 I have learned and whatever I have shamelessly lifted from others experiences here. I think what a day it has been since the morning, we talked about the social change. And I think one of the things about social change is something that I want to just carry on in this session here. The first thing is really about the credibility, establishing the credibility. Second is understanding the emotional aspect of change. One of the things, at least it's been my pet peeve, many a times we actually talk about the change in the context of, try to imagine the iceberg and the change iceberg really. When we talk about the visual aspect of it, the rituals, the artefacts, the processes, the control processes, the checks and balances of any process, we talk about those visual aspects of what really meets the eye. But the emotional aspect of change is really all about the hidden piece, the invisible piece of the iceberg that's submerged under the icy waters. And that is really the essence of change. And I'm going to talk a little bit about those elements of it here. Now I realize that I've just 30 minutes, I want to keep couple of minutes for interaction so I'll not be able to take you through entire detailed journey here but I'll try to do justice to whatever makes sense. This is a wonderful picture of last 11,000 years of biological evolution and human evolution. And one of the things very remarkable about this picture is, as you can see here, that it actually starts from minus or rather 9,000 BC and you see it's rather flattish up until actually almost the start, it's almost like the isocasmo, the calendar of evolution kind of a thing actually if you will. And what we see here is it's not even a hockey stick, it actually just takes off like the F-16 takes off in a cobra manoeuvre kind of a thing there. What happens is, what we see here is that the changes that are happening and the pace of change is just getting faster and faster all the time. What does it mean to us? Let's try to see that. And one of the things about pace of change is that it's not just limited to the rocket science or decoding the human DNA and stuff like that. Even stuff like the crayons that my child and your children have used, 100 years back in 1903, there were only eight colors of crayola crayons. Today there are 120 colors of it. How many of us can name them? There's actually a test on the net. Men are only able to name purple, pink, blue, red, white, green. Women can name two dozen of them. The point is there is so much of changes happening around us and we need to understand we cannot just ignore what's really happening there. So the point I'm trying to make here is we always talk about change as something threatening. But you know what? Change is in my way it's like normal actually because we get up in the morning and right from the first breath of fresh air we take right from all the things that we start doing to get up early to the office, beat the traffic there. There is a change happening everywhere. There's all kind of changes happening around us and we need to be aware of them and we need to understand what is really happening. So it seems like change is normal. There is nothing abnormal about it, right? So what is the problem then? The problem is people resist change and we are going to talk a little about why do they really resist changes? And that is the issue there that we need to understand there. Why do people resist changes? There seem to be millions of reasons for that. I've just written down a couple of reasons here. The FUD, the famous fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which really forces people into a panic mode, pushes them up the wall and say, okay, my goodness, what am I going to do there? I'm not really prepared for this kind of a change. And then some of us are really very happy being in the comfort zone. We really would like to rather much sit there and do nothing about it. And then there are few of us who really have legitimate concerns about changes. Okay, what you're saying is so what does it mean is that the global warming is really going to do so and so. I mean, they really try to put a lot of logic and analysis behind it. It is also a concern because many a times it's an indictment of the past practices. So what do you mean is when I say, I have not been doing code reviews here. What you're saying is that I've really been, you know what? Carpage and garbage out kind of everything. I've just been letting the whole world be my beta tester, that kind of a thing. And then we have victims of old habits. We are all used to it. We are so comfortable around them. We know, okay, that's how I've been doing stuff. Let me not change it. Why do I really do that? There could be legitimate issues around it because there could be a drop in productivity. There could be a drop in performance because of changing over from old habits to the new habits, but then that's besides the point. So these are some of the reasons why people resist changes. The scholars call it homeostatus is one of the human abilities of really resisting the change here. But what do people do as a result of that? And we all human beings are wonderful creatures. We respond to those changes. We express our resistance in beautiful ways. We disagree, which is a more polite way of saying that I don't like this change. We procrastinate, which is a socially acceptable way of saying that I don't like it. We push back. Many a times pushback is a desirable trade in people. We deny the proverbial ostrich wearing its head in the sand. We outrightly reject it and