When is the "Right time" for Culture Change?
How long can you effectively put off doing the right thing?
Today’s issue of Crafting Tech Teams looks into the irrational thought-patterns that come with deferring doing the difficult thing towards a later date, hoping for increased productivity. This can be learning a new technology, a new way of working. Improving a process that has recurring issues. But you’re in a hurry. And want to do so many things…
As we’ll discover, this often—if not always—backfires, but yet here we are. Doing it every day.
The Constrained Resource
Your team will be constrained by one or two resources that define the current stage of your business. It may be a combination of items from this list:
Revenue
Budget
Growth %
Expenses
Data Security
New Leads
Talent Retention
Innovation Capacity
Have you picked your two?
Good—now to simplify let’s see what you’d have to build and learn to achieve that.
Revenue— Improve revenue stream by learning why the old isn’t performing
Budget— You have money but you can’t spend it? Learn why other departments are competing with you rather than collaborating
Growth %— Not growing fast enough? Figure out what decisions lock you to a certain size
Expenses— Increase and lower investments by learning how to measure and identify the bad returns
Delivery, Tech Debt—Train your team to do the hard things more often. Figure out what they are struggling with.
Data Security— Fix your weakest points by learning where you can be breached.
New Leads— Increase acquisition by refining your positioning.
Talent Retention— Improve wellbeing by surveying and learning how to handle the direct responses
Innovation Capacity— Plan bigger by managing cognitive load
Now that you know what you got to learn there’s only 2 more pieces to the puzzle. What would happen if you did it? When is the right time to start?
When is the Right Time to Learn?
We humans are an interesting bunch. We like to fill up our todo lists and schedules hoping we will get more done had we left it all open. This has both benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is obvious: knowing what you’ll do when gets in on the map and makes it easy to visualise.
Any visualisation will help bring accomplishment into reality. For any task that requires your personal input, you cannot achieve it unless you know what it is. And you don’t know what it is until you think of achieving it.
To achieve something you have never done before requires learning. Learning is the byproduct of pushing through frustration. Any new activity worth doing will always be accompanied by frustration.
However, your mind will quickly fill up your calendar to give you excuses on why you it’s okay to avoid the thing that will frustrate you.
Tip #1: Get rid of the routine things that don’t matter to you. Focus on the thing you need to learn.
Focus comes from deciding what not to do. So that you can push through the frustration of doing the #1 thing on your list.
And when is the right time?
Tip #2: Now.
It’s always now. Unless… your #1 priority is not your #1 priority. This can often be fuzzy. You’d like that future to happen but not at the expense of everything in the right now. I’ve got news for you. All that right now stuff around you—some of it you’ll have to get rid of.
I started a poll today on how tech leads approach technology shifts. It ranked up a surprising amount of answers in 30 minutes (N=19). Here are the results so far:
Technologies, frameworks, all the MinimumCD and testing automation advice won’t fall from the sky. There isn’t a book or course or framework that would take away the frustration.
Most teams I work with struggle with the fundamentals because they avoid frustration and learning like the plague. Despite calling themselves Agile.
The secret sauce? These approaches are useful because they cause frustration. Frustration is how you learn. And it’s the New Ways facilitated by the learning and frustration that replace the old ways. This is similar to the Strangler Fig pattern for dealing with a monolith. Imagine all your old habits are your personal monolith you’ll have to carry with you your entire life.
What would you leave behind?