Speed bumps in reality: overcoming failed attempts at change
Photo credit: Makarios Tang via Unsplash
‘We’ve already tried that. It didn’t work.’
How many times have you heard these words? They’re a familiar feature of change in large organisations. If you have been the leader of a change programme, or an eager consultant, or a manager inspired by the prospect of doing things differently, then these words have probably left you daunted and deflated. You knew that this was going to be difficult, but you didn’t anticipate apathy and resignation.
Before we condemn such a reaction, though, and write off the people who react this way as resistant cynics, let’s consider whether such a reaction is reasonable.
To start with, the statement that we’ve already tried that and it didn’t work is often factually accurate when taken at face value. Transformation comes in waves, especially in the technology functions of large organisations: I’ve lived through waves of professionalized project management, of service and quality management, of Agile, of DevOps, of product management, and of the broad collection of things we call digital transformation. I’m sure that many people and most organisations have had the same experience. And the truth is that these attempts at change are rarely successful on the first attempt: the concepts are too new, culture and traditions are too embedded, the gulf between the people attempting to lead the change and the people who have to live with its consequences are too great. Profound change is hard and failure is frequent.
But even if we take the words as true at face value, should we do the same for their unstated implication? Because there is another unspoken sentence lurking in this phrase: ‘We already tried that. It didn’t work. So let’s not try again.’ The implication is that prior experience of failure is a good reason to expect future failure. It is often accompanied by someone confidently (but falsely) attributing this quote to Einstein: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
I believe that this implication, when applied to organisational change, is usually wrong, and I believe this for two reasons.
Firstly, I think it is a category mistake: the sort of mistake we make when we mix up two types of things and ask, for example, what colour is Tuesday? If we take experience of actual failure as evidence of inevitable failure, then we regard organisational change as something in the nature of a scientific experiment: we have a hypothesis, we test that hypothesis and we accept the conclusions of our experiment. This change does not work. I think that organisational change is more in the nature of training for a goal (for example, climbing a mountain, breaking a record), where failure to meet that goal in the first attempt is not just possible, but expected. That failure doesn’t prove that the goal is impossible: it tells us where we need to improve. To make this change work, we need to do more training.
Second, I think that, for many of these types of change, the case has already been made. One of the many features of enterprise technology that I often find confusing is that we figured out good practice some time ago: Agile has been around since 2001, DevOps has been around since 2009 and site reliability has been around since about 2003. We know that these practices, plus a few others, make enterprise technology go better, yet many organisations still struggle to adopt them. The exhortation that we should not do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is most relevant when there is no prospect of different results. But the results are out there, and are proven: we just have to reach them.
If we are leading change, and we encounter the idea that the change has already been tried and it didn’t work, what should we do? First, we should recognise the impact of those failed attempts. We might hope that these have paved the way, that they have made subsequent change easier. In reality, they make further attempts harder, more likely to be greeted with scepticism or cynicism. Each previous failed attempt is like a speed bump in reality.
And, like speed bumps, they do not mean that we should just try harder, push further, go faster. Rather, they mean that we should slow down, and apply all of the usual change management disciplines more thoughtfully: we should get to know the context of the people experiencing the change, we should empathise, we should find champions that believe in the change, and so on.
There is a new wave of change coming, driven by advances in AI. We have not yet established the transformation disciplines that will reliably put this technology to work. We are bound to encounter failures which turn into speed bumps for future attempts. But that does not mean that we should not keep on trying.