say, no, this is not going to work. We refuse like the proverbial dinosaur who says, change, you can't get it from me, right? We resist because we don't like that change and sometimes in exceptional circumstances, some of us do sabotage the changes also, right? Now, for the rest of the presentation, I would just like you to think about any personal or professional change that you are going through at this point in time in your mind. And you don't need to talk about that. Just keep that in the back of the mind because we are trying to go through the anatomy of that change process and say what really goes on at each of the steps. And I would like you to just kind of go through that in your mind. So what happens is people are resisting about those changes in all shapes and forms, but what do we do instead of that? Instead of really addressing it, we tell people, it's my way or it's highway, right? So we tell the people, as a good corporate citizen, you are expected to comply with what the organization is going through. Because that's in the right interest of the shareholders, theory E or theory E, what I mean, theory E when we look at it. And you need to make sure that we maximize the shareholder return. So we just change it required, blah, blah, blah. And so be quiet, just go and do those changes. If you don't like the changes, you're most welcome to leave. So those are really the challenges there. The challenge is really how do we bring about the change that we can believe in? And that's the biggest problem for any kind of leader or an individual or any person who has a role to play in the organization. My role, in my current role at Yahoo, I am responsible for agile adoption across our Bangalore Center. Yahoo is a company that you all know. It's highly democratic company, change, initiative is something which you, the first thing is we need to make sure that we are able to establish credibility at the door. If I'm not able to establish credibility at the door, not about my process or ideas, I will also get thrown out. That's as simple as that, it's as brutal as it gets. How do I establish credibility in a highly decentralized organization? I need to be a change agent, I need to really understand. There is no top-down mandate that's going to work there. So it's something which I have to really build a consensus. I have to build the coalition for change and really bring all those issues there. So let's try and understand what is change. I'm not going to define and give a bookish definition here, but this is something which I picked up from Visual Thesaurus. And a lot of words here really are about what does change mean to people. So stuff like it's something is varying or something is modified, getting modified, something is altering, some transfer, shift from what we are doing, conversion, commute, interchange, etc. So these are various, it's like the six blind men and the elephant, everyone sees change from their own perspective. So let's now try and define one single definition. All let's say is it is a change or a modification or an alteration from what we have been doing so far to what we are going to do now. So let's just start with that. Most of us have some myths about changes and we all truly believe these are the mental models that we have all grown up with. Depending on the cultural context, depending on the family values and the norms that we share, depending on the kind of environment that we have grown with, we get to live and grow with those mental models. And those are some of the myths, as I call them. And those myths actually end up creating a kind of a cross for you say and say no change should not be, change is not the good idea, right? But the way I look at those things is that the reality actually is much different. The change to me is something that protects us. The change is the new normal. It's not something which is necessarily the bad thing. Change makes us better. Change creates options. Many people say change, with change you don't have an option. But to me, change is an option available which opens opportunities. Change enables us to do more and more things. Change is not a one-time event that you really are done with. It's an ongoing process. Change is a progress and change is not really, change is creative. And change is not absolute or final. It's really related because we are always undergoing changes all the time. Change is actually giving an opportunity for rebirth. Look at it this way. If we were not allowed to change, and if the only destiny for what we were doing was the end, then we would not get a second opportunity. So in a way, it's like a second birth available to you free of cost, right? And a lot of people have really put their wisdom in these quotations, which I like some of them here, the second one especially. If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. And Demig's famous statement, it's not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. So I think it's important. I think the agenda is pretty well set in terms of why do we really need to change? So the question is, is change really good? And the point is really how you look at it. But the way I look at it is, and I picked this up from a US composer, John Cage, I cannot understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. And I think that itself in a way summarizes why the change is required for us. Is change bad? Gary Hamill, the famous professor of management, just the last line important, are we changing as fast as the world around us? And we saw the graphic there. The world is really on an upswing at