 everyone thank you for coming I want to talk today about change and I want to talk about it in the framework of Virginia satir's process for change we'll talk about other things as well because we're going to weave some things into that Virginia satir was a family psychologist therapist she pretty much kind of invented something that people also refer to as systems psychology in which you're really looking at people as a product of their interaction with other people whether it's a family or whether it's an organization an individual team that sort of thing but change has patterns she noticed and that's we'll take a look at that so why is change so difficult sometimes and part of the part of the problem is sometimes we don't recognize it for what it is so I learned about satir years ago from Jerry Weinberg who picked up her ideas and applied them to the software world and from there I guess there's a lot of material out there now but Jerry has a book called the secrets of consulting which is a good read whether you're an internal consultant or an external consultant a lot of good ideas it may look like a crisis but it's only the end of an illusion and so let's take a look at where that illusion comes into play so when we look at the process of change now maybe some of you were in the last session next door with Utah X Dean Eckstein I'm probably mangling her name but she was talking about retrospectives and she introduced what I would call the classic model that you see of Virginia satir's change model which is you've got status quo you've got new status quo old and new and then you have this wiggly line that says there's a lot of friction lot of static a lot of annoyance that happens in between here and there so I've transformed it a little bit with the help of Sharon lotion Sharon lotion I meant I spent some time on the board of satir global organization so and Sharon is currently the president of satir global you can find them at secure global org and there's some interesting references there but in talking with Sharon what I discovered what she discovered or what she uses a lot is the fact that in all of this chaos in the center where everything is seemingly out of control there actually are choices implied you always have a choice so sometimes what happens is when that foreign element comes in something unexpected maybe but sometimes expected comes in you have a choice to react to it old status quo is very comfortable it's the familiar it's what you know it's the things that make you feel warm and cozy and it could be related to your level of confidence what your expertise is in your job or your family life or wherever that is and that foreign element is just going to push you right out of that you can try to resist but when you resist the change what happens you go back you say no I'm going to stay where I'm comfortable and you go back here but you're going to be bounced right back there again so this is a loop that just keeps pushing you back into chaos chaos being that area of discomfort things are out of control it's not safe and you're looking for a way to feel comfortable where however you're going to do that I wanted to tell you a story about some consulting I was doing years ago this was a big aha moment for me I was doing some consulting with and actually I was doing a workshop with a class set of engineers guys working on some automotive controls and I had a class of 24 people and the subject matter at the time was we were there we were helping them build executable models at the time and those executable models could be used to run simulations and so forth and so on so in this formal modeling technique you know the different iconography so that they would build something out and then would turn the crank and run the simulation well early in the class I wanted people to build something very simple simple model Tom was in the back of the class and Tom presented his model to me he took one of the icons and it really doesn't matter which one but when he presented it to me it had arrows going through it and knives being thrust into it and blood dripping out of it and it was I was just oh my is that his impression of what's going on so I had been on the road a while so I was tired and it was like oh my my last week before I get to go home and relax and I have somebody melting down at any rate later that day I went back to Tom before he left and asked to talk with him it turns out that Tom went to a university in the town that I lived in at the time so we talked about a few things his favorite hot dog stand and stuff like that and I talked to Tom about the knives and the arrows and all of that it turns out that Tom was one of the more senior developers and this whole new idea of an executable model that could run simulations he kept seeing as something that threatened his level of expertise and his seniority in his organization and so that's what all the knives and the arrows were about once I knew that and I knew that Tom was here and trying to go back here then I could help him I did not know this model at the time when I learned this model I realized oh my as a consultant I am the foreign element that comes in when their company makes a decision to make a change and I'm the one that helps move them or seemingly is perceived as moving them into chaos so but what I did at the time with Tom was I sat down with him and I explained how his expertise was extremely valuable to the work we were doing because all of the technology overlay was was an important piece so I gave Tom a few more choices as it turned out which was good sometimes something that you some of you might be able to relate to too sometimes the foreign element is is a good thing it's not perceived necessarily as bad like Tom being asked to do something a whole new skill totally different