Using Covid's poison against itself! I've been using the same thing in all Agile Transformations

(I wrote this in April but it was too hard for me to share it at that time! In the light of the news on vaccines and the hope of passing this year's difficulties, I thought I can share my thought with my network!) 

With all the hardship Covid-19 has imposed on our people, our loved ones, and everyone around the world, there is at least one lesson to learn from it.  

If Coronavirus is super contagious, human being behavior and practices are as much contagious and even more. I have seen many people who wear masks not because WHO/CDC asks them, governments push them, or it's the law, but they simply do it because their friends/neighbors think it is better to do. I know many people who started shelter in place before governments making it a law. They learned through social media from people they knew. And not all people who simply follow the trends do really know the logic or care about the logic. They, however, see tangible results from trusted parties around them. 

  I have been taking advantage of this same simple rule in all Agile transformations. You just need to stick to the priority rule and prioritize weighted shortest job first. I use Cynefin to categorize transformation pieces. In the same organization, the transformation of one department or a team in a department might fall in the Simple area and another falls in the Chaos. I let the contagiousness for Agile to move jobs from the chaos/complex to complicated/simple over time and I focus on simple first. If you have been a part of a transformation, you have probably met people and teams who are just not into changes and much more difficult to reason to. Sometimes they just don't like agile or the way it works. In some cases maybe they just do not like change. While you should be always in the business of explaining reasons and providing the why, there are always walls to hit. Instead of spending too much time on turning that hard team or person, it might be better to train a team that is ready or help a part of org that is ready to transform. Then let the contagiousness of the good behavior do the job and get the rest in a place to be ready to transform.  

Indeed this cannot be a silver bullet but using Cynefin to decide where in the community to approach first and let the infection of the good behavior fly in the harder part of the communities have been working for me. For the covid situation, it happened too fast, but we all saw people against wearing masks or doing social distancing (even high ranked people all around the world). Instead of pushing them to do it and lose the valuable time, I would much prefer helping parts of the community who are willing to do it and let the rest learn the good behavior through communities until they are ready. 

To sum up, my rule is to find the simplest and closest portion of the work with some tangible results in a community, and then use them as a working epicenter letting it become the model and contaminate the rest of the community with the good behavior/practice.

Happy Thanksgiving and stay safe!