Key Principle: Decriminalize Mistakes
Learn how to encourage the calculated mistakes that are required for teams to Inspect and Adapt.
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 ...