact of a possible failure, discuss it beforehand with people who might be impacted, act carefully and react swiftly when the worse happens. If you approach experiments in this way, then failure can be turned into a valuable learning experience for the whole organization. Someone who is able to experiment, fail and handle the recovery properly is an asset that should be celebrated. Blaming people for a smart failure would be absolutely counter-productive.

Someone who fails accidentally, through an oversight, a lack or knowledge or sheer bad luck should own it, and act swiftly to help with the recovery. Accidental failures happen all the time and should be seen as part of doing business. When an accidental failure happens, review what happened, derive some action points to help reduce the chances it will happen again, and move on. Again, blaming would not improve anything.

In either case, if you are responsible for the failure, own your mess and be part of the effort to clean it up. If your are not, avoid assigning blame as it does not bring any value except perpetuating an unwillingness to try for fear of failure and blame.

Failures caused by sheer negligence, pig-headedness or straight malevolence should be dealt with seriously. There should be consequences for these kinds of failure, but again they are not about blame. Often, having a talk with the person in a safe space will reveal some issues that can be addressed so this does not happen again. At other times, especially for a repeated offense, the best course of action might be getting rid of the bad apple.

Or not: Some deliberately developmental organizations such as Next Jump have a no fire policy and will salvage you no matter what. Still, we are not arguing for either immunity or absolution: follow-up actions, or consequences, are part of the deal.

Working with self-organized groups makes this system easier to use. Teams share success and failure and even more, they share effort. When an organization wonders how it should react to a situation, the best course of action is to ask the team involved. Disaster recovery, lessons learned and recommendations as well as how to react to the person at the core of the problem can all be dictated by the team.

Safety isn’t just about you

When Joshua Kerievsky developed Anzeneering in 2014 — his approach to a culture of safety — he described this work culture as something your are responsible for upholding rather than something that should be owed to you.

It should be every individual’s responsibility to ensure that coworkers are safe from a bad environment, that your organization is safe from your actions, that users are safe to use the work you produce, and so on. Nothing about that mindset is about making yousafe, it’s all about making others safe. You become protected too when the mindset spreads across the organization.

That is an amazing approach: look at safety as a gift you freely give to others.

Towards a culture of responsibility and ownership

A culture of safety is not meant to exist by itself. It goes hand in hand with a culture of responsibility and ownership.

Modern Agile puts make safety as a prerequisite to remove the fear of failure and blame we so often see in organizations. As we’ve seen, fear leads to an understandable lack of desire for ownership and responsibilities. Without this fear, we are better able to reach our potential.

The other three principles of Modern Agile are the key to unlocking that potential.

Deliver value continuously forces us to revise how we approach work. To be able to deliver any kind of work in a continuous fashion, we need to divide it in smaller, independent chunks. That approach is very important. Smaller chunks means that if we fail or miss the mark with a chunk, the damage remains small and the issue can be resolved quickly. By making these chunks independent, we make sure a failure will not spread or contaminate other chunks (ours or somebody else’s), thus limiting the impact of the failure. Small, self-contained chunks drastically reduce overall risks by making each failure insignificant. Without fear, and with insignificant risks, experiment and learn rapidly becomes a very powerful tool. It allows us to figure out solutions empirically, work out kinks to provide better quality and stimulate innovation. New discoveries are far more often the result of failed experimentation than of planned design.

With safety from reprisal and blame, with work habits that reduce the risk and the impact of failure and with constant learning from practical experimentation, we make people awesome by giving the environment they need to be stimulated by what they do, to take ownership of their work and to become the assets everyone, deep inside, wish to be. In turn, they can see it as their responsibility to spread that culture and help newcomers feel safe enough to participate and grow.

The Modern Agile logo is a wheel. I believe that to be very deliberate: each aspect builds into the next one and keeps the whole wheel turning.

Too rosy a picture?

In this blog, we saw what is intended with a culture of safety. Put in place properly, it can propel any organization and its members to new heights.

