 People on the back row, please raise your hands. Okay, so you can hear me. You've just attended the first flow con. Was it not amazing? What a privilege for me to be here with this great lineup of speakers, presentations, wonderful ideas. And now here you are at the end of the day wondering what can I do on Monday morning? Is that what you're thinking? Do you have some ideas, some new ideas? All right, you have some ideas and you're wondering how can I make that happen? How can I introduce some innovation in my organization? Perfect, that's why I'm here. We're gonna talk about organizational change and I'm gonna cast it as a collection of myths. Now I know you don't believe in some of these myths but I'm talking about those other people. Those other people who might believe that some of these things are true and it might hold them back. So bear with me, this talk is for the other people. There are about patterns. I'm assuming most of you know a little bit about patterns. Perhaps the gang of four book introduced in 94 changed forever the way we developed software. Changed forever the way we think about design. The notion of capturing a good idea and giving it a name and with a collection of those names have a vocabulary or a language to talk about design. So the patterns we're gonna talk about have to do with organizational change and so they have names that we can use to talk about the ideas and I hope that when you leave today you'll have a small piece of that pattern language and you can talk about some of the ideas. As you go back on Monday morning, this is the book, Fearless Change. We started writing it, my co-author Mary Lynn Mans and I. In 1996, because we were introducing patterns into our organizations, we finished it in 2005. Took us 10 years and over those 10 years I changed. I was writing about how to change organizations and what I did was I changed myself. I started as a technical person who had a PhD in computer science who believed in the power of technology to make everything better and at the end of that long journey I realized I should be paying attention to people and how they think that that was the key to really innovating to changing, understanding the people side. So I know you're looking at me and thinking, good Lord, this woman must be 95. How could she possibly have a PhD in computer science? There probably weren't even computers when she started her educational career and you would be right, you would be right. We were rolling stone tablets around. So I went back to school many times and it wasn't until 21 years ago I decided I was gonna finish that PhD and I went back with a goal of finishing by 50. So as you think about something you'd like to do, some change you'd like to make in your own life and maybe someone, maybe it's you, somebody is telling you, oh well you can't do that because you're too old or too young or too tall or too short or too wide or too black or too white or if somebody is telling you that, my message today is you listen to your own voice in your head and say, if Linda can do it, if Linda can do it, if she can go back and finish her PhD by 50 and I did, I defended one month before my 50th birthday. I usually get a little applause. And that was 21 years ago. And I'm not telling you that because I think I'm really smart or exceptionally hardworking. I think you could do it, you could do it too. So at the end I realized I spent a lot of time on computer science and thinking about technology and really I should be looking at oh my goodness, influence, how does that word make you feel influenced? Um, yeah, that might be a myth that we think that's kind of underhanded maybe something that those of us who are very smart people, well we don't need to do that. Isn't that for marketing guys? Sales people? I started writing down things that I heard today and I thought, you know, this kind of backs up what I was thinking about and by the time I got to the end of Jeff's talk I thought I have to stop because all of a sudden my talk got so long because of all his comments. And if I continued on through Catherine's wonderful presentation I would have realized that everybody today has been saying kind of what I wanted to say. I think that means it must be pretty good. So that's what we're talking about, changing the world. So here's myth number one. Let's take a poll. How many smart people in the room? Look at that, look at that of course and therefore, therefore, you are rational decision makers. Ah, okay, thank you. Are you married? Was that a rational decision? Did you make a little decision table with the positives on one side and the negatives on the other and did you priority rank those and come to therefore and then you decided I have known people who have done that by the way. Oh, and you, ah, okay. Well, so even you, the rational decision maker would say every now and then you make a decision that isn't rational. I gave a version of this talk, let's see, a week ago in a small country in Europe, maybe I shouldn't give the name but it has a lot of chocolate in it and a lot of clocks. And I really got stuck on this one because they just wouldn't buy it. I said, no, no, we're very rational and I realized there might be some cases you should move there. You'd be right at home. So they're very rational, very rational people but most people would realize that every now and then they do make decisions that are not rational and so therefore we have to do