Tag: change

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Processes

Good process is a great way to scale your impact. Bad processes stifle creativity and stop progress dead.

So when you think it’s time to add a new process, be really honest with yourself why you want to add it, and ask yourself a few key questions.

Firstly, is it actually going to help? Does it solve the problem you are trying to stop, or does it makes things worse? Get some people to throw some rocks at the proposal. Imagine what happens if you follow the process to the letter, as people’s judgement will fade over time, you can’t rely on that.

Assuming it passes these tests, and is likely to lead to better outcomes and good behaviours, ask yourself if it’s worth the cost? If the impact is big, then it might be worth a new process. If it’s small, why are you bothering? Don’t add overhead you don’t need.

Then ask if it’s really worth the cost. If you add an approval step to every release, then you’ll release more slowly. If three people must sign off a slide, then triple whatever the original cost to create was. If it’s your process, then you’ll need to own these costs. Nothing comes for free, it’s never just pure upside.

Finally, ask yourself how you’ll get rid of the process, or update it when the time comes. It’s easier to add than subtract, especially when you create jobs to enforce a process. What’s your way out? How will you know when a process is embedded into culture? How do you know if you are going through the motions for no real benefit?

Good process accelerates change. Bad process stifles it. Do the work to make it good, don’t just launch and forget.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Don’t force the Process

Hammer hitting a biscuit and smashing it
Photo by Theo Crazzolara on Unsplash

Requiring a uniformity of process caps the highest potential of your teams.

Process protects us from making mistakes, and can lift every team to a good level. Forcing this is what stops us finding the truly great performances.

We sometime fall to uniformity when we find it hard to measure the outcomes that teams are driving. Measuring adherence to a process is often easy. It’s easy to count the number of widgets that are being created, and it’s easy to see if we’re all doing it in the right way. It’s not always easy to determine if we’re doing the smart things that actually achieve the outsize results.

A classic example of a mistake is to enforce Scrum, or any other particular flavour of agile. The more tightly it’s enforced, the less likely you’ll get a 10/10 team performance.

Instead, go back to the Agile Principles. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

An overly rigid process hinders this adjustment. It doesn’t recognise the unique context of the team, and that’s where the potential is capped.

By all means, if your org needs certain things reported, or activities that must be done for legal reasons then you can require that of the teams. Beyond those must do things, you should instead encourage your teams to experiment and find out what works best for them.

The goals of leadership in this model is to share the things that are working, and also the things that aren’t. Giving access to the tools that can support, and taking away the noise that breaks focus.

It’s imperative that you don’t just allow each team to meander through the path to excellence!

So forcing a process can take you up to good, coaching teams and sharing the best outcomes widely will help you achieve greatness.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Smaller Risks Less Allowed?

Three dice stacked on a deck of cards

There’s a common pattern as anything moves through a maturity curve of people being less open to risk.

Wen something is new and exciting, we can do lots of new and exciting things. When organisations are small, it’s easy to make a change, and one reason is we’re still open to the risk of it not working out.

As things mature, people get more used to ‘how they are’. Big orgs become more focused on maintaining what’s working, and that means taking fewer risks.

It’s harder to drive change, and in an ever faster moving world, that lack of flexibility soon becomes a major risk itself.

It’s important to identify these situations, and then look for ways to counteract the change. We don’t invite anarchy into a large organisation, but we must stay open to the desire to change.

To help frame these thoughts, imagine some of the inventions of the last couple of centuries. If cars were invented today then they wouldn’t be allowed out on the road. The risks we accepted then were far different to those we accept today. Similarly, improvements to cars are always having a higher bar to entry, we’re less willing to tolerate smaller risks, but things we have accepted for a while carry on being thought of as ‘fine’ to the general populace.

In a growing organisation, the same thing happens. Existing policies and practices are accepted, but changes get harder to make. We put people in place who are rewarded on the basis of successfully operating these processes, and often incentivise risk reduction rather than value capture.

Some of this behaviour is vital! The larger the org the higher the chance of an internal bad actor. We need to protect against this. We have changing legal responsibilities that we must meet. We have grown due to being successful, and it makes sense to protect that success.

Too much however, is dangerous. We have to be able to adapt when circumstances change. We need to be confident in taking some risks when the situation is ambiguous or opportunity is at hand.

So what can we do?

Beg forgiveness – A strategy that’s high risk in and of itself. If you are right it’s all likely to be good, but be ready to accept some consequences, especially if you realise some of those risks!

Seek support – Find someone more senior who agrees with your approach, and get them to sign off on it. Processes often exist to make decisions without needing to involve an important person. Get that backing to step around the process and get moving. Build trust with smaller things, and this approach will even work for some significant changes.

Change the system – Hardest option, but biggest long term payoff. It’s easy to put something in place to prevent a risk occurring, it’s harder to remove or streamline it. So, taking on that task might not be easy, but getting rid of an outdated practice will let everyone move faster.

As organisations grow, they can be less receptive to change. Smaller risks become less allowed.

If you see this happening, use some of these techniques to free up the capacity to change. The world moves on, you need to move with it!

