Getting an organisation to change how they work is hard — and a bunch of folk I know have been forced to become some variety of “change agent” when they would much rather be doing the actual work.
The user researcher who wants to kickstart Research Operations — so he can spend more time doing actual user research work. The developer who wants to convince the company to experiment with WIP limits, so she can spend more time coding and less time context-switching between a dozen different things.
Sometimes it can be hard to figure out whether that change work is going to be worth the effort.
I have a very informal three item assessment that’s been useful to me in the past when facing that challenge — trying to understand an organisation’s expectations & needs, and whether spending the energy to do change work is likely to succeed.
Because I’m not very complicated, it’s not very complicated:
Are they seeing it as long-term change or a quick-fix? Because everybody is already working one way and it’s hard to turn that boat. It will need continual repetition & checking. Existing working habits are hard to break, even when folk want to break them. There will be missteps. People will accidentally fall back into old ways. There will be resistance. Time, money, and people will needed for it. Are they expecting that work?
Do they see it as a change, or as an addition? Are they willing to talk about the things they’re gonna stop doing as much as the things they’re gonna start doing? (Hard to become more outcome focused if every exec update is focused on a date-based feature roadmap. Hard to become more incremental in our delivery work if we’re 100% invested in an internal design agency model that only delivers page perfect mock-ups. etc.)
Are they looking to solve a problem, or do they want a solution? Do they want to deliver useful software more often, or do they want to “be Agile”? Do they see issues with strategy deployment because teams are off doing random stuff and they don’t know how to steer, or do they want to “do OKRs”? And so on. Problem-first folk end up much better people to work, and if you cannot get the solution-first folk to talk about their problems then things are likely to go poorly. (Chris Matt’s piece on Communities of Need & Community of Solutions helped clarify this for me several years back.)
I don’t have a formal assessment for the above — I gut-grade people based on the conversations about the work, and poke at areas explicitly if I don’t get a read on them.
When I feel I have enough context I evaluate like this:
Enthusiastic “yes”: Folk looking for Long-Term Change to address a Problem tend to be fun and productive people to work with.
Hard “no”: Folk who want a Quick-Fix Additive Solution are almost guaranteed to be terrible people to work with on change (maybe just give a talk / workshop type activity, which can maybe turn some hearts and minds for later work.)
Worth exploring:
- If folk have problem focus, and the problem is large — then investing some time on moving expectations on quick-fix vs long-term, and change vs addition, can be worth it. They’ve identified an actual pain point, and if you can find ways to show incremental progress they’re more likely to be willing to spend more time & attention on it.
- If folk have a solution focus, but they’re expecting it to be a long-term change — then investing some time on pulling out their underlying problem can be worth it. They’re set up for the long haul, and figuring out the real problem can be part of that work.
Leaning “no”: Every other combination tends to involve a lot of work. Some good will usually come of that work — but it will often be a frustrating PITA. Consider saving your energy for something more likely to be long-term successful.
I think the biggest value for me was getting a handle on that final “frustrating PITA” category — because I found having the expectation of “This is not going to be the perfect gig, but some good will come out of it” helps make it a better experience when I did say “yes”.
When I was talking about this framing on the socials the always insightful Melissa Appel commented:
you need whole company buy-in, which means you need the CEO and executive team fully on board with making changes in their teams too.
Which is absolutely spot on. One of the things I find useful about this model is that you can apply it quick ’n’ dirty at the individual level.
If you got to browse my notebooks you’d see a bunch of little diagrams like the above attached to different people at different levels inside an organisation. Comparing those diagrams can be wonderfully informative.
For example a pattern that’s popped up multiple times is folk closer to the team level tending towards the “problem” & “long-term” end of the scales. As you move up the org — and things get simplified and narrowed down — it gets a bit more “solution” and “short-term” oriented.
Having those differences visible can make poking at them so much easier.
TL;DR: Look for people expecting a Long-Term Change to address a Problem, and avoid people demanding a Quick-Fix Additive Solution.
ttfn.