Every road leads in the right direction if you don't know where you're going. Producing the wrong thing faster makes you wronger. Outcomes > output. #BVSSH

If you don't fail, you're not learning. #BVSSH

What curling can teach us about Ways of Working: 🧹 everyone sees the same target 🧹 there is a shared goal, there are shared incentives 🧹 the leader sets the direction and the whole team constantly adapts 🧹 team members influence the outcome in real time

Capability = (Education + Experience + Coaching) x 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 To build capabilities, there is a need to nurture generative behavioural norms, translate 'failure' into 'learning' and minimise fear.

Often it’s not skills that hold teams back, it’s safety. Even the most talented group underperforms if people don’t feel safe to speak up or to experiment. Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating the conditions where others feel safe enough to share theirs.

Change without a clear and shared Why. #BVSSH

From reporting lines to supporting lines. ▶️ What is the desired outcome? ▶️ What have we learnt? ▶️ What will we learn next? ▶️ How soon can we learn it? ▶️ How can I help? Impediments are not in the path. Impediments ARE the path.

Optimise your approach to the work, to the domain of the work. Ask the question: "How many times have we done this exact thing, with these exact people, in this exact context?". If the answer is lots, then you can optimise for knowability. You're on the right-hand side, in the ordered domains.

Join Maria Muir, Myles Ogilvie and me at the Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) APAC meetup event on 18th Feb (4pm EST, 9pm GMT), 19th Feb (8am AEDT) to share and explore: ▶️ Key learnings from 2025: challenges, changes and ninja moves ▶️ What this means for 2026 ▶️ What steps you can take ▶️ Q&A

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. The more cars on the road, the slower they go. Limit work in progress. Stop starting, start finishing. #BVSSH

An entry for the Rainhill Trials in 1829, a competition for steam locomotives on the world's first inter-city railway, Liverpool to Manchester. Nearly, but not quite...

In the previous 4 Industrial Revolutions work was mostly repetitive and *knowable*, with people as cogs in a machine, with narrow division of labour, work passing and detailed work orders coming from the Planning Department.

From Management By Objective (Peter Drucker, 1954) To Objectives and Key Results (originally iMBOs, Andy Grove, Intel) #BVSSH

Intelligent failure. Fail (learn) faster to succeed sooner. Intelligent failure is quick, unique, small, cheap and safe. It is possible to fail forwards. We learn and adapt from it. Done well, it makes us stronger, more robust, more antifragile.

From PMO to Value Realization Office (VRO). ▶️ Portfolio OKR controls (not too many Os or KRs, alignment over cascade, nested OKRs with parents, transparent, well-written outcome hypotheses)

This would be a nice problem to have! #BVSSH

As a leader wanting to optimise outcomes, how should I behave? Align, Act, Reflect, Adapt (AARA) 🎯 Align: be clear on the Why and the direction (measurable outcome hypotheses). Limit Work In Progress.

Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility can be combined by treating VSM as the structural viability baseline and antifragility as a dynamic performance criterion under uncertainty.

Leading and lagging measures are a critical data feedback loop when testing an outcome hypothesis, enabling us to reflect and adapt. Leading measures are particularly important as they should give us an early indication as to whether we're heading in the right direction.

From Scientific Management To Outcome Leadership #BVSSH

Every organisation is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you are happy with the results you are getting, don't change. If you are not, do you know what you want to optimise for? Do you have measures (leading and lagging) for those outcomes?

Why we work the way we do today, how we got here: on the left is an Instruction Card for sewing in sleeves issued on 15th July 1920. The steps are standardised and atomic, with times to the second.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a powerful way to foster continuous learning, connect passionate innovators, and create momentum for change. They enable champions to self-identify themselves and form inclusive social groups that anyone can opt into.

Improve via emergence, learning by doing, visualising the system of work, perfectly imperfect, within guardrails. Not by endlessly iterating a Powerpoint deck. #BVSSH

The mindset behind the introduction of the Charting of an Organisation (Org Chart) was predominantly about authority and who took orders from who. The 'reporting line' in the org chart, historically, has been an 'ordering line'.

The current state for many organisations is functional role-based silos with work passing, like a relay race. This is how we have worked, at scale, since 1771 with the introduction of the first Industrial Revolution.

Value Centres are nested and networked. No single person knows how to make a pencil end-to-end, millions of people are involved and there is no central planning.

