“The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.”
― Dee Hock
How do you get an organization, a business to change? Does it start from the top and works it way down? Does it take a voice from the bottom and then become a good idea?
Organizations struggle to change because people struggle with change. It is hard for an organization that is commanded to suddenly embrace the characteristics of leadership. Leadership is about letting go of power and control and enabling the people in the organization to have power. For managers that may mean giving up their power so that the team or group has that power and for many organizations power and position are the same. How do you give up one without giving up on the other. Power and importance are linked and being important or more important than others fuels some people and some organizations.
Let’s say that the organization does a lot of software development and the process is shaped by power and positional authority, how does it adopt agile principles? That is going to be one of the struggles. Agile thinking is about leadership, shared responsibility and shared power. A command and control hierarchical system of management where permission is granted and control is granted will shake when it comes to releasing that control to a group of people.
How do you encourage an organization with a decidedly hierarchical approach to embrace something radically different?
How do you let people who have had control release that control?
It is going to be very unsettling in an environment where control is a part of the culture. Begin as an experiment. Set out to discover how alternative means of leadership can work. A group of people who are given permission to be collaborative and to find their own answers may struggle when they have always reached to a manager to make a decision for them.
One of the reasons changes are hard is the way of doing things today is based on the belief that those things work. The belief that the current system works is a hard belief to change. It isn’t enough to say things aren’t working as well as they could be, it takes evidence to show that things aren’t working and each person is going to have a different level of proof in order to abandon an existing system to embrace something new.
If you’re the person who is attempting to create an organizational change there is a lot tied in beliefs about the current system that have to be overcome. You can’t say the “new” way is better because there isn’t enough evidence that it would be better even if other organizations have said so. What are the truths about the current system? Can those truths or beliefs be tested?
Are you in a place where organizational change is difficult?
What cultural attributes would need to change?
What are the truths the organization believes in?
Thinking about Agile 