something else because if you have your great idea you said you had a great idea after today that you would probably think of going back on Monday morning and doing what? If you had any plan at all, any strategy for talking about your great idea, what would that involve? Maybe a PowerPoint presentation with some nice bullets. Would that be it? Yeah, and what would be in that PowerPoint presentation? Would it be, well, here are the reasons? Here are the benefits. Here's that little decision table. Have you done that before? How'd that work out for you? Did you get to the end of that PowerPoint and everybody said, oh, thank you. I see, so clearly now why we should do this. You've explained it to me so yeah, sign me up. Is that what happened? It did, oh, I'm so glad. You should probably move to Switzerland with this guy because most of the time that nice rational argument that beautiful PowerPoint presentation, people just sit there and they listen to your wonderful cost benefit analysis and they don't care. And you walk out of the room and you're, well, you're a little sad and you start saying things like, well, those people, they must be stupid. I explained it to them. I told them why all those good things and bad things and they didn't listen to me. So maybe they're not as smart as I thought because we buy into that myth. We think that because they're smart that we have that nice rational argument and that's all we need. So if we don't pay attention to influence then we have only one tool in our toolbox and most of the time it will let us down because most of our decisions are not made for rational, logical reasons. Now here's the really bad news from the cognitive scientists and that is that, I'm sorry, I have to work up to this one. None of our decisions, that's as in zero. None of our decisions are rational. Oh, that's not good, is it? I'm sorry, not to mention those people with the chocolate and the clocks. They just could not get past that. So I'm just the messenger here. I'm not marketing myself as a neuroscientist. I just read about it all the time and that's the conclusion, is that it's all done unconsciously and then what we're really good at is explaining after it's over why we made the decision and that's called rationalization and that has nothing to do with the underlying logic for making it in the first place. Oh, I'm sorry. My husband says, you know, the reason why you're still talking about this is that you're trying to convince yourself. I don't like it either. Let's just go on to the next one. So I have some patterns that will help you address that and the first one is called evangelist. Now, when these patterns were written, I was living in Phoenix, Arizona and my co-author was living in North Carolina. That's in the South. And she said to me, Linda, you know, evangelist in North Carolina, I'm not sure that's the name we want for our pattern. And I said, well, I stole it from Lucent. They do that all the time, corporate evangelists. I said, I kind of like it. So we debated back and forth about it and now the book was published in 2005. We're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of that book and now we realize that is exactly, that's exactly the right name because in the beginning, you are sitting there now with your great idea and what you have around that idea is no scientific proof that it will work. And all you've heard today are stories that are really about religion, maybe a little bit. I assume that you're all doing agile of some form. Let's take a poll. How many of you are doing agile of some form? I'm not gonna ask you what kind, scrum butt, whatever. How many did you decide to do that because you looked at all the scientific, randomized, controlled, double blind experiments that show clearly the benefit of doing agile. We're not believing anything he says. The reason why nobody else raised any hands is because there aren't any. We have no scientific, this is not a science. This is. I have a talk that I sometimes give, it's called, could agile be a placebo? Cause think about that, if the drug companies ran the way we do, we'd be going up to each other conferences like this and saying, hey now I tried these blue pills. They really made me feel better. I'm here to tell you across my organization, we are all trying these blue pills now and it really peps us up. We can see our customers are happier, our defects are going down, you should try it. Yeah, and you can try, I'll give you a free sample. Think about it, the drug companies not only have to show that the drug is better than no drug, but they finally realize there has to be a third group and that third group gets something that looks like the drug, but it isn't real. It's a sugar pill or a vitamin. And the question you have to ask yourself is, how does that work? How does that placebo, how does it work? The people who are in the placebo group don't know they're in the placebo group, they're taking something that looks like a real pill or it could be surgery. So they believe that they have the real drug and the belief is enough so they get better. And that's all we've got right now. So evangelist is the right name. In the beginning, you don't have any proof. The only reason why you're passionate about that idea is you believe, so is that a bad thing? Because it's all we've got. So evangelist is not only a good thing, in my opinion, it's a requirement. Because if you don't believe, if you don't