Everything has a flip side. Something can be optimal or sub-optimal (not enough or too much), unique to the unique context and moment in time. Anything can be done well, or done badly (where the definition of good and bad is unique in context).

The world's first known org chart dates from 1855 and has the company directors at the bottom, not the top! It is drawn to represent a plant, a living organism, with the railroad lines representing branches of the organism and people as flowers, or nodes, of the plant.

3Ms of OKRs: Mindset, Mission and Measurement. Mindset: Emergent over Deterministic. Empowering. Mission: Outcome over Output. Inspirational. Measurement: Movement & Behaviour. Leading & Lagging. An OK OKR needs all three. #BVSSH

Ask yourself the question, "how many times have we done this exact thing, with these exact people, in this exact context?". If the answer is never, optimise for emergence (unknowability).

Unique change is unknowable and emergent. It is not knowable and deterministic. The only thing that is predictable is unpredictability. Optimise your approach to the work, to the type of work.

Why we work the way we do today: the origins of Scientific Management. Early in his career, Frederick Winslow Taylor worked extreme hours and expected others to do the same.

Implicit incentives (behavioural norms) influence explicit incentives (goals, rewards), both of which inform how people organise (role-based fiefdoms, multidisciplinary teams, information hiding or sharing).

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Happy New Year! Let's get started (or restarted) today. #BVSSH

This holiday season, I hope you find moments of peace, joy, and connection with those who matter most. I'm grateful for the shared learning, community and passion in 2025 and look forward to working together to improve outcomes and to make the world of work more humane in 2026! Happy holidays!

Do what you are good at, what you love doing, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. #Ikigai #BVSSH

In 1878, aged 22, Frederick Taylor made an unconventional choice. Despite strong family ties to the owners of Midvale Steel in Philadelphia, he joined the company as a common, unskilled labourer.

Start with Why. When improving 'how we do, what we do', colleagues will need to try something new and will fail. Ideally, failing fast, uniquely, cheaply and safely, with an absence of fear and blame.

Go slower to go faster. Or you will go slower. Balance. Renewal. Continuous Improvement. Prioritise time for it every day. Personal and work. #BVSSH

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a great way to identify and nurture the natural innovators, the crazy hill dancers, in your organisation! ▶️ Voluntary, Law of Two Feet (come and go as you want) ▶️ Two co-chairs and a small organising group, when it gets larger, to organise and chair the sessions

Antipattern: Water-Scrum-Fall. Big Up Front Planning, Big Bang release, feature or story or story point counting, with the word Sprint ten times in the middle. Predicting the future at the point of having learnt the least.

Frederick Taylor, the 'Father of Scientific Management', in 1874, age 18, took a highly unusual step, given his 'upper-middle-class' background. He turned down a place at Harvard, with plans of becoming a lawyer, like his father.

A value stream has long-lived value consumers, producers (in multidisciplinary teams), and product(s) (things of value). Value streams are nested and networked. They are fractal. Teams & teams of teams are funded, rather than projects.

Get 1% better every day and after 365 days you'll be 38x better. And, obviously, don't stop after 365 days! Human systems entropy, improvement needs to be continuous. Standing still is not standing still, it is going backwards. #BVSSH

Leadership behaviour will make it or break it. 1. Role model behaviours you expect in others 2. Nurture psychological safety 3. Have an emergent mindset over a deterministic mindset (the future is not predictable, have hypotheses, run experiments) #BVSSH

Lasting change requires many people to unlearn and relearn. People need time to undergo that process. The pace of change is determined by the speed of unlearning The speed of (un)learning is determined by psychological safety #BVSSH

The Making of the CR*P Talk: Lots of learning when preparing the Certified AI Practitioner Talk! For this talk, there was an intro with talking babies, most slides contained AI-generated video content, and there was a talking baby outro. Here are the learnings:

The 'whole-job' team approach, Bell System Technical Journal, September 1983. "The principal advantage of this approach is that the developers themselves have a close relation with the clients. This results in high motivation, flexibility and low overhead. It is a proven technique and has been

Unique work is unknowable. The only way to learn is by doing. We need to minimise time to learning and value, to make the unknowable, knowable. We need to have hypotheses and run experiments, which are safe to intelligently fail (cheap, fast, safe).