than what he was comfortable with you have your spouse and you decide to have a baby you don't have a family yet so this is your first child it's a good thing right however if you don't have any children all of a sudden you go from being a couple to being a family and maybe that baby cries a lot at night and there's a whole adjustment there's that whole period of adjustment saying oh my gosh how do we do the right thing I don't want to do the wrong thing and so a little bit of a little bit of noise while you kind of settle down into a new routine so what you're looking for when you're in that chaotic period is what are the possibilities that might take me to some other comfortable place some place where maybe it's just as comfortable as the old place one of the things about the classic satir model is it always has old status quo low new status quo high but that's not always the case you could be you could be in a neighborhood in the country that is being torn apart by war old status quo was much higher if you think of that in a scale new status quo would be much lower but you have to learn to do something to cope with it or survive it so I just made them equal because in this particular view I wanted to say I've got something here that's comfortable and then I want to get over to here because I've got to learn how to deal with that new thing however I do that so when you look at new possibility so as I started thinking about what Sharon was doing with choice I and and the idea of new possibilities I was thinking we need to look at opportunities so when we look at the opportunity of what what could be different so oh the thing that occurred to me when I was thinking about this this morning oops the lemon tart dropped so did if you were in Josh's presentation yesterday the chef the sous chef who dropped the lemon tart and expected the world to fall apart in fact the chef owner of the restaurant came by and said oh look oops the lemon truck lemon tart dropped and he came up with a whole different way of presenting that to so that was a transforming idea that took them to a new status quo the transforming idea one of the problems and I've seen this in organizations and with teams of people that sometimes people state what they think that new possibility is going to be like or how they're going to get here and what happens is management in the organization or colleagues have expectations and sometimes those expectations just can't be delivered for one reason or another safety reasons organizational structure I thought there were a lot of good ideas that I've heard this week on this week yesterday on ways that you can come up with well new possibilities and maybe a way to better manage the expectation I really liked the sociocracy ideas with you know taking that organization and seeing if you can get people at all levels that are participating and involved and building that up in stages whatever makes it safe in the organization I thought that helped you get here down this path rather than getting bounced back problem with a lot of organizations is the fear aspect just as Tom was afraid that he would lose his seniority and his skills would no longer be needed there's a lot of problems I think in with fear people fearing that if they don't master the new skills sufficiently they're going to be punished they won't be able to progress in their career they're going to have to find another job so that's something that I think you really need to think about when you've you've got everyone in that center chaos so I wanted to talk a little bit then about what we've got here so this is just the piece where we kind of want to generate we want to generate something that's going to take us up the green path and not put us back there so that choice power is really something you want to think about so one option is a trap two options are a dilemma which way do I go three options are a real choice so now I have a real choice and four and five and the more the better so part of the trick I think when you're here is thinking about what your choices are and so I've heard people talking about generating ideas trying to get maybe to the outliers or the different way of thinking about how we could do what we do the more you can put out there and say these are all viable I think and what is the one that we think we can support to get to that new status quo and past past the gate right here that is least likely to be something where we are going to get bounced back here so one of the things when I was looking at this that seemed interesting to me there's this is a little off the chart here but there's a woman named there was a woman named Danella meadows and she had an article she was somebody who did systems analysis in social systems and looking at how to make things better environmental issues and she has a little article that you can find places to intervene in a system then Danella meadows don a meadows org in her archives and leverage points places to intervene in a system so that's you can poke around in her archives and find it there hers was 14 different points very detailed very specific many times to physical systems so if I'm looking at environmental issues and I want to make a change I might be looking at physical power plants or lots of things like that so what I did was I wanted to take it and look at it through the lens of software and agile development and what she was noticing and I and I chunked these into categories these are not her categories there they're kind of mine but she she saw and observed that some of those measures are the least effective places to intervene they're easy to collect so I think we've heard a couple of times recently that velocity isn't always a good thing you have organizations that want to say well why can't your team be as good as