This is a transcript of episode 364 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel.
Can you drive change in your organisation by accelerating crises?
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
Deming
Listen to this section at 00:14
Squirrel: Welcome back to Troubleshooting Agile. Hi there, Jeffrey, and happy New Year!
Jeffrey: Oh hi, Squirrel. Happy New Year to you too!
Squirrel: So you have something you listen to, and I’m not sure that I quite followed it, but you said that it gave our listeners some really interesting, counter-intuitive advice, and that was to accelerate crises, to make crises happen faster. And that sounded interesting. So why don’t you tell us more about that?
Jeffrey: Yeah. Well, I think it’s really about making a sense of crisis or awareness of the crisis, as opposed to waiting for the crisis to be upon you or making the actual moment of pain happen, but it’s psychologically getting there. I was listening to a 1994 panel discussion and the context here was, people looking at the life and learnings of W. Edwards Deming, who we’ve talked about before on the podcast. In the panel, they were saying, ‘what is it that prevents more organisations from adopting the Deming philosophy?’
Jeffrey: Deming is kind of the father of lean manufacturing in the West. He was someone who wrote a book called ‘Out of the Crisis’, back in the 80s, when it was the rise of the Japanese imports that seemed to be taking over all of the manufacturing market. This question, though, about change is one that I find really interesting. I’m always looking for what prevents people or how to enable people to introduce changes that they think they need to have. What I liked here is there was just a very, very simple, practical thing that one of the speakers, a gentleman named Russell Ackoff, really well known management consultant of the time, and he basically made it very, very simple.
Change Happens When There is a Crisis
Listen to this section at 02:13
Jeffrey: Ackoff says, ‘change happens when there is a crisis.’ And then he gave this recipe. ‘You can bring that forward by extrapolating the current trends and the way the organisation currently operates, and extend them into the future to illustrate that the current way is not something that will work in the future.’ And he gave an example about a government agency that said, at current rate, they were going to have to hire every citizen in the United States to work for them, given the trend lines into the future. And I thought that was a really clear example.
Jeffrey: And I also thought that this fits with the kind of practices that we often do with things like big visible charts. We try to give people visibility into the future. Though we often do that, at least I often do this, in kind of operational, day to day sense. The idea of using this similar kind of techniques at a bigger scale, to introduce a bigger change was an idea that I hadn’t heard anyone describe in exactly this way before, and that’s what I wanted to share.
Squirrel: Well, fantastic. The name that I’ve often heard for the big visible charts, the burn up charts, the other kinds of things that we try to introduce in technology teams, is an information radiator. So is that what you mean by these big charts? You give people the graph, and then you invite them to continue the line where, for example, the software never gets delivered because we have more bugs arriving than fixes arriving. Is that the sort of thing that you mean?
Jeffrey: Yeah, exactly. This is part of what makes me think it will work, is that I’ve often seen it and used it in the day to day operational level. But if I’m thinking at a bigger level, I’m trying to introduce a bigger change in the organisation, maybe a change in strategy, the way we approach things, it’s the idea of scaling up. I first actually came across this technique from my father. He worked in manufacturing and his company was facing a crisis. They had a challenge. They needed to start shipping 30 units a month. The previous record was something like 15, so they weren’t very close—
Squirrel: They must have been making something big. This wasn’t widgets or screws. This was some huge thing they were making, I take it.
Jeffrey: It well, actually it was relatively small but expensive. It was something called a versabraille, and it was something that used like a light pen to read a page, and then you’d put your hand on it, and it would, it would come up with Braille underneath your fingers.
Squirrel: Oh, nice! Boy, my wife could use that. Okay, keep going.
Jeffrey: So they had these units and what he created was a burn up chart, and you can do the math here and say, ‘well if we need to ship 30 units a month, we pretty much need to ship one a day.’ The idea is you don’t want to find yourself on, you know, January 28th realizing, ‘oh my gosh, we’re not going to make it.’ With the burn up chart, people could see on day three, ‘hey, look, we’re behind!’ And on day five, ‘we’re further behind!’ It really changed the way people in the organisation behaved. It didn’t require an edict from the top to suddenly have people change their behavior, because they could see what needed to be done.
Jeffrey: So I have seen burn up charts be effective in, sort of, bringing the future forward.
Jeffrey: Maybe you could say like, ‘hey, look, if we have our scope as the top line and our delivered features—’ and the question is, ‘our are we narrowing the gap on our scope or is the scope keep growing faster than we can deliver?’ I’ve also seen people bring the future forward. And what I liked about Russell Ackoff’s idea is I could imagine this at a bigger strategic level, or like you mentioned saying a trend that would continue over years. You can say, ‘look, at the rate that we’re going, as we increase our software base, we spend more and more time in testing, for example. If we don’t start changing our approach, we’re never going to be able to ship anything in the future, though it may be a few years out.’ So that idea of extrapolating a trend, bringing about that sort of sense of crisis, that we need to change our behavior, was one that seemed to be applicable in many different situations, and that’s what I wanted to highlight.
