Pace of Change: A Response to Change

• Budget secured to lead organisation-wide program to enable agility - Check
• Iteration 2 complete for the 4 experiments across the 4 departments - Check
• Results from the 4 experiments captured in 4 different Canvases??? - Check
• Day/time confirmed to present program insights & learning to CXO’s - Check
• 4 Volunteers confirmed to share learning and insights at CXO meet - Check

Everything is well in place. My colleague and I walk to the venue of the CXO meeting 15 minutes early.

We see the typical board room that would house 20-24 people - a long rectangular table, high-tech video-conferencing equipment, space for snacks and tea, an Italian coffee machine and some chairs laid out for observers / listeners.

The room starts to fill in with CXO’s rushing into the room, checking their iPads from time to time - almost 15 people in the room by now. We begin the meeting as soon as our COO joins and asks us to dive right into the main agenda.

The 3 volunteers start to share their insights about how it’s going on their Agile journey - business and tech perspective, positive momentum even with things not yet working as they thought it might, slow progress across the 2 iterations.

The energy & enthusiasm of the 3 volunteers to complete iteration 3 was super obvious and that energises the complete room.

The Directors share stories about their daily involvement in supporting these experiments and actively removing the impediments that the teams come up with.

I acknowledge and thank everyone after they share their stories.

Then it starts to get interesting…

The 4th volunteer begins their story and shares "we’ve shared some positive points in the results, but we still do not see why we need to be part of this experiment. We don’t believe this experiment is going to give us any value."

"We have been doing things in our standard approach for the past many years and delivering consistent results contributing to 39% of the organisation’s revenue. We don’t see how changing our approach to this new agile thing will add any extra value."

The room descends into pin-drop silence.

The Director of this team adds, "I agree with my team’s feedback. That is exactly what I had shared in the last CXO meet. Such things don’t work for our kind of work.

We’ve had enough evidence already to support that. Now after these 2 iterations, we are very sure, this is not working for us."

The silence thickens further...

After almost a minute, someone in the room starts to shuffle through their papers, some get back to looking down into their iPads, some just start to look outside the window.

I check to sense if anyone is going to say anything or which direction the meeting might take.

As I sense no-one is comfortable to speak at this moment, I take the opportunity to say

"This is great feedback. Thank you Director and thanks to your team. We were unable to capture this in our insights and learning from your team’s iterations."

I can sense a mixed atmosphere in the room by now. There’s a palpable sense of relief as the tension in the room begins to lower.

Some Directors appear to be relieved that the conversation has moved on from the tense atmosphere that it had started to set into. Others give me the look of "what the hell are you saying?" My supervisor for sure gives me a shocked look but I see the sense of trust in her. It is difficult for me to ignore these looks.

I do not want to lose this only opportunity that I see right now and I go on to say to the Director

"With the results that you are now seeing for your team on this experiment, what would you like to do?

It is totally fine if you believe that you would like to stop this experiment right now and opt-out of this journey."

The Director immediately views this as an opportunity. He justifies to the COO how opting out from this experiment is the right decision to make.

I thank the Director and his team yet again during the wrap-up of the meeting and share that we do hope to see them sometime on the agile journey whenever they feel ready. For now, we would wrap-up the experiment with their team by facilitating a focused retrospective so we could capture more insights from their 2 iterations.

7-8 months pass…

Each team from the 3 departments is still on their journey - more mature in the journey from where they began. More teams have now joined the agile journey - sharing learning with each other across Townhalls and internal organisation meetups.

Around the 10th month is when I get a call from the 4th Department’s director saying we should meet for a coffee chat. We meet for coffee and my oh my! Do I enjoy that meeting!! Even today I have such fond memories of that meeting!

Here’s why!

1st thing the Director says to me smiling as we sit down for coffee

"Sarika, we are now ready to onboard the journey."

As we both smile ?? and continue our conversation, the Director shares what has happened behind the scenes in these past months.

1. "During all CXO meets we've listened intently to other departments failure / success / learning journeys shared - some of them were tough ones too. We know we did continue to ask tough questions too during all these meetings for sure, but then we have been so curious and wanted to clarify our doubts in many ways.
2. We did our own department retrospectives to confirm that we did not see any benefits from agile. But well...
3. We sent 1 or 2 participants across the past 6 months to your continued organisation-wide trainings "What does agile mean to me?". Each person brought back a new positive perspective.
4. We were uncomfortable with the fact that you made no efforts to push the agile journey to our department after the CXO meet.
5. What was even more uncomfortable was that you personally continued to do a monthly check-in with my team that was on the experiment earlier as to - how they were doing, what challenges were they facing, how were they resolving them and asking each time if you could help them in anyway.
6. With some of these insights you also updated your program plans and presented them in every CXO meet, also giving credit to the feedback you heard from our team.
7. All that discomfort makes us feel safe and ready today to onboard the journey."

"Change resistance" is a positive for me.

It gives us the insights to tell us many things - maybe the change isn’t the correct one or the time isn’t right etc.?

Pushing the change at people impacted by the change is not going to give me any additional benefit (unless I want to just put a check in the box).

People do need an option to opt-out of the change if they don’t yet feel ready.

We need to wait for change to take it’s natural course versus just pushing change at people especially when people are not yet ready for the change.

In this specific case, what a journey it was once the Director and his teams were ready to onboard!

Having the Director and his team as our most amazing advocates with a relationship that we all treasure even today is, from my perspective, a sign of a good humane learning journey!