When Old & New Delivery Practices Collide...

This coming week, I'd like to work through in a series of articles something I've struggled with for years now.

Traditional approaches to getting stuff done contain, to some degree, clear things to do and things not to do. Clear behaviours to exhibit, and behaviours not to exhibit.

More modern approaches to getting stuff done have the same.

However, when trying to explain to people newer ways of getting stuff done, I often find myself moving more towards the side of incremental change and pragmatism. No one is ever going to adopt a whole bunch of new practices overnight. No one is going to change their behaviours and how they see the world overnight either. Besides, too much change all in one go may end up throwing away things that were incredibly useful at the same time as things that were less so. Change takes time, and the best changes tend to be incremental, lower risk and respectful of the context in which they operate.

As a result, I often (some may feel too often) find myself saying 'It depends', when someone asks me what should be done in a certain situation. I tell people that many of these new methods are just frameworks and tools, and that as a result they don't need to adopt them wholesale. In fact they should fill in the intentional gaps that these frameworks contain with their own practices, and customise what they do to suit their specific context.

For me, the risk of not doing this is not only that the changes won't land, but also that people just see the changes as processes, as ends in themselves, ones that once adopted will cause the world to magically get better all by itself. When in fact these changes are just means to an end, tools and ideas for solving real world problems in real world contexts.

However, as I talk people through this vision of a liberal hippy utopia, I find them saying "So does that mean I can still do X then?", and my brain immediately thinks "No! Good grief! Of course you can't! That would break everything, please stop doing that right now".

Which is pretty much the opposite feeling than I went into the conversation with.

So how do I square this circle? How do I still do what I think is right, which is to be pragmatic, incremental and respectful of contexts, seeing change as a journey not a destination, whilst not just sitting there saying 'Do whatever you like, none of this really matters'?

Well, I'm beginning to think it's a question of understanding which things do mix, and which things don't. Which practices, when combined, complement each other, or at least do each other no harm, and which actively fight against each other, potentially making things worse than if they'd never been combined in the first place?

I suspect there's an underlying pattern that applies to answering this question, and over this coming week, I'm going to work through a few examples to see if it helps make this pattern clearer. You can read each day's articles with this in mind, and share your thoughts on what the pattern might be too, or you can just read them as stand alone pieces of advice on old world and new world practices that clash, fight, and generally make things worse than they were before. Cautionary tales of what to look out for and what not to do.

The first one will go live tomorrow (Monday) morning. Do leave your comments on them if you want, especially if you think you've spotted an underlying pattern too.