that team why can't you guys deliver the same velocity and why are your story points so different and so on and so forth so sometimes we take things that I liked Josh's word I think he called it busyness accounting you know people looking at these things and it's kind of an accounting exercise but I did love the love metric that he talked about the idea of what is the is the customer using the product what is that feedback on the customer using the product so going up the scale to the more effective places to intervene feedback and I think this is where agile does a fantastic job of working towards getting things moving and things changing so there's demos there's retrospectives there's things that are probably a lot more transparent the fact that you're also engaging business people engaging people who care about the end product looking for the value one of the traps I often see is people don't think they have enough time for the retrospective yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay let's get on to the next project because everybody wants all their resources allocated so Mary talked about that just a couple hours ago that resource utilization not always the most efficient but a lot of opportunity here how can you make a change and suggest a change to actually make these happen so I think everybody goes through the demos but certainly when you think about assistance here you can think about things like getting the tooling and the infrastructure together to do continuous development you know that gives you that power more power on that feedback making things transparent I think one of the biggest challenges I've seen is not being in the same room for many companies that is a luxury you can't do that you have people all over the world so you have to be creative in terms of how you make the work transparent and there are a lot of tools out there some better some not so good but in the end when you take something and say well this could really help us in a worldwide implementation then you need to think about it from your perspective because these tool vendors make things and and those tools are built for anybody who wants to buy it so the anybody may or may not be the way you want to work so very important that you think about how you want to use those to be effective and and keeping it simple let's keep it simple and build up retrospectives build the time in if you can get somebody to change the way time is allocated build the time in getting to the more powerful levers rules of the system safety is big I had a colleague I worked with who this works better in a room and in a room one of the things he used to do is get the group together and give everybody a slip of paper the slips of paper were identical and everybody had a pen or a pencil he had a big hat and he would say on a scale of one to five with one being the least safe in your mind five being the most safe write down a number fold it up put it in the hat and what we're going to do is kind of take a temperature reading of how safe people really feel everybody was anonymous but when you if you saw one or two people feeling unsafe then there was an indication that you had to pay attention to that trust issue so now how do we solve that problem how do we solve the problem in the utas retrospectives she talked about the paradox I forget the yes paradox intervention I like that how could we make it worse everybody can think about how it would be worse so you can also use those creative juices also to then turn it and reposition it and say well if it looked exactly like we wanted it to look what would that look like and imagine create that imagined world forget if we you think we can't get there today doesn't matter because we're just pretending so what if you can use a what if to start thinking about that and then generating those choices generating the options communication is an important piece and I think there's been a number of talks about communication which I think is is an important piece you want to make sure that you've got an incentive program I once worked with an organization where I was I was so impressed with this clever little way this was a a an organization that developed software for for commercial sale and they were having a problem with quality and they were having a problem motivating people to change the way they worked it was pre-agile but they're you know there's always been quality problems that people are trying to address making it different making it better making it faster and then somebody in the organization decided let's make it different let's say we've got different teams working on different product lines let's tell the team that comes up with the software that does the best that they're actually going to get 2% back on the profit from that the sales and boom things turned around it was a little chunk of change for the organization itself but it was a huge incentive for the team because maybe if the team was like five or seven people they each actually got a nice bonus in there very simple very small but just changing the incentive system and it what it meant was you now have teams competing so everybody wanted to do better everyone but he wanted their product to be the winning product most difficult changing the system and so you know anyone that's tried to change a system and this is where I thought the sociocracy ideas were very powerful because you're looking at changing the organizational structure just trying to start to inject some of the teams back into the upper levels of a hierarchy it's a particular this is a particularly difficult problem in big hierarchies I was also very impressed with Mr. Chan's opening statements about how he purposefully took the team and moved them to a separate location and in doing that you know then protected them