Trains tracks…

Years ago I would drive by a large billboard each day that said “even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”. A colleague recently shared a story about an enterprise company that had tried introducing agile practices into it’s organization on several occasions yet failed each time to successfully gain adoption and acceptance.

After inspecting the situation a bit more, the underlying driver for this failure was due to the company’s ongoing success in generating cash and positive financial results. The financial situation of the company was contributing to an apathy within parts of the organization and in this case it was largely IT that was not really moving forward. IT wasn’t really pressured to innovate or change and although they wanted to introduce new ways of working, the sense of urgency was minimal and the risk of failure was low in their minds since there were really no major reasons to do something much different or much better.

This organization was on the right track in their respective industry yet they were just sitting there, basking in the sunlight of their success with little to no attention of taking a leap forward in the market, separating themselves from the rising competition and introducing innovation across the organization.

Today that company is one of several in a fiercely competitive market and while they are still experiencing levels of success but there is no doubt that their competitors of old and some new and rising stars have caught up. When companies talk about change there isn’t always a recognition that it requires mainly a mind-shift in how things are done. Tools, processes, practices are all ways to improve things and help change along it’s path but the acceleration, adoption and results most organizations seek from a change program comes from the passion of the people involved, which must include it’s leaders.

As with most things, the lack of planning and preparation to initiate change is often one major reason for it’s failure. Failing fast is a good agile principle but not a great Change Management one. Change is incremental, iterative and actually represents many of the practices and values you would find in very well run agile program or project.

Evaluating change is ongoing and requires the courage to “change” the people that don’t want to change. Change is also a constant and not a point in time “plan” that is started and ended like a project. The trap of success is the plateau phase that many organizations get to at some point in their lifecycle and what breaks through that effectively is a mindset of change that has existed along the way to continuously innovate and challenge the current environment.

The train track quote above was also stated another way that perhaps says it even better.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower