Taking everyone on the journey
As someone working at an organization in an uncommon situation, there’s strong sponsorship from the top and enthusiasm from the bottom to…
As someone working at an organization in an uncommon situation, there’s strong sponsorship from the top and enthusiasm from the bottom to change and adopt new ways of working. In some cases, people are saying, we are already working like this in ‘my team’ how is this different, in others ‘this will never work, we are in a regulated industry’ etc… This whole spectrum of emotions and concerns are to be expected during large scale transformation and change.
To me the real question is, is large scale transformation and change really the right way to do things given the amount of time, money, and anxiety such focus creates on an organization. It isn’t quite as silly as you must be agile by day x, but there certainly is an expectation that things will start to get faster over time (I hear leaders recommending the Scrum book — do double the work in half the time by J. Sutherland — which is a concern as that book doesn’t focus on leadership or organizational complexity and so it missed a lot of the systemic problems and suggests a sugar pill at a team level for productivity).
I’m all for people learning, reading, and going on a journey but there’s a lot of books / material out there that typically require someone with experience to know which books are more helpful than harmful and even then, some content is purely better than others based on the readers context so a general — this book will be useful for everyone is quite a rarity.
Having said that, ‘Better Value: Sooner, Safer, Happier’ is my go-to for all occasions — seasoned and beginners alike.
Whilst that does sound promising, it also puts much of the organization in a hyper compressed state of pressure to go through the stages and end up ‘so freaking agile’ at the end of the 6 month journey each group is going on.
I’m usually the first to remind my colleagues that, putting people under intense pressure — does not create diamonds, in fact you are likely to get coal at best that isn’t going to help anyone.
If so much focus and attention is put on the execution of a time-based transformation to become ‘agile’ — you are quite likely to create burn out and create even stronger organizational antibodies (the white blood cells of the organization who attack everything that doesn’t conform to how things work).
If you listen to the language people use, you can notice the discomfort people are feeling. There are many telltale signs, the phrases I hear most often are:
‘we cannot impact our existing delivery’
‘everything is important / urgent’ or ‘this is critical’
‘the business’ or us and them type language
‘the people in xyz role aren’t senior enough’
‘we need to hire experts’
‘we cannot afford to fail’
‘the regulator is concerned’
‘this sounds like consultant speak’
‘we need to move on from the theory and execute’
‘the way we work today already works’
‘we need more transparency’
‘we need to empower people’
‘we are disempowering my leadership team’
‘do you expect an executive to go into JIRA for an update’
‘who is responsible / accountable for xyz’
‘who owns xyz’
‘who is the sponsor’
‘we need slides to tell people what to do’
‘we are too busy to attend training’
‘are you telling me how to be a leader’
‘what is the status of this action’
‘when are we going to be agile’
‘who is going to coordinate the work’
I must stop here, or I could have kept going ad infinitum.
How to change culture
A lot of the above language is not helpful. It is easy to say things like we need to ‘adopt an agile mindset’, ‘change the culture’ etc. From what I’ve read (book suggestions below) and observed, you change culture by changing behavior. You change behavior, by changing language. Then you start amplifying the behaviors and language that supports the culture you are going for. You don’t start with culture, it emerges and cannot be directly tamed to your whim. If things really go awry — you change the people, by changing the people.
I’d rather take the optimistic route by assuming people turn up to work wanting to do a good job!
A lot of this language is really telling and deserves a much closer deep dive to pick apart, I could deep dive on each of the above in their own respective articles. That may become overly cynical and over explaining / spoon feeding is anyway not the goal.
In the spirit of keeping things in a short / readable fashion, I’ll try to keep this article short. The main question I expect comes from such a list (which I have myself) is: how do we deal with all of this?
Like everything in life, there is no best practice, check list type solution. Human beings are complex social creatures and there’s many ways of interacting with them and understanding the challenges they are facing.
My favorite approach to getting started, comes from my dear mentor and friend Chris Matts who talks about the ‘zeroth constraint’ which is a play on the ‘theory of constraints’ and he talks about going into an organization — the first thing you need to do is establish trust and competence, that means find a real problem leadership / executives have and go and fix that rather than starting off telling them what they are doing is wrong or introducing all this new language.
Eventually you start building rapport and trust with executives, they will then start to be more open to your feedback, but this takes time and trust building! Without that you won't last long in Pitri dish!
Here are some great resources to consider too:
Turn the ship around & Leadership is Language — David Marquet
The Culture Game & Inviting Leadership — Daniel Mezick
What other techniques and practices do you recommend meeting management where they are — rather than make them feel bad for something the system hasn’t enabled them to learn / adapt from.
In a subsequent article I will start to unpack some of the above and see what practices can be useful for understanding and working with people rather than against them.