Not All Change Is Good Change

Ever since taking on the Agile Manager role two and a half years ago, I've become much more cognizant of examples of adaptation occurring around me than I ever had been before. I see it lots of places, from online surveys that I receive (and am more inclined to fill out than I had been in the past) to friends imparting insight that they've gleaned from training of one sort or another. I stepped into this whole AgileMan gig several years ago as someone who was traditionally very resistant to change - and wasn't afraid to admit it! - but what I've come to realize since then is that I'm really only opposed to bad change. So what do I mean by that?

I think there are several types of bad change, and looking at a couple of them even briefly as I'll do in this post will undoubtedly shed some light on some of what can make change a more positive experience. One obvious example of the wrong sort that comes to mind is "change for change's sake." This might come in a case where someone (or some group) is unhappy with the way things are but won't spend the time or energy to figure out why. I had one friend, many years ago, who left a job because he didn't think that it was fulfilling enough for him. When I asked him what specifically had been missing, he couldn't actually come up with anything concrete ("It's just a feeling"). The job that he moved to, however, turned out to be even worse than what he'd given up. Before long he became extremely nostalgic about the old job, and subsequently did everything that he could think of to try to get it back. When he failed in that attempt, his misery just intensified. From what I could tell, he had made a change without having any real idea what the driving force behind it was, and ended up quite unhappy as a result.

Another type of bad change is "throw away whatever I don't know and replace it with what I do know", which is really an anti-change for the person driving it. This can often exhibit itself in the form of a management type who either wants to make his mark on an organization or only knows one way to work, for example. Often such an individual will therefore rush to sweep out whatever "the last guy" implemented in order to either avoid having to learn the old system or just to re-shape it into something he's more familiar and comfortable with (or maybe both). While such a change may ultimately prove to be the right move for the organization, it's a poor approach to take for several reasons. For one, you end up throwing out the baby with the bath water, since you have no idea what working processes may get kiboshed in the process. For another, you run the risk of alienating those in the organization who liked or even believed in the old way of doing business, without first giving them a chance to draw attention to the working bits.

A common thread between both of those preceding examples is lack of data. And that's really what's often missing when the wrong kind of change is introduced. There's the data about what's currently going right and what isn't, and there's also gold to be mined as far as what effect any change you introduce is actually having. "Adaptation", as distinct from the more general purpose "change", requires that there be a feedback mechanism in place to provide that data and allow those involved to evaluate and respond to it. There's an old joke about a guy going to a doctor and saying, "Doc, it hurts when I go like this" (waving his arms up and down like a chicken)... to which the medical expert wisely replies, "So don't go like that!" The patient wasn't adapting to the data that he was receiving (pain while doing something silly), but doctors are all about paying attention to data. They listen to what the patient says, to what the patient's medical and family history tells them, and what various test results indicate... and then they respond accordingly. Smart, adaptive patients follow their doctors' directions on matters of health; the rest of the population keeps smoking/drinking/not exercising with no regard to what the effects might be, and then get eulogies that speak of how their lives were cut unfairly short.

As I said at the start of this, I've been seeing bits of adaptation almost everywhere I look now, and I think that's a very good thing.