have passion for it, it's not gonna happen. Trying to change organizations, trying to change other people, trying to change yourself, takes an enormous amount of energy and it's gonna be discouraging. We've had a lot of talk today about experiments and failure. The only way you're gonna survive that is if you have a powerful passion for it, if you believe in it. So evangelist is the first pattern and then you have seen this today already. Adrienne reminded me of the connection with the Uda Loop and we've had people talking about this cycle. The patterns originally, so this is 96, realized we said we gotta try something, test the waters. And then you have to stop and think about it. How was it working? And then you have to build on your success and that implies that you're gonna have failure and then you repeat little steps over and over. This is like lean startup, this is like add, this is the heart of agile development. We have seen flavors of that all day today. The message is clear. The way forward is to believe and to begin taking a series of small steps where you learn, well these have to do with how you're gonna change organizations, how you're gonna apply patterns to change organizations but it's broader than that. This is how babies, we all started this way. How do we learn to walk by standing and taking a little step and falling down and picking ourselves up and doing it again? It's called the learning cycle by a psychologist named Kolb. So everybody's got a label or a flavor of it and so that's what you do as an evangelist. You begin with the power of belief and then you begin your own little experiments trying in some small way to be scientific. It's a little bit like propose a hypothesis, test it out, learn and then try another little hypothesis and some people say good Lord, Linda you're 71, why don't you just stay at home? Sure it would be easier than getting jet lag all the time and I said I think I'm still doing that. I think I'm still going around and around in that cycle. I'm addicted because it's about learning and you can still do it at 71. Uh oh, this one's just as bad. My idea is so good. That should be enough, shouldn't it? Shouldn't it? I've actually heard that from many evangelists. Well, it's such a good idea. Goodness, goodness should win. Doesn't good win? Doesn't good triumph over evil? I'm sure we can all think of a time in history, whether it's a political idea or technical idea or the bad idea won. You know, they didn't like that in that country with the chocolate and the cuckoo plaques. They didn't like that either. We have this deep seated belief. It's called the just world fallacy. In fact, some of us were talking about this at lunch. This belief that there should be truth, justice, goodness. Oh man, I just told you you're not rational and now I'm telling you goodness doesn't win. Maybe I should stop now and just go home. What do you think? So what are you gonna do? Feed them. One of my favorite experiments has to do with food. They said, let's have a couple of groups of people here and we're gonna give them the same presentation it has to do with an issue and then we're gonna ask them to vote. So we're gonna give them exactly the same presentation but that group over there gets chocolate chip cookies. You on the other hand, sorry, nothing, no food for you. So here's the question. Which side supported the issue? Pretty easy, right? Yeah, the people with the cookies, indeed. Seems like a no brainer. Now, here's the interesting thing about that experiment. It's been repeated many, many times and what they learned was you don't have to have a good idea. You just have to have good cookies. You can convince people to vote or support a pretty bad idea as long as you bring in food that they like. Now, what we know is it's not about the quality of the idea but it is about the quality of the cookies. If you don't feed them the right kind of cookies, I made the mistake once of bringing in healthy, whole wheat, big Newtons. That'll work against you. That will lose you votes. So if you're gonna use this pattern which appeals to some real deep, hard wiring, think about it, the United States, I'm sorry, no longer number one in the obesity race, we have fallen to second place. Come on, people, we can do better than that. Mexico has just pulled ahead of us. We're no longer the fattest nation on the face of the earth. It makes me proud to say we're number two. Even in the United States of America, food is a powerful influencer. It's so deeply hardwired in all of us. So all the data shows very clearly that when we're eating, we're more open to being influenced. So there you go, on Monday morning, you have a little brown bag and you say, hey, I went to this great day, flow con, some great ideas, come on, we'll have a little brown bag session and I will buy the cookies. In French, it's what, compagnon, a friend is someone with whom I break bread. All languages speak to that connection. When we eat together, there's a feeling that these are people we trust. It's hardwired, goes back tens of thousands of years. So it's a great influencer, even for bad ideas. You know, there's some interesting work that's been done on dictators. Turns out that the dictators all think they're good people. They think their ideas are good. Okay, so I had to slaughter a few million people. But I did it for the good of my country. So the debate about good ideas, bad ideas, complicated. I like this