from the outside so the other place I had heard that kind of approach as well was in talking with a colonel in the US Air Force who had some software guys under him and they were trying to do something very very different in the way they developed software to support fighter planes things like that you know the heads-up display and he had done the same thing as well because he said you know everything in the military everything is very regimented lots of rules which is what I was hearing echoed with Mr. Chan in the government systems so if you can find a champion one champion that can help you make that kind of move that can be very very helpful so that that those are a lot of the places that you can start looking for your team to come up with ideas looking for choices obviously when you look at those missed expectations they could be around the same thing like the problem with measuring not really understanding what makes something work I had a colleague and friend somebody I've known a long time and he worked in an organization where they made radar systems and the particular product that his company had on the market was kind of stretched thin and they wanted to just slap more code in it and get this thing out the door and he said no no you've got to trust me I want to redesign the architecture and once we redesign the architecture then we're going to be able to make changes more easily and so if any of you have been in some of Mary's talks and she talks about that distributed federated kind of architecture I mean that's what my friend was talking about at the time I worked in organizations where sometimes they call these Lego diagrams and they can pick up the blocks and move them around and so what he did was he convinced his management to take four of their best people and put them in a special place so they found this little room in a building that was unlike the main headquarters and they used to sit around they got easy chairs and they brought in these interesting lamps from home with you know colorful shades and a little bit softer lighting than the fluorescence that are everywhere and so they had their cozy chairs and they had their lamps and they worked on their new architecture and the vice president of sales would come around and the vice president of engineering would come around and they would look in the room what are these guys doing they're sitting they're sitting in their chairs eating dried apricots and oh look at those lamps on the table and in the end what happened was the architecture was a success and what happened was of course then their cycles for change improved quite a bit the interesting thing that I thought was very funny was those vice presidents walking around trying to understand what made the team so successful what they did was they then passed a catalog around to other people in the organization asking them to pick out a lamp of their choice so I just thought that was such a funny story he was thinking that somehow the magic was in the lamp and not that unifying goal and mission to create an architecture that was flexible and changeable so people that don't get it sometimes luckily that was not a missed expectation that kind of worked out well feedback I had a class on design that I was teaching and it was a new introducing new things into an organization and the man who was the chief architect was very excited about the rollout of this class and how this was going to be accepted and it was a normal class there were a couple of people in the front that were asking a whole lot of questions and at one point I saw open door in the back nobody else could see him I saw the chief architect standing there listening in the back I didn't say anything and you know the class proceeded people were asking questions well that won't work because of this or this won't work because of that and you know we got the class to a close at the end of the class Bob the chief architect walked up to me and he said I was really concerned with all those questions being asked so you know all I could think of was he's going to go out and start punishing the architects who are trying to learn these new design approaches I said no no no I said you don't understand that's very important feedback that feedback tells me what are all the issues that people have what are the things that stop them from understanding or they believe would stop them from doing you know what we would all like them to do so he accepted that that was going to be okay so we were able to to twist that a little bit so that people wouldn't get changed rules of the system can be very tough some of you may already experience the problem of you know the time that people want people want you to meet the deadline and that becomes the most important thing as opposed to the quality and the value that you provide and that's a toughie but I think one of the one one person told me this is a colleague something that he tried was something he called a throw down and he said okay you think these agile methods aren't going to be as effective as what you've been doing let's get some data on the projects from what you've been doing and we'll start gathering some data on our turnaround time and defects and they they did a number of measures and in the beginning people were like oh this is not going to make any difference but what happened was he said at the end you have to had to take it out about six to 12 months because you needed some trending to see it start to change but he said the throw down was his idea for looking at how the trend improves I thought that was very clever because that was helping to change the rules of the system so but these are the areas where you're going to see the pushback and so I my thing is cut off there were five things but I think collaboration is important because