Key Principle: Decriminalize Mistakes

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER   The majority of Agile practices are team-based practices that provide support for team performance, learning, and improvement. Leaders also have an opportunity to expand team-level principles to organization-level work. This chapter describes how to support more effective Agile practices at the organizational level.

As I’ve mentioned, Agile development depends on the use of Inspect and Adapt, a learning cycle that depends on making calculated mistakes, learning from them, and improving. By “calculated mistake” I mean making a decision when you know you are not confident in the result and being attentive to learn from the result, regardless of how well it turns out.

In Cynefin terms, Complicated projects depend on making small numbers of calculated mistakes; Complex projects depend on making large numbers of calculated mistakes. It is thus essential that an organization decriminalize errors so that they are visible, examined, and ultimately beneficial to the organization, rather than hidden, shameful, and ultimately harmful to the organization.

As Jez Humble says, “In a complex adaptive system, failure is inevitable. When accidents happen, human error is the starting point of a blameless post-mortem” (Humble, 2018). Some organizations such as as Etsy publicize and celebrate mistakes—the focus of the celebration is based on the idea that, “We’re happy we made this mistake, because otherwise we never would have learned about X.”

Make necessary mistakes quickly

Complex projects depend not just on learning from mistakes but on making the mistakes in the first place. It’s important to create an organizational culture that does not hesitate to make mistakes when necessary. As the illustration below suggests, this is not a license to make careless mistakes. But it’s healthy to establish a culture of jumping in and learning from experience in cases where a decision’s outcome cannot be determined in advance.