one. I was talking about these patterns at a large telecom company. And the vice president there said, Linda, these are really nice, but I don't need these patterns. I tell people what to do and if they don't do it, I fire them. That's actually very effective. Killing them also works. If you don't do what I say, I will kill you. It's amazing how quickly people will line up. So there is this myth that somehow, if you had enough power over people, that then you could make, you could make them change. But it's an illusion that killing, that firing, it does not make real change. That gets something called compliance. People will do it. They will say, yes, sir. Oh, yes, sir, we are all agile now. Oh, sure. Come on, come on, have our daily stand up. Oh, yes, we are agile. But as soon as the flavor of the week, and you know, you probably can't imagine this, but in many organizations, they move on to other initiatives after a short time. And people know that. So they think if they just comply or get the appearance of doing whatever the flavor of the week is, that next week it'll be something else. I'm sure you've never seen that. So yes, you can get compliance. But I think what we want is real change. We want people to be as passionate about it and to care about it. We want real commitment and that you don't get with an edict. It's like innovation or creativity. You can't say, be creative or I'll fire you. You want their hearts. You don't want them to just line up. But what are we gonna do? We don't want compliance. So the pattern is called personal touch and I wrote down another wise word from Jeff. You must address genuine use or need. Data does not equal empathy. The pattern is called personal touch. And you as an evangelist have to reach out and try to understand the viewpoint of all of the other people in your organization or the ones you wanna change by realizing they are all asking the same question, which is why should I? Why should I sign up for your idea? Why should I be interested in continuous whatever? What's in it for me? At the end of the day, most people in your organization wanna get their jobs done. They wanna do well. And what you have to do as an evangelist is sell your idea as a way for them to be better. You have to make it mean something for them. You have to personal touch those other people. And what's in it for a tester is not the same as a developer, is not the same as a manager, is not the same as a business guy, is not the same as an executive. They want different answers to that question. So we've also heard that message today. Those are your customers. Those are your clients. We've heard stories about trying to understand the needs of your customer. We've heard stories about visiting customers and seeing how they work. That's exactly what's involved here is a deep understanding of the questions other people have, personal touch. We talked about this a little bit earlier that in a normal population, and whenever time I say that, I think I don't think I've ever seen a normal population or a normal organization, you're gonna find a variety of responses to any idea that comes along the pike. And most of us kinda stop early. We look at these people, they're called the innovators that say, oh wow, hey, you went to that cool conference and this is the latest and the greatest. Well, tell me all about it. Those people, I call the low hanging fruit. Cause all you have to do is tell them this is where Agile is going now. This is, this is the newest. And they're ready to listen. The innovators, but oh my gosh, two and a half percent of a normal population, that's not much. Next group says, you know, that sounds interesting, but they'd really like to hear that PowerPoint presentation. They'd really like to hear a nice summary of the data. They'd really like to read maybe a little paper that you have on it or go look at a website. I wanna learn more. Those are the early adopters and notice a little bit bigger than the innovators, but you know, you could add these two groups together and you wouldn't be talking about very many people. Those of us who work in high tech industries realize that most of the time when we're thinking about customers, we stop right there. And when you're thinking about selling your idea to your organization, you stop right there. You're thinking about the people who are gonna be real easy because they love exciting new things and the other people who are open, but they'd like more information. And not realizing that's just the tip of the iceberg that now we've got a lot of people down here. The early majority, you can buy the early majority a lot of cookies. And when it comes right down to it, they're gonna look around and they're gonna say, is anybody in my organization doing that? And if so, how is it working out for them? They wanna know about people they know, their neighbors, their brother-in-law. They're not the people who run out and buy the latest gadget. There was a man named Clay Christensen who wrote a book recently and he said, you know, people in high tech, you think about these groups and you never make this big leap because goodness, look at early majority, that's over a third. You're not even beginning to reach this enormous population. He said, you gotta learn how to cross the chasm. There's a big giant leap here because what convinces the early majority is not what convinces the innovators and the early adopters. It's seeing it in the