this point in time. The question is, are we really, is there an impedance mismatch between the way the world is changing and between the way our thought process is changing? Does it matter, does it matter that we need to change around us? I think it's important. More than 100 years or 150 years back, Robert Wood Johnson, one of the three brothers of Johnson and Johnson co-founder, he said, I'm very interested in the future because I plan to spend the rest of my life there. What more could be a better compelling reason for you to change, right? So I'll briefly go over some of the change models that I've used and I use in my process. Some of them are individual change that we talk about. Some of them are organizational change models. When I look at, why is it relevant for V agile practitioners? One of the things about agile is we look at agile as actually a primarily a development process change. To me, agile is actually a sociological process change. It is not just limited to how we do coding. It is not limited to how we write, we create an MVP. It is not limited to how do we do stand-ups. To me, these are actually, as far as I'm concerned, I can throw them out of the door. What is more important is how my sociological equations and dynamics are really changing because of embracing a certain different way of doing things. End of the day and I think all of us, I think software industry would be a much better place if instead of computer science, we all went to sociology classes. I truly believe in that. So going ahead on that, let me start with that. The first model here, I'll briefly go over. So Virginia Satter, she actually created this change model. Some of you have seen this one, but the whole idea here is actually, so what happens is we all are in our comfort zones. I talked about the comfort zone, which we can call is actually the late status quo. So we have already slipped into that comfort zone and suddenly what happens is this foreign element comes there. And try to think of foreign element exactly as the way human body works. As a student of organization behavior, when we read about organizations, we learn that organizations are actually organisms. And like any physical living organism, it has a tendency to self-preserve itself. It has a tendency that if there is a foreign element that comes in, there is what we know as the organ reject kind of a thing happening there. So the antibodies are produced and we tend to throw it out there. So the opposition also grows up to match up the amount of threat that is there, right? So a foreign element comes and then there is a resistance. There's a period of resistance because it has changed in the way we have done business, right? And then the performance curve really comes down because we are really struggling with what is happening. We have no clue at this point in time. And chaos happens right after that. And it goes on for some time, at some point in time, whether because the people's effort or serendipity are one of these better reasons. There is a transforming idea that germinates. And that is really able to start creating the foundation for integration. And that starts taking the curve up ahead. So, and then over a period of time when the integration has happened, we are able to establish the new status quo. Now it sounds simpler said than done. But this is in a way a very simplistic model of the change that is happening inside each one of us. Whether it is the first thing in the morning when we get up and we don't see the newspaper at the doorstep or we see that somebody has moved my cheese or something or any other major kind of a change that we're talking about. We go through this kind of a conflicting process. And the success of a change really depends on our ability to really climb up the hockey curve there. Because at the time of chaos and during integration also, there is a tendency for people to slip back into the old habits. And that is really the biggest challenge that we have. Now, if you are a person who is leading that change for your team members or even you are undergoing that kind of a change, just a few prescriptions that are available there in terms of how people can really get help. I'll not go into that, but slides will be available for later viewing. There is another very beautiful model. Kubler Ross was actually a Swiss doctor and she studied terminally in patients in 50s and 60s. She studied more than 500 people who eventually died, actually. And one of the things that she found as a process of that was that people undergo what is now famously known as the Kubler Ross grief cycle. And we all actually go through that in various stages. And the whole idea is when the initial news is given to people, again, the emotional response which is active tends to go down there. And there is a period from stability to the immobilization. There is an immediate numbness. Many of you must be following Yuvraj Singh, the cricketer at this point in time. Just try to see what happened or try to see what Steve Jaff probably went through. Just try to put that in that when he talked about the initial 18 months where he denied that, that's the next phase coming here. You deny that, no, this is not happening to me. And that's exactly what happens to people there. Then there is anger. Why me? I did not smoke, I did not drink, I did not do anything that would create or enter carcinogenics in my body. Why only me? And that's really the difficult part over there. And then we start bargaining. Okay, why not this time? Okay, I'll leave this thing, I'll do something else. What