Every improvement is a change but not every change is an improvement

Lost in Space

Fundamentally, a transformation is a learning process – empirical and experiential. Making change upon change can get us lost in space, not knowing which way is up or down, left or right. Measurement is the only way to retain a handle on what’s real. Plan, do, check, act. Design a way to measure the impacts of change in terms of the desired results.

How can we know what to change?

Every company operates according to its policies. Those policies are encoded into the processes. Some policies are good – they make sense; some processes are effective and efficient enough. Some policies and processes are not so good. How can we know which ones to change? Do we go after the easiest ones? Or the cheapest ones? Or the ones people complain about the most? Perhaps we should just start again?

In knowledge working the constraints can be invisible. What we see is the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the ‘berg, hidden beneath the surface, is really dictating what happens. It’s easy to assume, knowingly or not, that we work within an ordered system. “Danger Will Robinson!” Beware the retrospective coherence trap. For example, doing Scrum will not necessarily lead to the desired results. The world of software development and delivery is complex. How can we identify the weakest link in an invisible chain? Our approach to change needs to be scientific. Let’s collect hard data and analyze it, and verbalize our intuition and emotions as we rigorously test our assumptions. Then we can better understand the system and select where to intervene and make changes that will lead to improvements.

Change to what?

When we find a bonafide constraint what do we replace it with? What will the improved system look like? How will it feel? How will it behave? We’ve all experienced solutions that didn’t work, solutions looking for problems, and solutions that fixed the problem but also caused other problems. What does better look like? How will we know when we get there?

There’s a need to clearly show how the selected action leads to the elimination of the constraint; how the proposed solution solves the defined problem. Describe the desired future in a way that we can determine what we want, why we want it, and avoid unintended and undesired consequences that might result. And let’s measure the outcome (and impacts) of each change.

How to cause the change?

It’s easy to spend a lot of our time doing stuff. Then we get frustrated because we’re working so hard, doing so much, and improvement just isn’t happening. Our busy-ness isn’t taking care of business. We come up with solutions fast – arguably before we truly understand the problem. As Einstein said:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Let’s take the time to work through why we think a specific action will lead to a specific result. Moreover, it seems like we rarely stop to define, in a quantifiable way, the outcome we’re trying to achieve. By unambiguously defining problems or constraints, and the desired outcomes, we can systematically design and execute the steps to overcome the obstacles in between and recognise when our plan should be altered.

Stop and think. Then do

In an age where agility has quickly become the key to competitiveness, the demand for a change blueprint wrapped up in what’s being called an Agile Transformation is about as bogus as it gets. Business agility and true competitive edge lie in our ability to learn faster and generate deeper knowledge and to use that knowledge to inform purposeful action – deliberate and designed actions that solve clearly defined problems and produce unambiguous and valuable business outcomes.

Beware Agile coaches bearing transition blueprints

Taken from Marta Jasinka’s InfoQ interview with me about No Bull.

In the paper you point out that agile methods are being implemented in different ways. How does that affect the work of the Agile Coach? Can somebody outside the company, without deep understanding of the business and process requirements, help a team make a transition to a more agile way of working?

I think the method doesn’t matter for a coach with a deep understanding of agile and lean principles. That being said, the appetite to buy something called Agile has seen the market saturated with coaches making questionable adaptations to achieve corporate fit. So who knows? There’s no reliable way to know what you’re going to get when you hire a coach.

Transitions usually take companies to a ‘place’ where they’re doing Agile. What’s needed is for companies to get to a capability that continuously experiments and deploys accumulated learning to good effect for customers and stakeholders. What companies haven’t realized is that the benefits they seek by becoming more agile require profound change in people’s operating principles and beliefs. That can’t happen if the environment won’t support it. Having someone from outside the company to challenge ideas, assumptions and decisions and disrupt the status quo can be valuable. As they say, when everyone’s in the frame nobody sees the picture. That person will come to understand intimately the business and process and other aspects of ‘the system’. That person will become part of ‘the system’. But an agile coach isn’t a silver bullet. Every company is a unique context and change requires visible support and tangible actions from the people at the top. It’s never just a “fix IT” situation, despite what people often think.

The techniques for helping companies change are evolving. I see more references to Systems Thinking and perhaps even rediscovery of the thinking techniques from the Theory of Constraints. I also sense a maturing attitude that recognizes change as learning cycles. There’s a move away from teaching people to work differently towards learning with people and co-designing system changes. This is demonstrating an approach that balances inquiry and advocacy, which seeks to help people reveal beliefs and assumptions that drive their thinking, create awareness of context, encourage a willingness to experiment, and ultimately facilitate deeper learning. This just might win hearts and minds, and bring about the new thinking and different behaviours needed for change.