In most companies, changing a broken process is about as easy as building a defibrilator from household components. Sure, Macguyver could do it, but would you want my home-made defibrilator used to resuscitate you after a heart attack? Not me.
It is particularly difficult to change an inefficient process in a time of reasonable stability. If managers feel secure in their positions, projects seem on track, and customers are happy, you will find that your boss (and his boss) will have little interest in eliminating inefficiencies or even outright busted processes from the organization. Want to introduce a totally new way of doing business (like bring Agile into a waterfall shop) in a period of organizational tranquility? Forget it! You don’t have a chance.
Sure, everyone will listen to you. Heck, they might even ask you to put together a proposal complete with cute power point slides. They might even parade your little presentation in front of a committee or two, but in the end your proposal is going… going… gone. To the trash bin. Sorry. Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of reasons for your proposal’s failure, and a slick manager will even make you believe them. But the truth is your proposal failed because of your bad timing.
I know this is counter-intuitive, but it’s true. Most organizations don’t appreciate it when the sailors (not the captains) rock the boat on otherwise peaceful seas. Captains can rock the boat if they want, but sailors are supposed to keep it steady.
No, the best time to introduce dramatic change is at what common sense declares to be the worst possible time to change the rules of the game: in the depths of a crisis or the throes of organizational chaos. When the boat is pitching like mad in thirty foot seas, sailors can get away with ANYTHING, particularly if it improves the likelihood that the ship won’t sink after all.
Why? It seems obvious to me, now that I’ve been through it a few dozen times. In every crisis, or in the midst of chaos, people stop caring HOW you do something. After an embarrassing project failure, people don’t care what cover page you use for your TPS report. Heck, they might not even care if you produce a TPS report at all! Instead, you will hear the following sentence. I have to pause and take a deep breath before I write them – they fill me with such joy that even my fingers get a little choked up.
Here they are: “I don’t care how you do it. I just want it to get done.” This is the FREE PASS sentence. Every time you hear it, you should prepare yourself to make magic happen.
These are glorious words to the trained ear. When you hear them, do it your way. Pitch PMBOK out the window and use SCRUM, if that’s your thing. Or build your data-driven web app with Ruby on Rails on Apache instead of JSP on WAS. Nobody will care, and when you’re successful (I’m feeling positive today – any other day I would say IF you’re successful) you will hear important people say words almost as gratifying as the FREE PASS sentence.
You’ll hear: “Wow, I really like your approach. It was lean, focused, and totally effective. We should run all our projects this way. Do you think it can scale to a larger effort?”
The word for crisis in Japanese is Kiki (pronounced key-key). The kanji, or semi-pictorial symbols for words, that are used for kiki are very interesting. The first “ki” is the same symbol commonly used in hazardous warnings. It means DANGER. The second “ki”? It means opportunity.
Crises, chaos, and periods of painful change are dangerous opportunities. You should look for the opportunity in every crisis and find a way to leverage it for positive change.
Stumble it!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jeff // Jul 26, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Are you sure that you work in corporate IT ?
No manager at my workplace has the authority to make those kinds of decisions – they might as well start looking for a new job if they just decided it was OK not to follow the official process… or even worse, use a “non-standard” technology like RoR. The mentality seems to be: better to do it by the book and fail, rather than to do something unapproved and (maybe) be successful.
Keep up the good blog entries – it makes me feel less alone out here.
2 dave // Jul 27, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Okay, I admit that this post may be a bit simplistic. It doesn’t automatically work when your IT manager is pulling his (or her) hair out, unless they have autonomy over the issue you want to fix. So, we have to manage our expectations to be within the autonomy of the manager who is desperate. The ideal situation is when a BUSINESS PARTNER utters the magic free pass phrase. Then, IT managers who once objected will suddenly get in line. It’s a beautiful thing to behold when it happens. And trust me, it does happen. Sometimes.
3 Allen // Sep 5, 2006 at 12:28 am
There are actually two times that you have this opportunity… both where the first derivitive equals zero… in other words when you are at the top or the bottom of a wave. What you are describing is the bottom of the wave, when they have nothing left to lose. But there is that special moment at the end of a successful project when you have about 3-9 weeks of “I don’t know… do whatever you would like to” time. Usually good for creating the powerpoints that you mentioned. But in either case if you can deliver a prototype in that time frame then you are set.
Though you may have a good point. They may not get implemented in corporate America until the next bottom wave.
4 Allen // Sep 5, 2006 at 12:29 am
P.S. I LOVE that you brought this topic to light!
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