change in the turning point

This week I’ve been speaking with some agile coaches that I used to mentor. We’ve been talking about whether or not organisational transformation is possible. I am certain we are not the only ones hired to change things and then prevented from doing so. Those at the top of an organisation seem to understand that things need to change and fail to understand the biggest change needed is within themselves.

In the coaching community, we often talk about how changing other people is impossible and that one can only really change oneself. I have often wondered about how I can call myself a coach, and at the same time, hire myself out as a change agent. I’ve recently been rewriting my CV, and it has occurred to me how difficult it is to list my wins when I rely so heavily upon those around me changing because of my influence rather than direct action.

I’ve been reading the book Project to Product (which I thoroughly recommend, it’s a well-written and lovely journey through flow metrics), in which the author talks about Geoffrey Moore’s technology life cycle model as written about in Zone to Win. This model describes how a new industrial process starts taking hold, becomes a disruptive influence on more established companies, kills off those who didn’t change their ways in time, and then embeds itself as the new normal. In the middle of this, he describes the turning point.

The turning point is the last opportunity for existing organisations to stay relevant. As I see it, these organisations will become poorer as they lose market share to those who have been considered disrupters up until this point. In the meantime, they will be throwing all the money they can at the problem, even if they’re not sure what the problem is. As IT and software development become the core competencies an organisation needs, we’ve watched traditional businesses try and fail to scale IT, then agile, then dev ops.

To come back to my conversations with other agilists, is significant change even possible? Perhaps for some. I suspect not for most. Given we have never seen organisations as big as the ones that dominate today, I think it reasonable that we expect a lower success rate in the current turning point than we’ve had in those previously.

So then, what are those of us who are trying to help these organisations change doing? Are we exploiting the situation, and those who are hiring us? How does that sit with our espoused values, principles, and ethics if we are?