Squirrel: Well, I got you, Jeffrey, this makes lots of sense. I have seen that work, and I have got one example of it, but I also have a sort of counter example or a devil’s advocate argument. So let’s see if we can cover those. The positive example I have is one that I wish listeners could help me with. You’ve heard me say this before, long time listeners, there’s a story that I’ve never been able to back up, which is that there was a timber company in Sweden, and this timber company was busy chopping down trees, when a couple of people in the middle ranks of the company, not at the top, not at the bottom, just people who were middle managers drew a line and the line showed how many trees there were and how many trees there had been. And they made the line go into the future, and they were going to be zero trees soon. And they said, ‘this might not be a good time to be a timber company! Maybe we should do something else.’ And they said that, ‘really the thing we should go after is transistors.’ And everybody said, ‘how do you spell that?’ Um, and I don’t know how to spell it in Swedish, but this company became Nokia, of course, and they started as Nokia Timber Company. I’ve never been able to find who those engineers were, because I’m really curious about who those middle people were, but that’s a perfect example of someone bringing that crisis forward and saying, ‘you know, we’re just not going to wait.’ So that’s an inspiring example. That’s one we could look at.
When a Crisis isn’t Enough
Listen to this section at 08:14
Squirrel: But here’s the puzzle for me. I know lots of organisations, and I can think of a client of mine who did this, who quite happily look at the impending doom and say, ‘boy, somebody really should fix that. You know, we should really do something about this, this crisis that we’re aware of.’ In my client’s case. They had a gigantic customer of theirs who was really dissatisfied, and it was really clear what they were dissatisfied about, why they were dissatisfied, how they were not going to pay more money if they continued to be dissatisfied. And my client didn’t do anything for six months! Now, that’s not quite true, they did a lot of things, but they didn’t do effective things. And they were certainly not doing what your father did by saying, ‘hey, we’ve done three things, and we’re this far into the critical period and none of them are working, and they’re making it worse. Maybe we should completely change our strategy.’ So there’s lots of examples like that where attempting to accelerate the crisis doesn’t work! Nobody listens to you saying, ‘hey, we’re going to run out of trees soon. So what do we do about that?’
Jeffrey: Well, actually it’s great to bring that up, because I will say, I don’t think there are any techniques that an individual can use that will always guarantee that the company, the organisation, get the right outcome. So if the idea is like saying, ‘is this a technique that’ll make sure that people pay attention and I get my way?’ I would say definitely no, but I would look at it the other way around and say, ‘the insight here is that if there’s not the ability to show a potential crisis, then change becomes very unlikely and your ability to successfully sell it will be, you know, probably zero, if you can’t show this.’
Jeffrey: Now, what you’ve just illustrated is that if you can show that there’s a crisis, will that guarantee that the people then change? And the answer is no. But I think that the idea is to give yourself a fighting chance, to be able to say, you know, ‘is there the potential for a crisis if we don’t change?’ And this is important. I’m often, in my career, for the last almost 20 years now, at CITCON, the conference that I help organize, I would have people coming in, and they would be very frustrated that they had better ways to do things, and they weren’t able to convince people that they should do these better things. So I’ve always been looking to say, ‘what are the techniques that people can be using to find those ways to be more convincing, to get other people to care about the things that are better?’ And I think this idea of, ‘is there a crisis? Is there something that you could point to say, look, if we continue the way that we are, that will be a problem.’
Jeffrey: If you do have that, then you have the potential. But if you lack it, then in my experience it can be very, very difficult and very frustrating. And so, you know, that’s what I’m looking at, having people get some idea of what they should be looking for in their environment, if they have something that’s bugging them, and they’re saying, ‘this really needs to change, it’s really important, it’d be so much better if we change,’ then maybe there’s a trend line you can look for. Maybe there’s something you could project out in the future to explain why maybe what we’re doing is okay for now. Or maybe it was okay in the past. Maybe it was great! Maybe it was the best thing to do a year ago or five years ago. But if we look forward a year or three years, that we’re not going to be able to continue. That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to give people, the hint of the kind of things they might look for, to give them the chance of introducing change where otherwise it might not be possible.
A Crisis is Necessary but Not Sufficient
Listen to this section at 12:00
Squirrel: Well that’s fascinating. Hey, Jeffrey, the way I’d put that succinctly is that it’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition. You better have some crisis coming somewhere or nobody’s going to care about your wonderful idea. However, it’s not enough, and I don’t want to promise this to listeners, but I’ve got a few thoughts, and maybe we can try to pick it up next time. A few thoughts coming from our book, Agile Conversations about what might be the sufficient condition, what might be missing, what’s going on in those organisations. I don’t want to make it a full cliffhanger because we might not actually cover it, but maybe we can put a pin in that for next time. What do you think?
Jeffrey: I love that idea.
Squirrel: Excellent. I think there’s a puppy crisis happening in the other room, so I’m going to go deal with my new puppy who’s joined us. Listeners who would like to get in touch with us head on over to AgileConversations.com. You’ll find free videos, free material information on running conversational dojos. That book I mentioned, Agile Conversations and our Twitter and email and blue sky and whatever else we’ve got. So we’d love to hear from you whether you’ve tried this or you haven’t, or if you know those Nokia engineers, I really want to meet them. The other way, of course, to keep in touch with us is to come back when we have another episode and that’ll be next week. So please come back for another episode of Troubleshooting Agile. Thanks, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Thanks, Squirrel.