Change - How Bad Do You Want It?

“Can’t we just get on with this Agile transformation/ change program and deal with Psychological Safety and people issues after?”

That question breaks my heart. We hear it too often these days when we get to implementing PeopleNotTech’s work tool that increases Psychological Safety and EQ in Agile teams from CTOs or other execs tasked with some type of transformation or other and every time I hear it I wonder how to be kind to the burned-out Superhero asking it. 

If we dissect the question, what jumps out as a sad immediate realisation, is that the asker is sold to both concepts- Agile as they are meant to execute on it, and Psychological Safety as they know what it is and agree it’s important and needs doing. The fact that they can see it as a sequential effort where the latter can wait, is the heartbreaking bit. 

It’s tempting to say “well in that case they get neither - how will they make the organisation Agile if they aren’t Agile in the heart and mind themselves because let’s face it, if they were, they would get how people are not an afterthought but the bedrock and they wouldn’t dream of doing things sequentially in general, forget on this capital topic” but that would be unfair. 

I put it to us these mandated superheroes are simply run down and tired of what is an unimaginable amount of daily fight. They’ve been given a mission impossible. They were asked to lead this change and they believed the mandate, the permission and the good will to be there immutably and their job to be that of executing on them, but all too soon they saw it wasn’t that clear cut as they started running into closed doors and dead ends where everyone’s ideological warts are showing.

Everyone’s real, deep issues with it all - their unwillingness to do things in new ways, their fear of change, their impostor syndromes, their jaded journeys, their sequential thinking - all exposed every time a step needs discussing. Budget talks causing ulcers, P&L sheets making everyone wish wine was acceptable at lunch, every meeting challenging egos and flaring impression management displays of the worst kind, discussions about execution minutae making everyone worry about mortgages and open profiles to recruiters on LinkedIn. At every level. Everyone. Under the superhero and above them in the board too. 

Because from where they stand, these boards of leaders who had signed off on the transformation before they even brought the superhero in, they thought they had it. That they had genuinely spent enough time thinking about it while absent-mindedly shuffling through print-outs of consultancies decks, and had agreed, and approved it, and found the right guy or gal (who are we kidding?) to lead this and now their work was done and all they had to do, is check back in a year to see if everyone was all Agile now and the organisation was at Silicon Valley level of flying awesomeness. 

No one told them of the remaining work, of the unknowns, of the real questions, of the exploration need at every corner or that this would attack every mental structure they had put in place to understand work and their industry, that their thinking patterns would have to change, that it would throw up uncomfortable questions about their business and their own selves. 

They hadn’t realised, you see, that Agile comes with insidious, inbuilt self-work. And they’re not enjoying the realisation.

So they put up resistance and pretend they are playing devil’s advocate when what they are really doing is look for a blessed “ha! this doesn’t work, abort mission and let’s go back to how we were doing things” collective moment.  

In the name of “commonality of suffering” we have to be empathic towards these boards. As we are towards these superheroes who may at times lose their way enough to think people-work is secondary. They know it’s not, they know that designing the perfect CI/CD pipe in the absence of spending time thinking about team composition and health is nothing but a stalling technique. They know that saying to people that they now have permission to fail, experiment and move fast while not ensuring they feel free to use it is empty rhethorics. They know that lining up the best cloud strategy and laying out the best architecture is necessary but irrelevant as compared to having people in teams strong, resilient and courageous enough to avail themselves of it all. 

We all know this uncomfortable truth deep down that the work left to be done, the work that matters is on the humans. Our own selves and our teams. Putting it off and hoping against hope we can get by without it, isn’t going to cut it.  

It can get lonely at the Agile top and it is undeniably hard when you’re a change maker, but ignoring the only part that really matters won’t help, so if you catch yourself thinking of excuses and postponing tactics ask yourself how bad you want to succeed and then roll your sleeves because the answer is “Hell to the no it can’t wait, people-work needs to come first!”