if I just get yet another chance there, right? So we start bargaining there. And then after that, get into depression because by the time we have started to understand that it's not going to be as simple as it sounds. And then at some point in time, then we start saying, okay, I have to live with that. I'm moving towards the acceptance phase. Start looking at testing that and look at some realistic solutions there. So this is how the entire process is going. The original process is the one that is in the green boxes. This source I picked up from, the author has created two more additional blue boxes there. That's why there are seven, but the initial phase was. So the whole idea is now try to look at any of the changes that would have happened in your personal and professional life. Anything meaningful has probably gone through this. The amount of time could vary from one to other, but it really is that we go through these kind of steps of life. I mean, I can imagine when my boss would tell me that, no, your performance is not good this time, the immediate reaction is denial. No, I've done that. See, look at it, I'll send you the mails, I'll send you all the stuff. I've done that, I checked in the code yesterday. That guy broke it, he's the guy who's the culprit. We always look at those kind of things. But the reality is, that's how people are undergoing the changes. If you are a people manager, if you are a coach, if you are a friend to somebody, the most important thing is to really understand and recognize that somebody else is actually going through this cycle. It's not a single, it's not a switch that I can flip and say, you know what, until yesterday it was not a Y2K, now it is Y2K. So until yesterday I was X and now I've become Y. It is not like that, it's a fuzzy state. It's a transition, it's a gradual transition that is happening there. And at each stage there is a danger of people slipping back into the previous cycle. There is more work done on this Kubler-Ross cycle, which is known as the theory of transitions. Transitions actually, so Kubler-Ross was really about the negative news, how people look at the negative changes. The transitions theory is really about even the positive effect. Quite often we actually talk colloquially about honeymoon effect. And this actually talks about that honeymoon effect is actually a valid thing. So even the positive things actually wear off, they tend to taper off at some point in time because there is only this much. So that's why one of the things that we keep hearing about is you pay bonuses, you give salary hikes to people to improve their performance in the cognitive sciences. And guess what, over a period of time it doesn't help. Over a period of time it is law of diminishing returns that's applying to us. So this is a kind of a graph that actually explains you and it helps you align. And what this author argues is that over a period of our life, we typically go through 10 to 20 of these major transitions in our life, whether it is professional or personal. And each one of them lasts from anything between 6 to 8 months or 10 months. And people go through these cycles, whether it is good or bad. And this is how the human reactions really change. Now these were about the individual changes. Kurt Levin has done a lot of study on how the sociological systems, cultures, societies, teams really grapple with changes. And one of the things that he has come up with, what is known as the force field analysis. And what he says is that it is the tendency of every system to stay in the equilibrium. And what is equilibrium is actually when the driving forces and the restraining forces are in balance. And that is really the steady state that we are talking about here. If we want to move from a current state which has an equilibrium to another desired stage, then it's not going to be so simple. One of the natural tendencies that we have, I try to think of one of the changes that you were trying to impose upon somebody. I mean, if my son doesn't study, I say, okay, no more Facebook for you or no more mobile for you or no more PSP for you, you go and study there, right? Guess what? He invents more creative ways of finding the resistance. So what really happens is that instead of really, so if I'm just trying to actually move the driving forces up, even the resistive forces are coming up. So the change is not happening, right? So to really bring about the change, we have to go through a three-step process what is known as unfreeze change and then once again, refreeze model. So if you see what is happening is before change in the current conditions, there is a sense of equilibrium. Now try to think of it, some of you who have been aware with some of the Indian changes that we are going through like Anna Azari movement. Try to look at it, look at any parliament of any democracy. There is a government and there is an opposition and they have a creative tension between them, right? And that is what is really the equilibrium that is bringing there. Now try to think of the government wants to bring a new legislation. The government wants to lower the taxes or raise the taxes or whatever they would like to do that. There is a driving forces, there is a lot of lobbying happening there. There's a lot of pitch in the media there. People start really raising the stakes and say, okay, we need to bring this change, people talk about it, the focus groups and all kind of things. And at the same time, if they do not really start diminishing the restraining forces, what happens is the diminishing forces