Jon Smart
@jon
Better Value Sooner Safer Happier #BVSSH Lead Author of ‘Sooner Safer Happier’, winner of Business Book award in Leadership category. soonersaferhappier.com
The mindset behind the introduction of the Charting of an Organisation (Org Chart) was predominantly about authority and who took orders from whom. The 'reporting line' in the org chart, historically, has been an 'ordering line'. Clinton Edgar Woods writes in 1914: "There is then no loophole
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.
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.
Antipattern: order giver, order taker with low autonomy. Here are your tasks, do them without question, in your role-based silo. In the previous four technology-led revolutions, managers told workers exactly what to do and when to do it. This evolved in the context of repetitive, manual labour,
People embrace change with an S-curve profile (Diffusion of Innovation, Everett Rodgers, 1962). Start by inviting the natural champions, the innovators. Change is hardest at the beginning, with the most headwinds, the most impediments, the least understanding and social proof in context.
Employee engagement has fallen for a second year in a row, from 21% to 20%, the lowest level since 2020. This was primarily driven by middle management engagement dropping from 27% to 22% in just one year (source: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026).
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).
Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Optimising for outcomes demands an experimental mindset. This means embracing trial and error, continuously learning and using that learning to define new experiments. Ask the following questions: 1. What have we learnt?
Organisations are comprised of organisations. Organisations are fractal. Interactions: the quality of the interactions determines the quality of the system. Interactions create coherence. There are high-frequency, low-variety mechanisms (information sharing, data feedback loops, cadences, etc.)
Organisational improvement takes time. Yes, there can be quick wins. And lasting improvement takes years. That has always been the case and will be the case, as it is about people changing behaviour and going through fear, with real or perceived threats.
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).
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).
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.
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.
How would you feel if your organisation was able to achieve the following outcomes: → Leadership meeting hours reduced by 70% every week → Store profitability increased by 31% in a single quarter → Product availability improved from 75% to 96%
This article, published in the Jan 1986 edition of the Harvard Business Review, is still just as relevant today as it was almost 40 years ago. Empowered multidisciplinary teams, moving up and down the pitch together with the ball. Over a relay race. Shared goals and incentives.
I’m excited to announce that Matt McBride, CCO at Tesco Mobile, will be speaking at Sooner Safer Happier LIVE this September. Matt will share Tesco Mobile’s approach to organising for outcomes -
Incentives (explicit and implicit) drive behaviours which drive outcomes. "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity", Rita Mae Brown Visualising incentives (explicit and implicit), threats (negative incentives) -> behaviours ->
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.
The 'whole-job' team approach, Bell System Technical Journal, September 1983. "The principle advantage of this approach is that the developers themselves have a close relation with the clients.