6. Transforming Ways of Working
Creating Awareness for Necessary Change
A ReBoot Co. blog series that helps you & your teams discover a better way of working.
When I experienced my first Transformation “in the wild” I felt cast adrift in a big sea of impossibility. It was my first time out of a consultancy and inside a business as a perm employee. I was responsible for technology delivery in an Insurance Company. How would I go about communicating the need for better, more adaptable ways of working when Transformation wasn’t part of my official role?
Fast forward five years and many battle scars later, I started my second Transformation “in the wild” and I recall similar challenges but different feelings. I was at the bottom of a big mountain that I had to climb, but I felt more confident and impatient to get started on making a whole heap of changes.
The climb
For my first Transformation I needed a metaphorical life preserver to keep the dream afloat, by the second I just needed some grappling hooks and a few good places to grip for support.
9 PATTERNS TO CREATE AWARENESS FOR NECESSARY CHANGE
For anyone who has felt that starting Transformation inside their workplace is a daunting task, or impossible to start, I’ve found the following 9 patterns, gained from real applied experience of transforming ways of working, have worked for me and can work for you when you need to Create Awareness for necessary Change.
TOURING MOHAMMED TO THE MOUNTAIN WITH A GEMBA WALK*
This is the reason that a lot of Lean aficionados go on study tours to Japan to tour factories and find out the realities of Lean workplaces. Like me you might have visited the Altona Toyota factory to watch an example of The Toyota Way in action (sadly it closed in 2016).
The perfect person to convince you of something, is you. So take key decision makers in your company to tour a workplace where they are already doing something you want to try.
I remember visiting a company who built their software using Extreme Programming (XP) back in the late 90s. They showed me their continuous integration builds running live tests on their code, they allowed me to ask any questions.
“Who is the project manager?” I asked - because I was a project manager at the time. They told me they didn’t have one, but they had someone called The Customer, another team member who was always available to the team. “Curiouser and curiouser!” I thought. These radicals were delivering lots of high value working software without a project manager! After that visit I knew a lot more about how XP teams worked, and I had the best answer for people who claimed that XP couldn’t possibly work for them. I knew that it could because I observed it working with my own eyes.
So, make friends with companies that are further along the journey than you, and also ask us at ReBoot Co! We have a collection of friends at workplaces that are proud to show other people how they are working, some want to show off how proud they are of their teams, and some are just eager to pass on the goodness of these ways of working to others.
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mixing up cultural metaphors aside, Gemba literally translates to “The Place” and we often use “Gemba Walk” as a way of expressing “Going to the source”.
2. START A PILOT
If you want to start something in a different direction than the norm, there’s no getting around actually starting. So be on the lookout for candidate Pet Projects, Initiatives, or anything that you can start where people won’t be too invested in their current modes of working.
Using the word “Pilot” can help when you are asking for some leeway against the prevailing winds of governance or process. Although not ideal, you might be able to form a coalition of the willing. some people to start your pilot by donating their spare time to it.
Starting a pilot gives you a great way to learn what it’s like to work as an Agile team, and then something to reference when you are saying “I want all of our work to be as successful as that team’s!” It will give folks more confidence to change more of their work practices, if you can prove it will work on a pilot.
3. TACKLE THE BIG PROBLEM - USING DESIGN THINKING
Feeling particularly brave? Why not take your biggest business risk and tackle it using more contemporary ways of working? Big risky projects are often slow to start as people are nervous to take the first steps, they over analyse and spend too much time estimating and hand wringing over solutions. Design Thinking provides a raft of tools that allow us to tackle big problems, with short and sharp iterations, and can improve your potential solutions faster, than a large lumbering project takes to get off the ground.
Of course we will apply Agile ways of working to our Design Thinking approaches, using iterations, standups, showcases and prioritisation, so you are getting a “Transformation Experience” bundled in for free AND solving your biggest challenge at the same time. If you are new to Design Thinking, even one solitary coach can make all the difference to start tackling your Big Problem, we have helped our clients on many occasions using this approach.
4. GET THE EXECS TO TALK, AND COME ALONG TO A TALK
C suite folks like talking to people who are just like them, and you can understand why. It’s tough at the top and these people are shouldering the pressure of the companies they run. I’ve found that people at the executive level of companies get value from talking to peers in other organisations, they are more likely to cut the BS and tell each other what Transformation might look like for them, warts and all. It’s no different from tech talking to tech or coach talking to coach at a conference. You share knowledge with people who are experiencing similar challenges.
Speaking of conferences, I LOVE inviting these folks to conferences to expose them to the different stories and techniques of organisational Transformation. It could be worth the cost of registration to get your fave sponsoring Executive along to an Agile or Lean conference and show them around while you’re there, introducing them to their peers for future conversations. Execs are always looking for ways to get their companies performing better so will generally soak up the experience.
5. NEVER WASTE A CONVERSATION
Speaking of speaking, you’re going to want to do a lot of this. Speaking inside your organisation at formal presentations, running brown bags to create a buzz and teach new techniques, sharing stories and never wasting the opportunity to ‘spread the word’ about how you might improve how things are working. I feel quite uncomfortable writing this but there’s really no better term than evangelisation when it comes to sharing the upside to transformation, and I’m guessing if you’ve read this far that you’re an Agile evangelist yourself, but if not, at least an enthusiast!
