• Home
  • BVSSH
  • Engineering Enablement
  • Playbooks
  • Frameworks
  • Good Reads
Search

What are you looking for?

Standard : Teams embrace risk and learn from failure

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures teams treat risk and failure as essential ingredients for learning and innovation. By fostering reflection and experimentation, teams grow stronger and more resilient over time.

Aligned to our "Psychological Safety First" policy, this standard creates space for safe risk-taking and continuous improvement. Without it, fear stifles progress and opportunities for meaningful change are missed.

Strategic Impact

Clearly defined impacts of meeting this standard include improved delivery flow, reduced risk, higher system resilience, and better alignment to business needs. Over time, teams will see reduced rework, faster time to value, and stronger system integrity.

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Reduced ability to respond to change or failure
  • Accumulation of technical debt or friction
  • Poor developer experience and morale
  • Decreased confidence in releases and features
  • Misalignment between technical implementation and business priorities

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Teams avoid risk and hide failures.

  • Level 2 – Managed: Teams occasionally discuss failures but lack structure.

  • Level 3 – Defined: Risk-taking is encouraged and supported by consistent reflection rituals.

  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Risk and failure insights are tracked and inform improvement efforts.

  • Level 5 – Optimising: Risk-taking is integral to innovation and embedded in psychological and operational safety mechanisms.


Key Measures

  • Adoption metrics relevant to the standard (to be defined)
  • Quality, throughput, and system health metrics aligned to capability
  • Maturity scores based on structured assessment
Associated Policies
  • Psychological Safety First
  • Post-Incident Learning Culture
Associated Practices
  • Error Budget Policies
  • Deployment Freeze Windows
  • Release Orchestration Tools
  • Contract Testing

Technical debt is like junk food - easy now, painful later.

Awesome Blogs
  • LinkedIn Engineering
  • Github Engineering
  • Uber Engineering
  • Code as Craft
  • Medium.engineering