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Fine, so you’ve taken steps to use Gene Kim’s First and Second Way.
You’ve got an amazing pipeline set up, product increments are flying through it at an eye-watering pace. You’ve set up a bunch of feedback mechanisms, tracking metrics, feeding information from the pipeline back upstream where it is eagerly consumed by your team. You’ve got all the hallmarks of an efficient system, cranking out stable releases. Quite rightly, you are the envy of friends and opponents alike.
But (and I’ve seen this happen often enough) somehow… it feels hollow. Like, the system works well, but it feels empty; you find yourself thinking “now what?”. There’s an intuition that it could be so much better – but shouldn’t you be happy with what you’ve achieved?
Your intuition has led you to what Gene Kim calls The Third Way.
The Third Way: a Culture of Continual Learning and Experimentation.
Thing is this: feedback loops are great, but they’re only as useful as the feedback they transport. And if the system never changes, the feedback you’re getting will always look the same.
So if you want to keep or even increase the usefulness of your feedback mechanism, you need to mix things up.
And I don’t mean in a technical way, I mean in how you approach and do things, how you communicate, how you shape your team or even your product.
Try out new ways, see how they fit, or what they tell you about your present way of doing things.
The difficult thing about this is that… you’ll mess up. Depend on it. That’s the whole point of experiments: that you don’t know in advance how they’ll turn out.
So the big issue is going to be how you deal with suggestions, how you deal with inevitably belly-flopping every now and then.
This is something that happens in your head, in the entire team’s heads. And that’s why it’s called a “culture of learning and experimentation” – because it doesn’t matter what you do or how. What matters is how you think about it, how you react to yourself or your coworkers messing up.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide how you’d like to be treated if you take a risk, and it doesn’t pay off.