Safety first!

Tom Breur

23 April 2017

“Safety first!” Hardly a day goes by that I don’t imprint this wisdom into my three year old son. Whether it is in traffic, on a climbing frame, or when he tries to “help” me in the kitchen. In the workplace, we encourage people to try new things, too. You want people to tread outside their comfort zone – we all know that is necessary to grow. Inside your comfort zone the magic never happens. But once you step outside of it, the odds of “failure” increase dramatically, so you need that safety net.

Safety also happens to be one of the cornerstones of Modern Agile that I wrote about a few weeks ago. On Twitter, I stumbled across a great post by Chris Matts (who wrote the excellent book “Commitment”, btw, with his co-author Olav Maassen) that describes various “Get it Done” behaviors that jeopardize safety, sometimes in subtle ways. The ruthless “Get it Done” mentality seems to be another variation on the old pay-me-now/pay-me-later dynamic: achieving results at the expense of spoiling the learning environment so necessary to grow and experiment. But if you’re happy with the results you are getting, I guess there is no need to try something new, and change.

When I challenge my little boy to try new things, like riding a bicycle without training wheels, I am fully aware that he needs to take a (calculated) risk in order to grow. You balance risk by preventing serious harm (wearing a helmet) and preventing most small risks like bruises and  scratches. In software development or change management, that is no different. If you keep doing what you always did, you will keep getting what you always got.