However, it is possible for the ideals of such a culture to be corrupted. Toxic safety is a very real danger, and one we should watch for. We will explore its forms in my next blog post: When safety turns toxic.

See you then!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

Please keep in mind that I’m not advocating the use of these tools above the ones you might currently be using. I am not disparaging any other tools either. Context is everything, and the right tool to use will depend on that context.

Modern Agile

Agility has been around for a bit over 15 years now. Modern Agile, presented by Industrial Logic’s CEO Joshua Kerievsky, acknowledges what has been done in the field in that time and the lessons that were learned. It moves away from frameworks, roles and artifacts to bring back agility to four principles to act as True North; the direction we should strive to keep.

Make People Awesome: “People” includes customers (yes, YOU have to make THEM awesome), employees, managers, clients. When you aim to make people awesome they will want to work with you or for you, and stay.

Make Safety a Prerequisite: Safety is the foundation on which everything else can be build. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. Without Safety people don’t dare to experiment, take any kind of risk or speak up against problems.

Learn & Experiment Rapidly: This is a combination of Classic Agile’s Continuous Improvement and of Lean Startup’s short experimentation loop. Making it safe to fail is a prerequisite here. Small, controlled experiments will help you learn fast at the cost of very little risk.

Deliver Value Continuously: To make people safe or awesome, value needs to be available for consumption. It is not about scaling up anymore, it is about rethinking how we architecture work so we can scale OUT, and deliver value continuously from everywhere without having to deal with dependences. The faster you deliver and the smaller your deliveries, the smaller the risks taken.

Because they are very high-level, those four principles can be applied to different domains from different industry. The goal of this approach is to foster a better culture and guide agility across the whole organization.

For more about Modern Agile see www.modernagile.org.

VUCA

The world is not only accelerating: it becomes more complex and far less predictable than ever before. That is why Context & Situational Awareness are essential survival skills to have. You need to know where you stand and understand what is happening around you.The changes are constant, so your efforts to understand your context should be constant as well.

VUCA (for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) is a technique developed by the US military to quickly make sense of any given situation. It helps soldiers figure out how much of a situation they might not understand as well as how fast and drastically that situation can change. It is a handy technique to master when everything around you can quite literally blow up in your face.

The VUCA approach has since been adopted in diplomacy and business. A high VUCA world is now seen as the “new normal” and that new reality is well represented in Quantum Monkey’s trainings.

Antifragility

In his book Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that the opposite of fragility is not resilience but antifragility.

In a nutshell, a system that is damaged by stress is fragile. A system that is not bothered too much by stress is resilient. A system that thrives and grows from stress is antifragile. The quest for efficiency and predictability has led us to fragile systems and a lot of self-delusion. We suggest that rather than trying to predict variability, let us make sure we can survive and benefit from the unexpected.

Again, the reflex of so many companies is to scale up, which creates more and more fragility by adding steps and work dependancies. It is trying to solve a tower’s instability by adding more, wider floors on top of the existing ones.

The key steps to resilience are relearning how to organize effort to scale out, removing system dependencies, partitioning work in much smaller independent doses and making sure one group’s problems do not contaminate others. Antifragility goes one step further by adding short learning loops and a strategy for constant, relentless improvements across the board.

Networked Organisms

In The connected company, Dave Gray brings the notion that complex systems should not be seen and designed as machines (efficient but prone to obsolescence and too complex to truly be controlled), but rather as networked organisms or ecosystems, to be grown and guided rather than controlled.

He presents Podularity, an organizational model that uses the notion of platforms to grant more leeway to connected groups and to enable a true form of distributed leadership without compromising the company’s safety

Platforms bring tools, services, expectations and boundaries in one system. Smaller systems (such as teams), called pods, can adopt the platform and are free to self-organize independently within the boundaries set by the platform. This grants a lot of freedom to these pods while controlling the risks. The learning done by any of these pods can improve the platform to the benefit of all. Even the catastrophic failure of a pod will positively improve the platform rather than contaminate other pods.

Not only does this approach help bring antifragility to a large organism (like a whole division or an entire company), but it can also be implemented at a small scale first and spread progressively across the organization.