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Moving House

I’ve been off schedule because I’ve just moved house, hopefully for the last time in a long time!

It’s really true how much stress this change can bring to you, even though you signed up to it and knew it was going to happen.

So rather than a big long essay about how houses and software are similar (It Depends is not just a software phrase!), I thought I’d give you a chance to reflect a bit on that change, as it’s common to so many of us.

It’s something that’s mostly within our control, where we decide the when, where and how but it’s still really hard work. Whether that’s the size of the change, the new location, the costs or the disruption to daily life, it’s a big impact that can take a lot out of you.

So think about changes where there’s less control to the people undergoing the change. A re-org or change of priorities at work. It’s smaller than uprooting your whole life, but maybe it isn’t to the people it’s impacting in that moment.

Even worse if you live and breathe the change for ages before it happens. You can fall into the trap of thinking it’s smaller than it is.

Go back to moving house, you thought it was easy to cope with, but when you do it, it turns out it wasn’t. Again, you had more control there, the reality didn’t match the story you told.

You need to think about how to communicate changes, think back to these big changes to remind you when things were tough, and build your message with empathy and care.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Unshipped is worthless

Sailing ship

Software can be changed quickly. High performing teams can ship a new release to end users multiple times per day.

When we realise this and make use of it, we can push against the problems of perfection, of doing nothing or endlessly refining plans. Instead, we can slice up changes to be small, to be good enough to take the next step and to be quick to revert if they weren’t actually what we wanted.

The thing that unlocks these behaviours most quickly is building in the deep understanding that something that is out in the world providing value is better than the most perfect system that’s still stuck on your private network.

It’s hard to do, as you need to get used to things not being the absolute best they can be, instead that they are good enough to solve a problem today and can be improved tomorrow.

The best way I’ve found to break the desire for perfection is to connect directly with your end users. Every layer between you and the person using your solution is an extra chance to focus on something other than shipping the change, so cut through them to go faster.

When you meet up with users and see their daily pains, shipping something now that solves some of them is always more appealing than shipping something in a couple of months that might solve all their pains.

You also get fast feedback on the things you’ve already given them. You find out what’s really important to them, and also which of the details you sweat over they really care about.

Fast feedback loops like this encourage you to go faster. Ship small incremental changes when they are ready rather than building up big blocks that will be ‘perfect’ from day 1 but never actually going anywhere.

Unshipped changes are worth nothing. Get them in front of users and iterate, and capture that value now!

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Action Triggers

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

When you want to start taking steps towards change, but you are finding it hard to get going, then set yourself an action trigger to help kickstart the effort.

This is a simple mental plan to execute an action when you encounter a particular situation. It’s a great technique to help you build up or change a habit, by preloading some decisions in our mind.

It’s a simple technique. First of all, pick what you want to change. For example, you might want to show more gratitude when someone does a great job.

Next up, get specific. Exactly when and how are you going to do this? If it’s too loose, it won’t be effective in changing your behaviour. When we’re praising people, it has greatest impact close to the good activity, so you might set an trigger of “When I see someone asking a great question in a meeting, I will actively thank them for that input”.

This is good because it’s a specific situation (great question), and a specific action (thanking them). As you’ve already made this decision, you take away the concern of what “a great job” looks like, and how you’ll “show more gratitude.

When you make it easy, you are more likely to take these actions and change your behaviour. The complex processing that exhausts your Type 2 brain is dealt with ahead of time, letting you shift these changes to the quick and lazy Type 1.

If you want to be even more likely to be successful, then either say your trigger out loud, or write it down. Make the commitment public and it give you even more impetus to succeed.

This technique is not a panacea. It will only work if you want to make a change, and it will only help move you towards good behaviours. It’s not going to change your direction 180 degrees, and it’s not going to shift you fundamentally.

To make some positive change and build energy in your flywheel, setup a couple of action triggers to preload some complex decisions and make it simple when the situation occurs.

Categories
Leadership

Who Benefits?

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Making any kind of change is difficult, especially in a large and complex organisation.

One really useful technique is to identify who is going to benefit from the change. Think about everyone who will be impacted, ranging from customers to suppliers, your internal stakeholders to your immediate team.

If the only benefits that you identify are to you or your direct team, then you are going to be treading a long and lonely path. You may find that this kind of change is one to put on to the backburner, as it’s going to struggle to build momentum.

In the majority of cases, you’ll find some people where the costs outweigh the benefits that they’ll see, and you’ll find some who benefit more from the change than the effort it’ll cost.

Those who benefit more will be your key allies in bringing this change to bear, and should be the first people you enlist in building momentum in the group. Getting these people on board is key to success. Make sure they see the benefits that will accrue to them, and they are likely to become enthusiastic supporters of the change.

When you have that initial support, it will be easier to convince those who may be neutral towards the change, those who are neither going to gather major benefits or costs. There’s a lot of value in there being visible and vocal allies to convince others. A lone voice can be dismissed as an outlier, multiple advocates are positive reinforcement and can start to move the group.

