Don’t start from where you are

For decades now, I’ve been in workshops with a number of companies that seek to change some aspect of their business. Reflecting on the more recent workshops, however, made me recognize patterns that seem to reappear frequently or typically. As we all know, change is hard. For individuals and even more so for organizations. However, the patterns discussed below lead to less than optimal or simply bad outcomes.

The first pattern that I see occurring very frequently is teams starting from where they are and from the reality they’re experiencing right now. The misconception is that the world will continue as it is today. So, rather than focusing on what the world will likely look like when the change has been realized – which often takes years, especially in large organizations – the team focuses on the status quo and assumes it is static. A good example, concerning DevOps, is when many teams simply refuse to accept that customers will, also in their industry, start to ask for frequent deployment of new versions of software. The argument for this refusal is that customers aren’t asking for it today, even if it’s clear that industry after industry is transitioning in this direction.