Don’t hide your enthusiasm and take every opportunity that comes your way in the form of other people and their curiosity. Stay back after a showcase to answer additional questions, have coffees and informal lunches with people, and never forget to follow up with a very important catch phrase of mine “I’ll send you a link!” there are endless resources to share on the topic of Transforming ways of working (ahem - these blogs for example!)
6. THE GIFT OF AGILITY
Here’s a couple of true stories of things that worked for me:
A coworker had a DVD of Tom and Mary Poppendiek - authors of “Lean Software Development” - who had been filmed talking at a meet up in New Zealand. The video was very impactful to me as a fan of the Poppendiek’s. We burned a couple of extra copies and gave one to the CIO - who was already bought in, and one to the PMO Director - who we were trying to win over. I packaged them up with bottles of nice red wine, on the condition that while they drank the wine they had to watch the DVD. I don’t know if they ever made it through the whole video, I’m certain they made it through the wine, and it was worth the price of 2 reds to show how serious and passionate we were about getting their attention on the topic.
I once went to a ThoughtWorks conference and asked enough questions on the day to win myself a copy of “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. I read it and loved it and then re-gifted it to my CIO at the time, making him solemnly promise he would read it. To check, I hid a tiny note halfway through the book saying something like “let me know if you got this far”. During a big meeting months later he pulled out the book and said “Alex leant me this book, she didn’t think I would read it, but I did! And here’s the proof!” my little note held aloft in his hand. How we laughed.
There’s lots of ways you can create enthusiasm and attention, I’m not saying you have to try the stunts I did, but I will say that on both occasions they worked to raise awareness, and that if you’re feeling a lack of support or awareness, than fire up your creativity and get to work!
7. WRITE DOWN THE WHOLE END TO END PROCESS MODEL
Occasionally you are going to come across folks in a business that are more analytical, more process driven and are perhaps nervous that working in autonomous Agile teams is going to introduce risk, leave us open to expensive errors and waste or something more catastrophic that they will surely articulate to you.
It might feel like the right answer is to just tell them that a new Transformed way of working is actually LESS risky, or MORE financially prudent or has MORE governance than a bunch of Slide Deck and Project Traffic Light fakery might make us believe in our traditional delivery models, however some people are not going to accept that, unless you can back it up with some docco.
I’m not above jotting down a few process models about Agile ways of working, I’m not above illustrating how a scaled Agile “Team of Agile Teams” can coherently work together to create value. Sketch it out for YOUR business, that is, the process from end to end and how it will work within your domain, with your teams and actual ways of achieving sign off, to deliver value. Showing that there is cohesion in the model, and that we can use this approach to deliver value for the business, that includes it’s own checks and balances, shouldn’t be too much to ask. In fact if you can’t sketch it out to your own satisfaction, there’s a chance that there is some missing cohesion or checks and balances anyway.
I’ve created these kinds of process flows multiple times for the Transformations I’ve started and still do these for the clients we work with today.
8. TACKLE AGILE FUNDING - WHEN IT’S TIME
Your Transformation is always going to experience some ‘lumpiness’ in fulfilling the promise of a more Value driven and Customer Centric mode of delivery, if you never crack the model for how we can fund agile teams.
It’s likely you’ll come from a traditional model that asks you to plan out all eventualities in advance, including all possible costs, and commit to fixed dates for that cost before being granted the permission to work as autonomous Agile teams. Most companies I know ‘get around’ this by asking for a very big business case approval first, making up a few dates and outcomes, and resort to padding the outcomes and estimates by a huge amount to satisfy the business casing process.
This obstacle to agility and to Transformation is a very big one, but amazingly there are loads of organisations with scaled Agile ways of working that live with these conditions and seem to prosper anyway! It seems no one in big corporations has the gumption to admit that Business Cases are largely made-up and therefore the Emperor continues to prance around in his new clothes.
Agile funding processes are not usually where you START your Transformation efforts, in fact I don’t recommend that you do start with Agile Funding reform, I just recommend that eventually you should tackle it. When you do, you are going to use research, internet articles, visits to places where they already fund their Agile teams in a much more Agile way, and probably you are going to use some Slide Decks, and it’s going to take a bit of your energy. You’ll want to manage your own expectations that it’s going to take a few bites to get whole finance teams to embrace a new model into how they work. Especially if in doing so you are going to cause them extra work.
One thing that you MUST do is ensure that you have Agile teams that are delivering value successfully before you ask your finance people to work in a different way, there has to be an upside that’s obvious and immutable to all.
9. GIVE KUDOS TO THE SUPPORTERS
My final pattern that is essential for amplifying awareness for necessary change is to give the appropriate Kudos to the influential senior managers and Execs that are believing in you and smoothing the path for Transformation. They have the work of convincing their peers and company boards that we should invest in changes that can be quite disruptive; to people’s own KPIs, to their departments, to organisation structures and to individual’s own roles within the organisation. It can be a threatening place for them to operate from, potentially impacting their own career progression, and therefore it’s important that they are encouraged and thanked for their efforts that make it possible for you to swoop in with your Agile brown bags, links, pilots, books, bottles of wine and ultimately for your Transformed teams to deliver the most value possible.
These people are the grappling hooks and the good places to get a grip when you need to climb that challenging mountain.
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Next in this series - Gathering Advocates, why we are always better Transforming together.