I’m thinking a lot about transformation and its struggles and what I’m realizing is that in part – even though we’re getting better about not seeing our work as projects but rather as the incremental development of products and services – we keep looking on the transformation to get us there as a project.
It has a start, a dedicated staff, a finish and a desired end state expressed in KPI’s or in a defined vision of the organization. We focus on the activities as milestones (teams and trains and squads and guilds launched). It’s a project.
And like all projects, it starts in a blur of optimism and celebration, and ends in a quiet closing of desks and moving on to the next project. It leaves a bad taste in many participant’s throats, and a big part of that is the hubris of the start looked back on from the modesty of the results.
So what do we do? We try harder! We bring in new change agents! We switch from Lean Six Sigma to Scrum to Scrum at Scale to SAFe to Product Thinking to Flow.
And we do make incremental improvements. But when we look at the cost, and the results, and the effort involved – it feels like it was a failure. ‘Transformation fatigue’ sets in, at least among the people being transformed.
As one of the vendors who do this (and do it about as well as possible, I believe), I’ve seen this pattern over and over – in the transformations I worked in, and in the ones people who hired me and who I hired had worked in as well.
I realized that we were ‘bolting in’ change – and while I’ll argue very strenuously that the change we deliver is worth what it costs (which is mostly time from the internal folks being changed) – it’s not the change we want to achieve. It feels like we’re doing it wrong.
And then I thought about a book by a Lars Lerup, professor of mine at Berkeley – ‘Building the Unfinished.’ It’s about architecture, and why messy neighborhoods where the owners have adapted their homes and stores always feel better to us than sterile ones where the architects and planners have delivered and preserved a perfect rendition of the scale model that was used to get bank funding.
His tagline for the book could easily be modified to fit organizations:
In this innovative book, [the author] rejects the “behaviorism” of established transformation management which has attempted to create a perfect fit between people and their organizational settings. This view, he contends, neglects the fact that people act upon their surroundings. The organizational environment is, in his view, always unfinished and open. [The author] calls this position “interactionist” and deals with it in both an exploratory and theoretical manner.
What if we looked at ‘transformation work’ as a form on ongoing maintenance that had to be continually done in organizations? What if we looked at it as – rather than a neat org and process model that we define and project on a screen then try and implement in real life – as a messy and always unfinished product that we expect the users – the people who work in the organization and have to live there – to adapt? What if we embraced the incrementalism of it rather than mourned it?
I like the idea of ‘interactionist’ transformation, as well as transformation as a product that continuously emerges and evolves, rather than a series of bound in time projects. Good Grief, we teach our clients to move away from project thinking because it’s so inefficient and ineffective. Why in the Wide World of Sports are we (the agile, product-thinking change agents) getting ourselves caught up working that way?
What I’m saying is framework-agnostic. I’m not abandoning traditional frameworks for technical or business agility. I can think of a lot of ways to adapt generic transformation roadmaps that might lead us in this direction.
And that feels like good work to be doing.