change slows you down

On more than one occasion, I have seen the burning platform reason for agile adoption in an organisation. I’m sure most agilists have seen this, and I’m confident that it is the primary reason to think about agile more seriously for most companies. Unfortunately, as an agile coach, receiving an initial brief of “Make that team agile” is more common than I would like. Managers rarely understand that they’re asking people to make a considerable change and are even less likely to realise that they will need to make changes too. Without this fundamental understanding that adopting agile is more than changing what we call things, it is impossible to understand these changes will slow everything down for a while.

I have never seen a company willing to slow down to speed up. Something about being in an organisation’s existing (and hopefully soon-to-be old) ways of thinking prevents even new leaders from changing. I still find it shocking that people brought into an organisation as change agents - in whatever capacity - end up conforming to the existing culture, even though they find it incredibly frustrating. I suspect this is something to do with the way neurotypical people engage with each other at the social level; without even noticing it, they go along with the narrative of, “Get through this project, and then we can think about making some time to change.”

I remember in my first Scrum Master role being taught about the J curve of change by the excellent Dan Brown, who was by some good fortune working in the same organisation as an Agile Coach. The thing in his explanation that stood out to me the most was when an organisation realises that they’re slowing down because of the change, instead of holding on tight to reap the rewards, they quit and start another change! This results in an organisation that keeps getting slower and slower at things, and one can easily imagine it starts to wear its people down in the process.

It wouldn’t be unfair to call me a self-improvement junkie. As a teenager, I really liked how the Californians on TV would say “like” a lot, in particular, instead of “said.” So I decided to adopt this speech pattern, and I still have it today. (The older version of myself is less impressed by it, but I haven’t changed again because it was the first conscious change I made, which teaches me I am in control of myself.) All the changes I’ve made since that first change have taught me that there is a period of adjustment that takes time and energy before it becomes second nature. Its what we see when a new person joins an organisation; at first they don’t have a clue what they’re doing, then they get the gist but go slowly and occasionally need to be reminded of certain things, and then they know enough that they can do the job and teach the next person how to do it too. (Shu-Ha-Ri, anyone?)

How do we help our clients to understand they need to slow down, they need coaching, and they need to be better now, not in the future?