5.6 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier

Choosing the right approach for the problem you need to address is important, especially if you are focusing on problems that are connected to digital transformation. Approaches that have evolved based on the use of technology can guide you and help you discover insights that are specific to dealing with decisions and/or problems that involve digital transformation.

The Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) approach, developed by Jonathan Smart and colleagues (2022), helps you define your problem and provides a powerful roadmap to delivering your objectives and measuring the success of your outcomes. Like many others, the creation of the approach started with ‘why?’ (such as: Why do we need a better way of working and a better way of creating value?) which evolved out of their work with information technology firms.

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Figure 29 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (Smart, 2020)

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Figure shows the Better Value Sooner Safer Happier approach. In middle is word Value with interlocking circles with Better, Sooner, Safer, Happier around it. Then in a square around the circle in each corner is: Better – Quality, Sooner – lead time, throughput, flow efficiency, Safer, continuous compliance, agile not fragile, Happier – colleagues, customers, citizens, climate.

Figure 29 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (Smart, 2020)

Sooner Safer Happier is a textbook based on decades of practical experience of improving ways of working in hundreds of organisations. Learnings are structured into eight ‘patterns’ and ‘antipatterns’ for business agility.

A pattern is a response to a situation that, more often than not, is effective and improves desired outcomes. Of course, this all comes with ups and downs, back and forth, it’s all about the people. A pattern can help to create a tailwind for change.

The antipattern is to deploy a capital ‘A’, capital ‘T’, Agile Transformation across your organisation, with fixed scope/budget/plan, i.e. to apply old ways of thinking to new ways of working, which is unlikely to generate the desired benefits.

Table 10 explains the kind of organisational problems these patterns can assist with.

In the video below Myles Ogilvie and Matt Turner (both Principals at Sooner Safer Happier Limited) explain the principles of Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

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Transcript: Video 20 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier introduction

MATT TURNER:

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier to me is very much like a lens, a way an organisation can view itself, can view how it will learn, can view how it will start to understand its purpose, and then tune its fitness for that purpose.

MYLES OGILVIE:

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier refers to a number of outcomes that organisations seeking to improve business agility need to be focused on. There's around eight patterns in all that are encompassed within this language for improving business agility. And of these, first and foremost is the focus on outcomes. And this is a contrast with traditional ways of improving organisational effectiveness, which tends to focus on method and process and framework.

So, deploy a new method, and that will get you better results. But often we find they don't. What Better Value Sooner Safer Happier is advocating is to focus on outcomes, and the ones that we find are universally helpful to focus on and measure.

B is Better. It means quality-- better quality. So that means focusing on improving process accuracy, reducing complaints, reducing breaks, reducing incidents, so improving quality. And there's a range of different measures that you might choose in your context to apply to know that you are improving quality. Good quality is an outcome.

Value in Better Value Sooner Safer Happier is the reason your organisation exists. It's what it's for. If you're a charity, it's the charitable social benefits that it's achieving. If you're a financial organisation, it's the financial services that you are offering. And if you're a university, it could be the education that you're delivering.

So, Value is the reason you exist, and you can measure the value that you're getting through your organisation using objectives or outcomes with key results. So OKRs as a phrase is popular in the overall landscape at the moment-- OKRs, or outcomes with key results. But this is around slicing value into much more fine-grained units and measuring them than happened in the past.

Sooner is around measuring lead time, measuring throughput, and measuring flow efficiency. So, it's about how swiftly is your organisation able to generate change. Safer is around measuring risk management, shifting from a reactive-based dealing with the risks towards proactive solving risks before they've emerged.

So, there's a number of measures there around safer. And happier is around measuring the outcomes of customer and colleague happiness. So BVSSH, Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, what we find when we sit down with the leadership team of any organisation, and we talk about the problems that they're having in that organisation, the problems can usually be sorted into those five categories.

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier was developed because the nature of work has changed. It's changed from complicated-- so in the age of mass production, machines and components are complicated. It requires skills and knowledge to assemble complicated machines. But they are designed. They are known. The product that you're creating is known.