Finally, you can start to move those who are more impacted by the change. With a range of supporters, the change is gaining momentum. There’s a point where people will start to support it to make sure they are not left behind, being part of the group is important. You might need to commit some additional effort to bring around the most impacted, but if you’ve built the platform with your supporters, it will be less than you might think.

So, find out who is going to benefit and enlist them in your change effort. Many voices will bring success more quickly than a lone effort. Show the value you’ll bring and get those supporters lined up to move the group forwards quickly.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Bringing in the New

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I’ve been watching the theatre across the road being built for over a year now, and it’s really great to see some of the parallels between construction in the physical world vs the crafting of software in the virtual.

As we get into the New Year, then it’s very likely you are starting to put into practice some of the new ideas that will help you start building up your flywheel of change and achieving your goals. Today I’m sharing a couple of insights on how to do this well, from what I’ve observed throughout this construction process.

Every time a new material arrives on site, there’s a simple approach used to get it into the construction process. The experts in the particular area will fit a small area (something like a single window in a frame). They’ll review it, look at how it’s sitting in the shell of the building. If it looks good, they’ll show it to other workers, who are able to go and fit the rest of the items across the full facade. If it’s not working out, they’ll re-work this area, re-do the process and learn in a low risk corner of the site. If it goes really badly, then they’ll strip it out, and wait until improved materials can be delivered.

This low risk test and learn allows the construction to proceed at pace and in a more predictable way. There’s two clear stages in play, once the process is great and easy to apply, then it’s rolled out quickly across the whole building. The rework is limited to the testing phase, where it’s quick to correct any issues.

This is absolutely the best way to approach launching new practices and processes in your organisation, or building and launching new software products.

The most powerful part is to recognise when you are switching between the learning cycle and the rollout cycle, as that’s the point you change how you are delivering that change. This is also the most important time to communicate clearly and set expectations as to how that change will land.

So, in summary, to make your change a success:

  1. Test out a process or product in a controlled space
  2. Learn quickly, and adapt your approach
  3. Loop around again if it’s not right yet
  4. Recognise when it’s good enough, and roll out at pace

This approach gives the best chance of landing significant change with the smallest cost.

Get out there and do it!

Categories
Coaching

Get up and Gone?

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

It’s certainly been a really hard year, and whilst there’s certainly hope for the future, we still have a long road to travel before we’re free of the weight of the pandemic.

That means you may well not feel the usual “New Year, New Me” desire for change, or worse, you feel you should be looking for that change but don’t have any motivation for it.

Well, when we dive into this, it’s pretty clear that tying a desire to change to an arbitrary date in calendar just doesn’t works. There’s tons of research on this, with a headline that 1 in 4 of us gives up an New Year resolution in the first week of January.

It’s going to be extra unlikely to hit those large goals this year, as we’re all coming from a pretty heavy place of stress and uncertainty. Our starting lines are a lot further back this year, so these big changes are even less likely to land.

Instead of pinning directly on the Big Scary Goal, set some small ones to build momentum and drive your Flywheel of Change. If you aren’t feeling up to anything now, then just keeping going is great! If you want to go for something, find that small first step and take that. See how it feels and keep on going.

Tell someone about your goals and the steps you are going to take. There’s a lot of value in making this commitment to another person, you are much more likely to build that momentum if you bake in that accountability.

So if you aren’t feeling the big change right now, then don’t let the time of year push you into trying for one that will fail. Instead, set something more achievable, get some support in place and start building some positive momentum.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Is it Better?

Photo by Henry Becker on Unsplash

“Change is easy, improvement is far more difficult” – Dr. Ferdinand Porsche

When we make a change, we want to make things better. However, it’s not always easy to ensure that the change is actually positive overall. How can you increase the chances of actually making an improvement?

Good news, there’s a set of simple (not easy!) steps you can follow to vastly improve the odds on hitting that improvement you are seeking.

First, be very clear what the problem is. Write it down. State it in the simplest possible terms, which means you might need to refine it several times. Get specific, watch out specifically for weak or ambiguous terms. “We’re slow” is a very weak problem “We consistently take twice as long as our initial estimate to launch a product” is much stronger.

When you have a strongly stated problem, you can then work on what that improvement would look like. Do you want to improve your estimates, reduce the actual shipping time even if the estimates are still bad, or do something else entirely?

Next up, get explicit about what you are willing to spend to seek improvement. Are you going to invest more resources? Drop something that’s not important or high value? Maybe even make something else harder or not as great as it used to be?

Now you get to start trying things. You’ve got a framework to know if you are going in the right direction, and the guardrails to correct if it’s not going well. This is where the change gets to be implemented. Be as brave or incremental as needed for your problem and constraints, but be ready to measure and correct as you go.

Before making each change, record your hypothesis. “By doing this, I believe that we will move X to Y”. Take the actions, measure the impact and review against the hypothesis. If it’s going well, then keep it up! If not, don’t be afraid to cut the initiative and return to the status quo to try again.

Put in the effort to bring clarity to your proposed change, add the effort to measure as you go, and you are much more likely to find that improvement you seek.