Back when I gave talks in the beginnings of Web 2.0, I used a slide that showed the final scene of the old science-fiction movie Soylent Green, where Charlton Heston is being dragged away screaming “Soylent Green is made of people!”
I labelled it “Organizations are made of people!”
And while I’ll bet that my title – suggesting that people can be a product – made you narrow your eyes (in a Charlton Heston-like way), I want to defend the notion by suggesting that our focus as change agents has been slightly misplaced.
Our job is changing organizations – by leading them to implement agile structures and behaviors. My underlying thesis is that what we do works – to an extent – but it has limits and that we’re bumping up against those limits more and more often as we get better at what we do. The question we all need to ask ourselves is how we stop bumping against them and get past them.
So what do we do? We get hired (or if we’re within the org, called in) by a manager, who has the power to tell a group of employees that their world will be changed. The manager chooses to do this either because they envision some organizational or personal benefit (we’ll do better, my boss will be impressed that I’m doing this). We come in and execute the well-proven patterns for teaching and supporting new agile teams and teams of teams. We set up a LACE and attempt to institutionalize the change process.
And to do this, we work with the people in the org – what else is there? – but out attention is on the shape and behaviors of the organization, as set out in its people.
But wait – how do we make it stick? Remember every change effort has a sell-by date, a date by which people can’t focus on change work any more and need to do their day jobs. Did we sustain our support of change long enough to make it stick? In my experience ‘kinda.’ I’m interested here in what others have seen. We built some basic patterns, educated people away from their institutional muscle memory, created a few change agents who drank our Kool-Aid, and improved things. And then we left. Hmmm. If you’re familiar at all with US foreign policy, this sounds familiar.
So what can we do about it?
Let’s play with an idea. What if we took as our primary goal standing up a self-supporting network of change agents in the organization, our secondary goal as implementing visible and persistent change, and our tertiary goal as setting up an institutional ‘change office’?
There’s a proven model for this.
U.S. Army Special Forces.
Whaaat? You say? Rambo or Chris Helmsworth as change agents?
Well, actually yes.
What sets the Special Forces apart is that these soldiers are trained to live and work with the fighters of other countries, as their forebears did with the partisans of occupied Europe, as the Vietnam generation did with the hill tribes in their A-camps, as has been done by them more recently in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. They have also lived and worked among civilian populations in places like Haiti and the Balkans, using cultural knowledge and linguistic skills to help build a lasting peace. Special Forces soldiers may fight alongside their allies, as they did with the Afghans and the Kurds, but very often the preferred means of assistance is advising, training, and assisting a country in solving its own problems.
- Linda Robinson, ‘Masters of Chaos’ page xii
I’m going to ask you to set two things aside here. First and foremost, how you feel about warfare, the United States, or United States foreign policy. I’m holding up an organization to see what we can learn from it, not so we can model ourselves on it. Secondly, the crazy worship many have for Special Forces folks (famously, William Gibson used that – in the form of the search for the design and fabric of future SF uniforms – as the MacGuffin in one of his novels).
I’ll also admit that my oldest served five years working for Special Forces (as a spook, not a team member), and that everything I know about them I learned when he announced his intention, and I cleared the shelves on the subject at Amazon.
As I understand it, the core mission of SF is to go someplace where there’s a population we’d like to be on one side of a political contest, and to win their favor by doing good works (medical, dental, and veterinary treatment as well as civic infrastructure are favorites) and to leverage this into training them to be more self-sufficient militarily and to be able to sustain whatever infrastructure has been created.
Look at the photo above (or better, read the book “Horse Soldiers” that the film was based on) - our soldiers and surrounded by a lot of local Afghan soldiers.
The job was to create a network of allies, and to train and equip those allies to persist and to sustain change.
So let’s re-imagine one of our agile engagements in this light.
What if we took as our explicit goal – while in the process of setting up agile structures and training and launching agile teams - to identify, train, and equip (through mentoring and coaching) a mutually-supporting network of change agents. We have a name for that – a Community of Practice, or a tribe.
As we stand up and improve teams and burn down the clock we have to stay in an organization, we could be building them up and sustaining them. And as we left, they could collaborate with the institutional LACE that we established and push the change forward.
Would that be better or worse than what we’re doing today where the CoP is typically an under-resourced afterthought?