you can generate opportunities and however you choose to use that collaboration and I think one of the ideas for instance that you had in her session yesterday a session I attended yesterday was sometimes the the group may not have to you know move along slowly as everybody makes the decision all at once sometimes everybody says well you know you're the expert in this why don't you help us solve this particular piece of the problem and so sometimes collaboration does not mean everybody moves lock step altogether sometimes it means you have a trust and agreement with your other folks management support is important like just like what I was saying with Mr. Chen the US Air Force Colonel the people getting and my friend who got the trust of one manager in his organization to be able to get the architects to re-architect the entire system so you want to look for those champions that are also going to help you leverage things continuous integration important to learn what works what doesn't if you could read number four I believe it says transparency figure out a way to share information and make it visible and I don't know if I even remember what number five was but I'll have to get these out to you but the ideas those are just five ideas there's a lot of ways that you can start to look at this those are some powerful things that I have seen and in the end you just want to keep remembering that you need to use the power of choice it may feel like a crisis but it's only the end of an illusion that you're going to remain in the same place so things are always going to be moving we use words like disruption innovation it's inevitable so recognizing that sometimes you're going to be pushed out of your comfort zone and generate ideas to change that choosing again so is the title and so choosing again is if something doesn't work go back go back go back generate more choices and I believe I am at the end yeah oh look there's a page that pops up there's my transparency but and trust and permission to fail I don't know how I got those two slides at the end that's and that is kind of like my friend in also in the working on the radar systems he he got a permission to you know we may not do it right somebody was their champion and bought into that but permission to fail sometimes you need to come up with process pieces that allow you to say stop let's find out what's going a little wrong with what we're doing that's the power of the retrospective also to talk about that talk about what did not go right as well as what did go right you never always want to preserve the things that that helped but maybe work in a little process into how you how you get that permission to fail okay so I don't believe if I have any more here I'd be very surprised I don't know how that must have that must have been a earlier version where I did but that's that's it so we're at the point where if you have questions I'd be most happy to answer answer them yes to ask about you talked about the safety I guess yeah whoa people didn't feel safe yes in terms of you know as you're helping them with change as you're yeah looking at that I'm kind of curious I mean what do you look for though to know that lack of safety I mean what are the size of the indicator especially if you have very quiet yes anything yeah so the people have talked about a whole lot of ways so if people don't feel safe how do you particularly if everyone's quiet anyway how do you assess that I think in some cases you're looking at how far they're willing to go outside their comfort zone so you kind of have to know something about the people that you're working with and what you think their tolerance may be um I would look at some of the presentations on drawing people out there were a lot of ideas about getting things down and writing Mary's idea of you know buying into the idea of doing sketches design sketches before talking about it so all those people that are quieter good facilitation techniques where you ask everyone to submit some ideas so everybody has a voice to some extent that's one of the ways to do it but certainly being quiet is can be an indication of lack of safety how big a team are you typically talking about usually the team sizes might be five to ten and multiple teams yeah so I think you want to get the people that really are familiar with the teams to kind of get a sense of those people maybe talking to people individually I've done that outside of meetings where just to get a sense of you know what somebody's take is on what's going on it's not everything but those are some ideas other questions how to increase the trust level inside the team so they uh can give the feedback faster yeah no matter negative feedback or positive yeah team trust is a is is an interesting cycle and it has its own cycle so there was another psychologist Bruce Tuckman who had done some of you may be familiar with this or have run into it where he said that when a team forms there are stages that it goes through and the first it's forming storming norming and performing and so when a team forms it's not atypical it frequently you will see some friction as people jockey for position in the team who's who's going to be the best in the team or who's going to have control over different issues and so sometimes it's just time and having somebody who is a good leader to help kind of facilitate the team into you know getting to a norming stage norming stage is really where you start to see comfort and trust and performing is then they're taking everything and going on so forming storming those are the two stages where you're probably just going to have to figure out how to get through that to get to the norming so that's something worthwhile reading too other questions so if there's no more questions thank you everyone for coming thank you