Author: Jurgen Appelo

"Which cities have implemented Christopher Alexander's urban design patterns?"

"Which kitchens have implemented Jamie Oliver's cookbooks?"

"Which people have implemented yoga or Pilates?"

These questions sound a bit silly to me.

Patterns, recipes, and practices are descriptions of observable forms or outcomes. They are not something to be implemented. Depending on your behaviors, you may end up with something that looks like one of the pictures in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef, or Christina Brown's Yoga Bible. Patterns, recipes, and practices are the temporary result of our actions and behaviors. One moment, a pattern may exist (a town square, a lasagne bolognese, or a downward-facing dog), and the next moment, the pattern might be gone.

With methods, frameworks, and pattern libraries, it is the same.

Some people go around asking, "Which companies have implemented SAFe?" "Where is the Spotify Model being used?" "Which organizations are based on Holacracy?" They even ask me, "Which companies have implemented the unFIX model?" And all I can think is that it doesn't work that way. A way of working is not something to be "implemented". Of course, you can try to achieve some of the outcomes as described in the books. You may even end up with something that looks like one or two of the pictures. But that doesn't mean you've implemented the book. Nobody is expecting you to do everything: to recreate all urban design patterns or cook all Jamie Oliver's dishes or work your way through all the yoga forms. That would be silly.

If your organization has one or more self-organizing agile teams with end-to-end responsibilities, we recognize the Value Stream Crew pattern. If you have some units offering internal services to the others, you seem to have Platform Crews. If there are some informal guilds or Communities of Practice organizing regular meetings across the teams, you appear to have a few Forums. Your company may have one, ten, or twenty of the patterns described in the unFIX model, but that doesn't mean you've "implemented" the model. You likely already had these patterns in place long before I launched the unFIX website.

Don't implement frameworks. Try some patterns.

Check out the case studies published about Ministry Group, Pipedrive, Coolblue, BBVA Next, and VRT. They've been playing with excellent patterns. And we can nicely visualize some of those efforts with the unFIX model.

Which patterns have you tried?