Recall defines work complicated, even if it has a lot of components in it. So, the nature of work has changed from that to complex. When we are innovating software, that is complex work. So, what you need to build cannot be known when you set out trying to build it, because you do not know how the consumers of that software will respond to it. People do not know what they want until they see it working in their hands.

In a complex environment, there are so many moving parts around your landscape, you cannot know what you are trying to build until it is built. That constant sense and learn is what's needed. This is why the nature of work is different with software-enabled organisations.

So, with the approach of Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, you are constantly sensing, and learning are we heading in the right direction. If we are, we're amplifying. If we're not, we're reducing. Agile and lean thinking are really core to this, and they've been recognised across industry as essential.

However, BVSSH is a response to organisations that try to embrace agile and lean through mass rollout of those methods. So traditional industrial-minded organisations, which is the majority of our economy at the moment, are still in an industrial mindset. So, they see something that looks like a method.

There is a tendency to want to do a mass rollout on it. But that misunderstands what agile and lean really are about. There's a culture change. Primarily, these are cultural approaches. And by focusing on outcomes, Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, we find it's a more effective way for your organisation to embrace these changes than by trying to deploy a process with a bunch of new job roles and lots of complexity around how that process should work.

And we can look at, for example, Nokia that, when it was building the Symbian operating system, it was investing a huge amount in agile methods at that time. And it won an award for being the most agile organisation shortly before it went bankrupt. The method did not save that organisation.

What it failed to do was to actually look at the speed of delivery it was able to achieve with its particular technical construct at that time. It wasn't measuring the outcome of flow, of sooner. And therefore, it was completely unable to keep up. If it had been, it would be doing different things, such as architecting differently, as opposed to focusing on agile methods.

So Better Value Sooner Safer Happier encourages you to measure the outcomes that matter to you, and then apply any kind of changes-- be it organisational, be it technical, be it social or cultural leadership. So there is a range of different changes that you might try to deploy. And we're not prescriptive about how those methods might run.

In terms of the human-centred approach, what we see is, we're talking here about helping organisations learn. And for people to learn, they need to have a safe environment for humans to actually learn about different things, and to sense and to change their behaviour and adapt, that needs to be a safe environment for them to behave in. Across our industry and our economies today, many people are programmed and are taught to follow a process.

They're not taught to be continually learning. And so, a more human-centered approach is really critical if we're going to change that, and enable people to actually experiment and explore, and feel confident and safe that some things will work, some things won't work. But learning is the most valued thing here.

So, in the past, managers in an organisation, in an industrial context, would decide what the organisation and the people need to do based on the manager's knowledge and experience. That was how traditional organisations worked. But in the age of digital, we know that the people closest to the consumer of whatever software enablement is involved are the ones who have to do that sensing and learning.

So, it's the people closest to the work that actually know what work is needed, and the managers aren't directing that anymore. So, this is why human-centric matters. The role of the manager has changed. Managers become lines of support for people, rather than lines of management of people.

And as lines of support, the role is to enable and to empower teams to achieve the outcomes the organisation needs-- first to be more human-centric. Therefore, what's critical is purpose is really clearly explains. And often in organisations, we see purpose is missing, even if there is an overarching strategy that can be phrased in such broad-brush language that the organisation does not genuinely understand what its strategy is.

It does not genuinely measure the small bits of progress it's making towards that. That clarity of purpose and direction and progress needs to be really clear for people to understand are we moving in the right direction or not. And for teams to align themselves against that ambition, and for teams to feel safe to try out and experiment, and ways to support that, there needs to be psychological safety. And that environment of team trust is something that managers and leaders have a key role in enabling for people.

So, measuring the system of work around better, quality, sooner time-to-market and safer deliveries and more engaged colleagues-- better, sooner, safer, and happier, measuring the system of work is core for us to continually improve on. And it matters more than cost. In the past, project thinking is often focused on cost management. And our experience is normally, when you focus on the cost, cost goes up, or at least the value you get comes down disproportionately to the cost reduction. So, you get less for less.

If you're focusing on a system of work and optimising the system of work all the time, cost looks after itself. As flow goes up, efficiency goes up. And the value at the centre that we talked about earlier, is a separate measure. So that's the objectives with key results, and that's a key item for understanding the value. So, we're trying to optimise the system of work and focus on the value.

