A Primer for Smart Change Agents
Have you ever tried to act as a change agent in your organization, and bumped into obstacles that seemed to be blocking the change? There’s no such software development organization in the world that allows no space for some sort of an adjustment or an improvement. Whether you hit a wall as a change catalyst, or succeed will mostly depend on the following:
If the change you have in mind is trending — the way agile adoption was in the mid-late 2000’s — mid 2010’s — then you’re lucky. With this particular example, one would have had to apply little effort to champion the change, because agile became mainstream in those times — and some organizations are fine going along with this wave, while the others, by now, have been there and done that. Anyway, there has been a lot of information available as to why and how agile is supposed to add value, and in this case, your intrinsic motivation as a change agent would have been synced with the extrinsic sweeping wave. Not only your organization, but many others have been encouraged to hop on the agile bandwagon; and since the change here has been supported by a mainstream movement, it could have been initiated smoothly as in a domino effect, which is started by one easy sweep of a finger.
The second scenario for driving change is quite the opposite one. It might be related to a not that obvious trend, but you somehow feel that the way stakeholders treat this thing is in need of a major overhaul. Hypothetically, this scenario might involve your stating, and restating, and saying it again, and again, that the product that your company develops is in need of a more intuitive user interface. You’d run into an inertia as the stakeholders would probably say that all is fine with the user interface, because customers seem to be content with what they have, and revamping “the face” of the software involves some heavy changes to the code, etc. Unless you provide some compelling proof that the current customers as well as the prospects find the user interface confusing, and walk away because of that, the effort required to boost the change in the stakeholders’ attitude by pushing it down the pipe would be akin to that of a weightlifter doing 3 consecutive clean & jerk attempts.
The third scenario for driving change is not as easy, as scenario 1, and not as super-taxing, as scenario 2. This one is more about an innovative change. Say, you’re still defending a difficult case, such as improving user experience in enterprise software. There’s no domino effect, and no “join the others” feel in the air. What can one do to trigger the change? How to convince the executives/stakeholders that the time will come when the current clients will not be happy about the bulky UI? The incentive for change in this case has to be backed by good old research and analysis methods (actually, this would be true for scenario 2 as well). Instead of tearing your muscles as in weightlifting (or, rather, straining your speaking “muscle”), you might want to invest some effort into a research — taking advantage of the big data as well as of other resources/references — and discern some so far inobvious patterns which would help present you cause as a compelling one. If a mere call-to-action is rendered into a pragmatic business need, the actual “raw muscle” effort of arguing wouldn’t take more than that of this little girl who uses the power of her opponent to nail a victory.
Related:
This story is based on an earlier article.
