Safety

Creating safe environments where people can experiment and learn without fear is a central insight i gained over the years. These days i run strictly blameless environments, that means there are no fuckups, ever. There will be unexpected outcomes, some may even have negative effects, and they are always an opportunity, collectively, to learn, to improve systems, to improve documentation and, most important, to create even safer environments where everyone can continue learning.

Take book keeping. Experimentation is not desired at first glance, numbers have to add up. In a safe environment, however, anyone will be able to safely add automation, new tools, better data pipelines to the existing process and know that they are working. That is experimentation in action, encouraging people to take ownership and pride in improving the status quo.

Safe environments need a few prerequisites. They need a clear definition of a role and the scope for that role. A definition of what "this domain is healthy" looks like. These are not job descriptions, those are roles that ideally everyone can pick up because they have extensive documentation and ideally someone else already doing them. A person adding this role to their responsibilities can learn from someone and then improve on what's there. Creating safe environments for all documented roles creates an environment where everyone who has spare time can contribute.

In communities this can be a public service roster which creates two things, transparency and an easy way for people to contribute. In companies that can be a public backlog or task list or Kanban board combined with the role descriptions. Famously Valve, the game company, had no fixed people to project assignments and people could just more their table to a team and start helping them.

Creating safe environments where everyone shares the desire to make the thing they work on better and everyone helps to make that happen create a very strong culture of support. This culture of support helps new people to get up to speed fast as everyone is used to train others and it helps having other peoples back if things turn out different as anticipated.