If you map this back to all language, we talked about cost-benefit analyses for the project or something. But what we're really talking about here is zooming in on the benefits, because so often, when you do a cost-benefit on a project, the costs are micro-managed down to the nearest penny, and the benefits are completely ignored and forgotten. And that's just unhelpful. So, by focusing on the benefits, the value element and the key results associated with that value, and then optimising continually the system of work, we're enabling organisations to get the outcomes that they really need to.

MATT TURNER:

With Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, what we're trying to achieve here with people is to allow them to see that we don't know what we're going to achieve when we embark on a change initiative. But we do have the ways and means of understanding as quickly as possible how we are achieving it. And therefore, what we're not going to say to an organization is, you do it in this way. We will map out all of your behaviours and your exercises your practices for the next two years.

What will guide you in doing it is, how would you know that it's going right or wrong? What are those practices? And essentially, I mean, you can boil it back down to things like the scientific method. How do we know what's going on in the world around us?

For a higher education establishment, it's really nice to maybe draw the parallel to epistemology. How do we know that we know? And what we are putting down in the book, what we're describing in the book Sooner Safer Happier, are those means of understanding how we would know.

How would we run these experiments? What is discipline in a complex world where we don't know what's going to go right or wrong? If everything went as expected, if we reach the end of that two-year project and everything went as expected, there would be no learning necessary.

But we know that we are in a complex adaptive world now. We know that digital has meant that disruptions come from all over the place. So, we can't control that environment because it's so complex. We know that what that means is it won't go as expected. And therefore, the most important thing is that we learn at the fastest pace possible.

So Better Value Sooner Safer Happier are those disciplines and those practices and those means of delivery and means of meeting change, such that we are caught out and surprised as little as possible. And one of the other major things about agility and how it's different from traditional ways of delivering change is that, in traditional ways of delivering change, what you would often ask people is what is it that you want. And I want you to be very, very descriptive and very, very nailed on and sure of what you want at the end of these two years, and we're going to ask you that right at the beginning. So, we're going to be very specific about that.

And then at the point you've described that, it's locked in. It's contracted now. So that's what you'll get at the end of two years. And obviously, there's a heck of a lot of risk in that because the world is changing at such a pace.

We can have uprisings in Eastern Europe. We can have global pandemics from one week to the next. So, you wouldn't want to lock that in two years prior to then delivering something. With agility, with Better Value Sooner Safer Happier what we’re describing is how you can safely change your mind when you start to understand we should probably change our mind.

MYLES OGILVIE:

There are a number of elements to bear in mind when you're trying to improve Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. And focusing on the outcomes and measuring the outcomes is one of the key elements to bear in mind. But there's another seven patterns that we recognise will help.

So firstly, is thinking in terms of achieving big through small. So that's thinking about transformation carpaccio. If you're trying to make changes to improve your organisation towards Better Value Sooner Safer Happier really make small changes. Small changes are faster to deploy. They're quicker for people to learn about, and they're easier for you to understand, are they actually going to add value.

So, transformation carpaccio-- in the same way that you would have thought maybe about minimum viable product, if you're trying to build some software, think about minimum viable transformation. Make really small changes. So, think big. You've got your mission to improve your organisation in certain ways. But start small and learn fast.

The second element is then around invitation over inflection. So, this comes back to not having a one-size-fits-all framework or method that you're rolling out to your organisation, but to having a level of optionality about how people change. So, you're inviting people to change. You're offering options for them, and you're not instructing people about exactly what needs to do.

Allow people to be finding their own paths within guardrails. People learn in different ways, and what we see is the diffusion of innovation curve is really helpful with this. So, your early adopters, your innovators in your organisation, are always going to be the people to start with.

So, if you're thinking big, but starting small, start with your innovators. And then you're helping those innovators share their stories with others in the organisation. You'll see the majority start to get interested once there is some social proof created by the innovators that these improved ways of working are starting to help them get Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

End transcript: Video 20 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier introduction

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Video 20 Better Value Sooner Safer Happier introduction