What’s your stance on "change?" Do others believe you?

Nearly twenty years ago, seventeen software professionals collaborated together to produce “The Agile Manifesto,” a set of four values and twelve supporting principles that are critical to maintaining agility in software development. Given how much has changed in software over the last twenty years, it’s pretty remarkable how relevant the Agile Manifesto remains today. Prioritizing “individuals and interactions,” “customer collaboration,” and “business people and developers working together daily” has never been more important to consistently deliver the highest quality software to your customers. 

Another remarkable aspect of the Agile Manifesto is the ability to apply its takeaways outside of software development, and instead, to the way any business operates. So many of the manifesto’s recommendations are the cornerstones of nearly every successful company today. 

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer 

Build projects around motivated individuals 

Continuous attention to technical excellence… 

 While the Agile Manifesto is full of timeless advice for running a successful business, one area around how to address “change” stands out to me as something I wonder how many businesses truly embrace, and if their customers and employees would back them up on that claim.  

Value #4: Responding to change over following a plan 

Principle #2: Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. 

No matter how much humans may not like change, 2020 showed us on more than one occasion that businesses that aren’t able to quickly pivot or change will almost always pay dearly for that lack of agility, and so will their customers. The Agile Manifesto spells out the importance of being able to quickly “respond” to change, and even to “welcome” it, as opposed to begrudgingly accepting change as an unavoidable nuisance. This presents an opportunity to ask yourself some important questions. 

What channels have you set up and publicized for change to be presented to you? 

How do you typically respond to those who submitted those changes? 

How often are those changes typically implemented? 

What role/team is seeing the most/least ideas contributed, implemented, and denied? 

Who and what factors determine all of the above? 

Being able to abandon thoughtfully-laid out plans in order to give your customers a competitive advantage is a great place to get to, and something that management and business leaders should absolutely work toward. But in order for businesses to reach their greatest potential and avoid disruption, they need to be able to instigate change, not just respond to it. This is where an organization gains its own competitive advantage.  

What does it require for an entire organization to move to an “instigation over acceptance” mindset where change is concerned? A lot. It means creating a culture where even your newest entry-level employees are excited—not reluctant—to share new ideas because they know they’ll be heard and responded to. And it should be the same for your customers or partners. How about your mid-level managers? Are they comfortable sharing new ideas, even when they might contradict what their own managers have proposed? How does your executive leadership team, or even your board, respond to new, “we’ve never thought about doing this before”-level ideas?  

Giving all of these personas a channel or feedback for sharing ideas and even voicing concerns is a great start, but once you do so, are they taking you up on that offer? Or are they still worried about how they’ll be perceived after doing so? If the ideas and concerns are, at best, only trickling in, you’re still only accepting them, where welcoming is the goal. You can share the news that you’re “accepting” ideas all day long, but your desired contributors might still be reluctant, fearful, or distrustful that those ideas will ever be acted on, or perhaps that they’ll ever even be read. 

As a member of upper management, remember where these ideas and concerns are coming from. They’re coming from employees who might’ve collected them directly from the customers they regularly speak with. Or from the earliest vision of upcoming tide changes in your industry that they’ve pieced together from the rumored actions of your competitors, or media trends they’re seeing start to take shape. Or, they may just be impassioned, brilliant ideas that came to them in the middle of the night before. Maybe they’re so forward-thinking that there’s not a mile-long list of data backing them up...but so what? Would you rather stop at “I’m not sure that would work, I’ve never seen anyone go to market with that,” and instead, wait until your competitors launch something similarly brilliantly disruptive that leaves your organization scrambling to play catch-up...again? 

The result of successfully creating a trusted-by-all culture of “Bring us your ideas, no matter how much they might change the status quo around here,” should resemble the proverbial “trying to drink from the firehose.” The ideas should come in, continuously, from all angles, and at least initially, a struggle to comprehend “How are we going to manage this?” is a great problem to have. 

It’s important for organizations to keep these lines of communication open, to continuously measure their output, and for business leaders to be able to quickly identify timely opportunities for growth. And, most importantly, that they’re able to then help drive their implementation, whether that be an internal rollout or a full go-to-market lifecycle. This a growth mindset and one that all business leaders should not just possess, but one they should internally evangelize to make sure it's adopted as widely as possible, as it really is a requirement for continuous innovation. 

When these enablers are in place, organizations will see themselves not just able to respond to change in a timely manner, they’ll be built to lead transformative changes in their industry that leave their competition in a frantic state. As your feedback loops continue to shorten, the contributors of those great ideas will see them put into place, and, in turn, will enthusiastically keep them coming. 

It’s time to strip away the negative connotations around “change,” and to stop nurturing detrimental cultures that see change as an annoyance, and that ideas for change will go nowhere. Organizations looking to adopt, or scale-out, a truly agile mindset have to recognize change for what it really is. Change isn’t painful or a necessary evil; it’s an opportunity to introduce continuous improvements to all of the customers and/or employees that you serve. Make sure your belief of that isn’t a secret or doubted by anyone.