Triadic Relationships and Networked Leadership

The Triadic Relationships of Tribal Leadership is a great approach to create those networked connections and balance relationships and the spread of information by making relations and conversations three-way rather than two-way affairs. It makes systems more resilient by improving transparency. It also fosters safety and fast learning, two key elements in making people awesome. Awesome people form into awesome groups, or tribes, that have a better attitude and can accomplish a lot more. The role of a leader is to create other leaders, and networks of leaders across the organization. By doing that, they create a widely distributed system of decision-making that is faster and better by virtue of being closer to the problem, and still be accomplished by trusted people.

The saying “too many chiefs and not enough indians” does not apply here. A leader is not a boss: the former empowers others while the latter concentrates power. A bellhop can be a leader even if he has no one to lead but himself: all that is required is initiative and reliability, an inquisitive and open mind, trust and trustworthiness as well as the desire to make others reach their potential.

Where to Go From Here

Networked relationships & systems, situational awareness, experimenting & growing from challenges, distributed leadership, safety: these ideas are not new, but they matter now more than ever.

If you want to experiment with these ideas, do not hesitate. Most of these concepts are high level and you can explore them within your context with little effort and little risk, as long as you follow the Learn & Experiment Rapidly principle: small scale, well-defined experiments with clear goals within a limited time frame.

For larger experiment or organizational transformations, make sure to talk to a professional first. A bit of planning can go a long way to ensure success and reduce risk, stress and trauma on a system.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

During a coaching session a few weeks ago I was asked by a client about the advantages of keeping teams together in an Agile setting. After all, they used to build teams to order for each projects and it was working fine. Building teams for specific small projects and disbanding them afterward seemed like the most efficient way to go, as it meant that all specialists were exactly where they needed to be at exactly the right time.

This question is tricky to answer. Of course the client is right: in a very narrow view, he uses is ressources far more efficiently that way. But he’s also completely wrong, as the short-term gain of efficiency comes at the expense of long-term gains and of the overall strength of his entire system.

The answer is also not necessarily to keep teams completely stable over time, but to understand the “why” and “how” to change team members.

The Issue with Efficient, Predictable Teams

Business and production in the 20th century was marked by a continual quest for two elements: efficiency and predictability. From Taylor’s “Scientific management” to Lean Manufacturing, most of the proposed approaches have likened companies to machines that can be precise and predictable.

Predictability is desired in order to to plan from months to years in advance with little variance. Estimation experts either skim or use complex algorithms to calculate risk in their estimations, with results that are now increasingly off target. Predictability requires a very stable market, a very stable environment, and only “expected” unexpected events. As we try to predict over many years, we leave the realm of predictability for sheer divination.

Efficiency is desired to increase the output while reducing the waste. To be efficient, one needs to create a well-oiled machine, with all steps carefully planned and tweaked. It is much more achievable than a reliable form of long term predictability, but throw a wrench in that well-oiled machine and the the whole system will be blocked, if not damaged. Efficiency also requires a great deal of stability in the work flow, the market, the technologies involved and the corporate environment. Volatility and uncertainty are the worst enemies of an efficient system, as efficient systems are not meant to deal with significant variance. In effect, as a system moves towards efficiency, it also becomes increasingly fragile.

Entropy is the direct result of adding complexity to a system, such as new features or quickly patching defects. Increased entropy mean increased fragility. The more complexity you add to a system, the closer you bring it to the breaking point.

Non-Agile teams are created to deliver something specific in an efficient manner, often to be disbanded afterwards. Team members’ time is precisely managed using Gantt charts. Even estimated variation is accounted for and planned. Matrix planning allows for each person to be part of multiple teams with specific time allocation for each. It looks good on reports, but emerging problems causes variations, and there’s rarely a shortage of problems. Teams, and the systems they are working on, rarely seems to improve with time but rather accumulate entropy in the form of a backlog of work, defects, etc..