also rise to the intensity of the driving forces and that really defeats the purpose. So the whole idea is we have to unfreeze the current equilibrium, make the changes and then refreeze them. We have to lock it again them. In an organizational context, for example, you need to lock in with enough amount of institutionalization. In a large company, the institutionalization could be in terms of bonus that is linked to your new behaviors, for example. So unless you really display those behaviors, you are not going to get money at the end of the rainbow. So you need to make sure that you are exhibiting them, right? So, but this is a great reference model that really tells more dynamics of what it really is, it's not a seamless process, there are multiple things happening there. There's a famous book, The Perfect Change, and from Pro-C, and this is the ADKR model that talks about in the organizational context, couple of things, I'll not spend too much time here, but I'll just, a couple of things that I want to bring about is in an organizational context, there are five phases that this author talks about, awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. And one of the things that we don't understand when we are talking about change in an organizational context is the time it takes for an individual to go through similar changes, different for different people. Not all of us are cut from the same die. We all require different amount of time to immerse ourselves, to validate our own assumptions, to make sure that our concerns that we have are addressed adequately, and then we are able to move on there. So while it could take somebody just five days to really go through that process, it might take me 15 days to go through that. I cannot really be having, I mean, I need to have different strokes for different folks kind of strategy over there. But the problem is if the change model do not really treat the organization in the same way and they treat that as a monolith, then we are going to run into a problem. It's exactly like the kindergarten or the school after that because the teacher decides now every child will move to the chapter six. And every child has to move to the chapter six irrespective of their abilities and motivation about it, right? And the other important thing about in the organizational context is in a large organization, even in a small organization, information does not go to or reach people all at the same time. With all the technical advancements we have made with Internet and Twitter and all the updates that are available to people. Guess what? It is not that we all discover information at the same time. There are some of us who will discover it in the restrooms. There are some of us who will discover it in the hallways. And then there are some of us who will go back to the organizational Internet and try and figure out what is really happening there. And some of us will really wait for the official communication. What is important to understand an organizational change initiative that's going to just rely on this assumption is really going to fall flat because it's not the way people look at the changes. And to really make the change effective what we need to understand is that the successful change is going to happen on two dimensions. One is the business, one is on the people. On the business dimensions, people understand about the various aspects of it. On the people aspect is the key issue, how we are really going through it. So this is the context there. Now many of us would have seen that it is really a leadership, the situational leadership model which is talked about in the context, the Blanchard Hershey model. I try to look at it also as a change model actually because this is also the way you actually are helping your team members undergo a change. Now this change in this particular case actually could be related to how the skills are advancing in their own day-to-day life and how you as a manager or a leader is actually playing the role in terms of empowering them, in terms of decentralizing it, in terms of really making sure that you're not micromanaging their day-to-day behavior and you're really taking off and giving them a long road. So that's one of the ways in which we actually go. So if you see from quadrant S1, S2, S3, S4, the way the manager is really from a directing behavior goes to coaching behavior, supporting and finally delegating behavior. In the context of agile, we definitely see the roles are changing there. And I think even though agile explicitly doesn't talk about the role of a manager, I personally think the role of manager is even more than ever before because people are actually going through a lot of changes which are dramatically different from what they were used to. The reason being in the old good old control and command and control top-down world, somebody was telling them what to do. Now they are left to fend for themselves. And unless they really get the right level of support and coaching there, not all of us are smart enough to figure out what's going to be my next step. So I think there is a role to be followed there. This is really at the large organizational change. John Carter, the world's foremost authority on changes. The Harvard Business Professor has written wonderful books on that, has talked about this eight-step process there. But this is really in the context of leading a large organizational change. So now the question comes as we talked about so many things about, well, how do people go through the change? What's the anatomy of the change? What is really a chronological cycle of a change there? What can you do about it? The question comes, can we anticipate or predict changes? Somebody might say, you know what? I understand all this, but can we really predict? It's like predicting an earthquake. Can I really predict an earthquake, right? Or can I predict some other natural phenomenon? Can I predict a tsunami? Now guess what? Now let's see some viewpoints about it. So Nils Bohr said prediction is very difficult if it is about the future. Right? And that's kind of sums up our mindset about prediction. But I think there are multiple thoughts about it. The more you think about it in terms of if you anticipate the difficult, if you manage the easy, you can actually start anticipating the difficult part of it. So for example, people might argue and say, can you predict tsunami? Now in the last 10, 15 years, we have actually gone to the point where we can actually say the tsunami is going to hit at this point in time. Can you predict an earthquake? You may not be able to predict when it will come. We all know about the big one, the San Francisco story there. The big one, nobody knows when it will come. But if you look at all the tectonic plates and all the seismological studies, it will come one day. Does it bother people? It doesn't bother 7 million people who live in that area, right? The point is we have developed the science to grow around the threat level and make sure that we have enough mechanism available. This is one of my favorite books. I think it still continues to be one of the best books on change management who moved my cheese. And there's a beautiful passage from there that I'd like to quote here. So when the cheese is over in station C and these guys are figuring out what to do, how are they really figuring out, what they learn is noticing small changes early help you adapt to the bigger changes that are yet to come. So guess what, those who have read the book can relate to it more. But if you are used to eating the same cheese every day and suddenly one day the cheese is over, you know what? It doesn't happen. Fred Brooks taught about, taught to us 45 years back that how does a project get one month late? It is one day at a time, right? No project gets late 30 days in one shot. It's still one day at a time. So the fact is the changes are happening not at the scale that we believe them to be, but they are actually happening one at a time. One change at a time is really changing the world around us. And that's something that we need to recognize here. So the key part is that you need to keep smelling the cheese often so that you know when it's getting old. When the smell is really telling you, that's the time when you know that the big change is coming there. Similarly, John Potter's other book, Our Iceberg is Melting is Yet Another Beautiful Parachute that we can look at it and here are some of them. For example, a merger acquisition or a divestiture is almost always going to be a big change, right? There will always be some change in strategy in how the things are being done. There will be, there will most likely be a change in products that we are going to offer there to the market. For example, similarly, if you are creating a new product, look at iPhone. Five years back there was no iPhone. Today the revenues of iPhone are more than the entire business of Microsoft. How about that? Could they have anticipated this change coming from the left field? They could not have anticipated that change coming from the left field. So that's something that we need to understand here. New technology can really make sure that whatever we were used to doing it is not available. New legislation can actually make sure that whatever ways we are doing stuff is, a new leader is another change. So a new CEO, a new investor, a new key investor, new VCs there. So these are some of the changes, some of the indicators of an impending change that we need to read actually and understand that it's going to change my life as I know right now. And I can't just say that you know what, I didn't know that the change was coming. And I think it's a fair question to say what do I do when I don't know what lies ahead? And I think the key thing really is to turn your ignorance into curiosity. And that's, I have found the best way of really dealing with the uncertainty about it. So let me start summing it up. Change is a constant and unstoppable. There's no point in fighting the change. We all are most welcome to ignore it at our peril. The key is really to get up, smell the coffee, listen, read, network talk, observe, ask. That's a key thing to really understand. Start becoming aware of what's really happening around us instead of just being a passenger there. Prepare for the change. Be curious. Really start understanding what is happening. Why are we doing it? Why do we need to do stand-up? I mean, just somebody wrote it 10 years back in a document, do I have to do stand-up? Is it the right, legitimate reason for me to do a stand-up? What is it? Try to answer it. Unless you understand the emotional aspect of it, you're just going to do a lip service of doing the visual part of that. And finally, I firmly believe it can be done and that's something which I would like to leave you with. And yes, just want to leave you with one more thing. I think we always blame destiny. We always blame a lot of things that, no, I could not deal with that change. But guess what? I still believe that it can be done. Now, you've got to figure out what was your excuse. So that's my talk. Thanks a lot.