hands of other people and having those other people say, yes, this is a good thing, I like it and here's what it does for me. That's what's convincing. But goodness, here's another third that says, if I have to. In other words, I'm not gonna do it unless you make me do it. Somebody asked a question earlier today, well, what if you have an organization where you have people who are extremely resistant? That's highly likely. What do you do with those people? We got one more category. We've always done it this way. They're called the laggards and you say, well, 16%, that's actually what you get if you add the innovators and the early adopters. We've always done it this way. Now, whenever I give this presentation to managers, the question I get is, how can I identify these people? So I wanna be very careful. These are not people. These are roles and we all take turns playing those roles. So when I went through the list, you might have thought when I said innovator, you thought of some 20-something in your organization who's got the latest gadget. In fact, it's usually a he, isn't it? Women are too smart for that. Men, it's a he and he buys that gadget. He said, look, it doesn't work yet, but I got one and he's so happy. But let's have a look. Let's follow that guy down to the cafeteria. And what does he have for lunch every day? Doesn't he have a double cheeseburger and an extra order of fries? And he thinks ketchup is a vegetable. Do you know who I'm talking about? He's in your organization, isn't he? So he's not really an innovator when it comes, he would not do sushi. No. So he's not an innovator all the time. And that's true for all of us. That we might be resistant to a particular idea. And so it's your job as the evangelist to move people up. This might be their initial response, but they can move up. And I'm a believer in the power of people to change. I'm a believer that most of the people in our organizations are smart and they wanna do a good job. And what you have to do is realize where they are, personal touch. And address that response in an appropriate way and try to understand where they live. So one of the big projects I worked on in my career was the 777 airplane. Still a beautiful, beautiful plane. I flew home on a trip from Beijing just recently. I love that plane. And one of my jobs was, the whole plane was done in Ada. Probably never heard of that, have you? Ada. And it was supposed to be so complicated. This was before people were using C++. Ada was supposed to be so complicated so that I was an Ada guru trying to help people with Ada. And I heard this all the time. We've always done it this way because the Boeing 747 and all previous planes had all been done in kind of a funny version of Pascal. And those planes are still flying. Think about that the next time you get on a 747. They are flying, they're still. And they seem to work pretty well. So what was the argument I was gonna make here? Well, Boeing mandated it. That was my only defense. We've always done it this way. And they were right. Why switch? So they're looking for some good, solid thing that makes sense to them. And I think that's what we're all looking for in a way, isn't it? Oh my, those bad people. In fact, you gotta be careful about your language here because pretty soon, and we seem to do this naturally. We divide the world up. We spend a lot of time on that. I do a lot of traveling outside the US and I know that immediately I walk into the room, I have three strikes against me. I'm old, I'm a woman and I'm an American. Strike three, you're out. Those people. So we all do that. We label people on the basis of their appearance. How do you look? Are you tall? Are you short? Are you Asian? Are you Hispanic? Are you black? Are you white? We do that. So we gotta make sure that we use our proper language and be aware. So it's the hardest pattern in the book. It's called Fearless. And it means your job is to learn. And it's your job to learn from the cynics as well as the supporters. And to be a good listener. And I'm here to tell you because I have used the pattern myself that we make the mistake of thinking that a discussion about anything is like a fencing match. That you raise some objection and then I parry. And then you come back at me and I have to parry. And the goal eventually is for one of us to say, I win. You lose. I think we need to revisit that. So my summary of that pattern is to say it's your job to listen them into agreeing with you. The first time I tried that I couldn't believe it. I was having a discussion with somebody and finally I just gave up and I just said, oh, okay, well, tell me about that. Oh, yeah, really. Interesting. Could you give me more detail on that? And we did that for several minutes. And finally he said, well, okay, I guess I could try it. It's really pretty simple. I listened to him. I listened to him. I didn't fight with him. I listened to him into agreeing with me. Jess has given me a lot of bad signals over here so I'm gonna skip over to the end because there's a panel coming up, right? No, no, no, no. So I wanna leave a few minutes for questions and we didn't get through all the myths, but it's my understanding that you'll have the presentation and they can read about, there are 48 patterns in this book so we didn't have time to cover all of the patterns. We're just gonna cover a few myths. So anyway, we'll have time for a few questions and then, indeed. So thank you.