From Fragile Teams to Resilient Teams

New teams are always fragile, wether they are Agile of not. Agile teams however benefit from several advantages that makes them a bit more robust from the get-go.

Agile teams have a stable core of dedicated cross-functional individuals. They are not only systems, but networked systems. Their strength comes from the criss-crossing of diverse types of relationships within the teams — personal relationships, skill redundancy, information sharing and team self-organization. The balance between these relationships is whats make them complex organic systems.

However, even Agile teams start fragile. Growing them toward resilience require following the four Modern Agile principles:

Safety as a Prerequisite is achieved by creating a blameless team environment through shared accountability of work, group problem-solving, frequent synching and the all important right to fail. As Seth Godin argues, people are not afraid of failure, they are afraid of blame.

Learning Rapidly is achieved by spreading knowledge in the team through paired work and mentoring as well as small, controlled experiments. An Agile team uses a short learning loop to absorb new information and update their knowledge constantly.

Delivering value continuously, or in small batches, reduces the team’s overall risk by insuring that no matter what happens (budget cuts, human error or disaster), completed work is already out there bringing value to the company, client or customer.

Make people awesome is achieved in large part by the results of Safety as a Prerequisite and Learning Rapidly. Safety, experience-based knowledge and confidence empower people to go out of the beaten path without fear of reprisal. They will be able to absorb stress into their system, and be more willing to adopt new ideas. They will grow faster, improve faster and just be plain more awesome at their job.

Funny thing is, these teams will reach some form of predictability and efficiency, but from a completely different route than teams that are assembled to be an efficient system. It’s the combination of several traits that are not seen as efficient that brings them there: redundancy of skills, the collaborative approach, absence of fear, experimentation. By using non efficient practices, they end up more efficient.

When that point is reached, the team is already resilient. It will be able to withstand a lot of challenges, adapt to change and face both uncertainty and volatility. The team is not invincible though: very high levels of stress (such as changing several team members simultaneously) will make it crack.

From Resilient Teams to Antifragile Teams

Resilient teams are able to accept stress without being bothered by it too much. It’s good, but it can be better. Agile teams have all the building blocks necessary to progress from resilience to antifragility, so let’s put them to work.

Antifragility is the ability to take up a lot of stress, and become stronger as a result, like building muscles. Taleb uses the hydra as an analogy: a multi-headed monster that grows two more heads every time one is cut off.

The short learning loop of Agile teams is the key. The use of practices such as retrospective meetings allow teams to capitalize on that short learning loop: problems and challenges can be seen as new opportunities to grow. These challenges and stress are beginning to make the team stronger — or Antifragile. In order to convert stress into growth, a team needs to become comfortable with these short learning loops.

An antifragile team needs stress to continue to perform. Anyone who trains at a gym or does physical work for a while and then suddenly stops for an extended period of time will notice that the body will quickly lose its newfound strength if it is not used regularly. When not exercised through stress, the antifragile team stops growing.

This is where the Experiment & Learn Rapidly principle of Modern Agile truly comes into play. By conducting small, controlled experiments that are not too risky, teams can try and explore new ideas, keep themselves stimulated and create more challenges.

Introducing a rotation of team members is another way of adding some healthy stress. Changing one team member at a time, and then letting the team recuperate by spreading team expertise to the new member and absorbing the new perspective brought by the newcomer will make the team stronger. The departing team member will help another team by spreading his expertise and getting pollinated by his new environment.

The trick to this evolution through stress is pacing. If you do it too rarely, the teams will stagnate or regress. If you do it too often, however, the trauma might become too much and prevent them from reacting to unexpected large amount of stress.

Just The Beginning

Agile Teams are relatively easy systems to bring toward antifragility, because of their very makeup. It takes time and conscious efforts to grow them that way, but it is well worth the effort.

Other kinds of systems can benefit from antifragility. After all, what is the benefit of having antifragile teams in a company that cannot survive in a volatile and uncertain environment? Of course making a whole company antifragile brings a whole new set of challenges. In further posts we will explore how to bring those larger, and more complex systems along the same path.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca