How to Change the World
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NDC Oslo 201385 / 150
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00:00
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01:00:01
XMLUML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Alright, how to change the world. That's at least the topic of this presentation. When I was about 11 years old, I tried my first stint at being an entrepreneur.
00:29
I tried making cartoons. I had about four of them. And I sent them to the national newspaper, asking them if they wanted to publish my cartoons on a daily basis.
00:43
They kindly sent me a letter back, thank you for your cartoons, they look great, but we don't know if you are able to keep up the quality of your cartoons. Oh, such a pity, but no problem, I had another idea already. I was 11 years old at the time. I had one idea after the other.
01:04
One of them was when I was employed. I wanted to just finish my studies at the university in Delft. I came up with the idea to create a games company. I wanted to make computer games with others. So I assembled a team of people, other students, some great programmers, some great artists,
01:25
and we started submitting proposals to big international publishers. And we almost, almost got a contract. We got the promise that a contract would be signed by Mindscape in Britain. But unfortunately, the signature on the contract never came.
01:44
Such a pity, but I had another idea already. I had a very popular website with the 100 most popular computer games in the world. That was 1997 or something.
02:02
And my internet provider told me that I was the first website on their platform that shut through the roof of the internet bandwidth limit without it being about porn. I was so proud of that.
02:22
So much traffic and I made money with sponsors, etc. So I turned it into an internet startup. We all did that at the end of the 90s. So I wrote myself a business plan. It was a fantastic looking business plan, if I may say so, with very colorful pictures that show that all the revenue would be going up
02:41
and all the profits would be going up and all the number of employees would be going up and my ego would be going up and everything would be going up according to the plan. And I won an award that year in my country as Entrepreneur of the Year for a plan.
03:02
Isn't that interesting? And I got some informal investors. I convinced them to inject one million euros into our little venture and I employed a couple of people. And we worked two years very, very hard and we were very successful at spending all that money to the last euro.
03:26
Unfortunately, we didn't find any customers. Ah, such a pity. New idea. And this went on and on and on. I'm afraid almost all of them failed. At one point, I remember I was in negotiation with an employer
03:41
because I was almost broke after a number of those failed ideas. And I warned them, maybe you don't want to hire me because I basically destroyed all the businesses that I have worked for. They gave me a new idea. Maybe you should hire me and then make me work for your competitor. I can annihilate them, I said.
04:05
Anyways. So, for 15 years I failed. Until recently, things started changing. And this is one of my favorite slides. I like to show it everywhere I go. These are the most influential people in Agile, according to some research on InfoQ.
04:23
Number one, Mike Cone, he has been here before. I don't think he is here this time, I believe. Bob Martin, he is around here, I'm quite sure. Some others, and then six, Jurgen Appelow, who I'm so happy. I did a Dutch dance there when I saw that. When I saw that for the first time.
04:42
Now, I have this in quotes intentionally. I have it in quotes because I know how this top ten was produced, the kind of data they use. You shouldn't take it too seriously. There are actually only ten people in the world who take this list seriously and they're all listed here.
05:01
Including me, of course. So, things started changing when I started writing this blog. No op.nl. Has anyone seen it, perhaps? One, two, three, four, five. All right, good. You're my readers. I wanted who you were for a couple of years. Good. So, I started writing this blog and actually I wanted to write a book.
05:22
But I thought, let's do this the Agile way. So, write small pieces of text and get a feedback cycle going. And see what people think of my writing. And it worked. I got some criticisms, some compliments. Both of them all got me all fired up and write some more. And then over time, I learned that people were most interested in management.
05:43
I was a manager at a company in Holland. We made websites for some small and big Dutch companies, maybe. Some of you have heard of the name Heineken. I don't know. Could be, perhaps. One of our biggest customers. And there I had to learn what is the role of the chief information officer.
06:03
That would be me, the CIO. When you introduce Scrum, I flipped back and forth the pages of the Scrum books. But nowhere was there a description of the role of the CIO. So, I had to figure it out myself. So, that turned into this book, Management 3.0. There's only one reason why it's called Management 3.0.
06:22
Because a version number means the software developer is going to buy it. That is, of course, crucial to have on books. And I do courses all over the world. Last one's in Canada just last week. The next one is Singapore and Sydney. So, I see a bit of the world. I call myself the global bumblebee.
06:42
Stealing good practices from everywhere. And some people ask me, how do you do that? How do you do that? You were a pathetic, miserable failure for 15 years and now you suddenly have some success. Oh, I don't know. I learned a few things. Good. I learned something after 15 years.
07:02
And I'm prepared to share that with you. Isn't that nice? This is what the talk is about. Apparently, I've been a little bit successful in changing people's behaviors. Reading my blog, reading my book, coming to my courses. I've been an influencer, as some people say.
07:21
Now, other people would like to have that too. They say, I want to make the rest of the organization more agile. Or I want to motivate my employees to develop themselves some more. Or I want to convince customers that they should accept Scrum. Or I would like to convince Italians how to run an airport. Something like that. I hope somebody tries to change that.
07:44
So, how can I be successful at influencing other people to do what I want? That is the question. That is the meta question. So, I think most of you sometimes have this. Like, I have a good idea. Now they have to change.
08:01
That's the meta pattern of this question. Oh, it's a good question. It's a good question. Because you see, some of you probably are interested in Agile or Scrum or Kanban or any of the other Agile methods. And according to some research, these are the barriers to Agile adoption.
08:21
You see, number one, the ability to change the organization's culture. Bureaucracy, command and control, different words are used for bad organizational cultures. Availability of the people with the right skills. Number two, change management. The general resistance to change. So, numbers one and number three both deal with changing the organization.
08:46
It's a big topic. No wonder that many talks at Agile conferences are about organizational transformation or change management. So, I looked into it. I thought I want to know a bit about that too. So, I looked into it and I read these four books.
09:03
I read more, but these ones were my favorites. Leading Change by John Carter is probably the most famous one worldwide. This one, Fearless Change by Linda Rising and Marilyn Mance is probably the most well-known in the Agile world. I will see Linda Rising next week in Amsterdam.
09:21
In the middle days, Influencer and Switch have some great stories, wonderful stories, funny stories about changing people's behaviors. And I went through them and I sort of discovered, that's what I'm good at, I sort of discovered four ways of looking at change. That's how I organize it. Four ways of looking at a social system.
09:43
And I call it the Mojito method. The Mojito method is taking ingredients that already exist and that are in themselves a bit boring, but when you throw them together, you stir them a little bit, you get a Mojito. Amazing that you can make that out of these boring ingredients.
10:01
So this is sort of the Mojito method applied to change. The ingredients already exist, they are already out there, but I mixed them a little bit to make it work better. Number one, consider the system. You have to be a change agent and a systems thinker. I will go into details in a moment.
10:20
Number two, you have to change people at the individual level. There's a model for that. Number three, consider the interactions of the people. There's a behavioral virus, as if it is a behavioral virus that you inject in the system. You want people to copy that behavior. And number four, consider the environment.
10:42
There's a boundary around the system and if you tweak the boundary, the system will reorganize within. All right, here we go. Four parts. Number one, dance with the system I call it. There's a model for that. PDCA, Plan, Do, Check, Act. Very famous model. It's the mother of all improvement cycles.
11:02
There are alternatives to it. PDSA, the OODA loop. In the lean startup movement they call it Build, Measure, Learn. In agile we've called it Inspect and Adapt. It's all the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Do things iteratively. So I use the old one in honor of Deming and Shewhart.
11:22
It starts with the first two questions. I'll show you lots of questions and I all stole them from the books. So nothing is my own question. This is just common sense change management stuff. What exactly is your goal and where are things going well? For example, this is what they did 12 years ago with the Agile Manifesto.
11:43
They had a goal, improving the way we create software. That's what it says. We're uncovering better ways to developing software. That's what they were after. They had a clear goal, vision. And they had an idea of where things were going well. Because these guys, yes ladies I'm afraid they were only guys, 70 guys got together and they had experience with projects that went well.
12:07
So they already knew what was working. I had something similar two years ago, almost three years ago, when we came up with the idea of Agile Lean Europe. Me and some of my friends, we visited plenty of conferences
12:23
and we noticed that there's Agile Holland, Agile Norway, Agile Sweden, Agile Finland, Agile France, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, times 50. So we said it would be nice to get sort of a pan-European collaboration.
12:41
Not exactly the same thing as a European union. I would not go that far. But at least some collaboration so that we know what we're doing across borders. And people said, oh that's a great idea. And then others started organizing a conference. That was amazing. Within half a year a conference was organized in Berlin with more than 200 people.
13:01
The year after in Barcelona, this year in Bucharest, Romania. So I helped people change their behaviors because there was a vision. And there was also an idea of where things were going well because we noticed when you get people in a bar drinking beer, they get stuff started. That's how it worked.
13:22
So we decided let's get people together across Europe in a bar. The conference is of course just an excuse. We want to have them in a bar together to get things started. And it worked. Next part is what are the simple crucial steps and when and where do we start?
13:41
There's a good time and place for things to be started. Like Mike Cohen said in his book on Scrum. You don't want to choose the biggest project because it is not safe to fail. You don't want the smallest project because that might not be taken seriously by other people. You want something in the middle when you want to start with Scrum.
14:01
So that's an example of there's a good place to start. But then what are the crucial steps? Here's an example. You need the simplest possible thing that you can do that sends people in the right direction. Like a task board. Visualize the workflow as they call it in Kanban. So you simply show with sticky notes what the work is and you have it move across the board.
14:26
Anyone can do that. I even saw account managers do it. So it's easy. Now I know that this is a bit of a strange board, I admit. It has beer on it. So apparently this is somebody attending a party or something like that
14:41
planning the amount of beer that he is going to drink. Or she, it could be a Norwegian of course. So planning the amount of beer that they're going to drink. And then moving it across the board throughout the party. And hopefully at 4 o'clock in the night the fridge is empty and all the sticky notes are in the left column. And then hopefully the guest says to the host,
15:03
Look, could you verify that your fridge is empty? Did I do a good job? And then that would be the demo. We call that scrum, right? That's a scrum approach. Some people say you shouldn't estimate all that stuff. It's a bit silly to estimate the amount of beer that you can drink. You just drink as fast as you can but only one beer at a time.
15:21
And we call that Kanban. Limited beer in progress. All right. But the fact is it is a very simple practice. Visualize the workflow. It's a simple crucial step. Then how do you get feedback? How do you know as soon as possible whether you're going in the right direction?
15:42
As I did with my blog. I tried two times before to write a book and I failed. They were too big of a project. But when I started as a blog I could navigate towards the stuff that people found most interesting. That worked. So you have to increase or decrease the feedback cycle.
16:01
I did that with my courses too. When I started out I had of course evaluation forms, as everyone has. But I noticed at the end of the second day it is too late to ask for feedback. I want to know it earlier. So I came up with the idea of a feedback door or a happiness door. After lunch or before lunch on the first day, write something on a sticky note and put it on the door before we leave.
16:26
It works like magic. So I got fast feedback in an informal way and people liked it. Oh this is fun, this is fun. And the higher you put the sticky note the happier you are. So they gave me a quick visual representation of the happiness in the room.
16:41
So learn fast and then prepare to go through the cycle again. Because you don't know if it's going to work. So you'll need another idea and another. Accelerate with the feedback cycle. Here's an example. There were 15 attempts at creating a tablet computer before the iPad. And all of them failed.
17:00
But the industry knew that it was a good idea. Somehow they wanted us to get to use tablet computers. And it took the right person and the right time to get it right. Steve Jobs and touch technology. That made the difference. And I'm sure they learned from all the previous mistakes that went before.
17:23
So the message here is it is a social system and it is unpredictable how it's going to change. You have to try everything. Like I tried with my blog all kinds of things to make it successful and get people to read it. And most of the stuff failed. Until I wrote a blog post called 100 interview questions for software developers.
17:45
They were just questions I had lying around that I came up with with a friend of mine when we were having a bit of fun and beer at night. I had 100 questions, useful for me as a manager. I thought, OK, let's put them on my blog. My God, half a million visitors for this blog post.
18:03
I still get people sending me messages from across the world. I have been interviewed with your questions from your blog. Managers simply print the list and start with number one. Easy. I get people complaining, you destroyed the interview process. Like I care.
18:22
Someone else gave all the answers. It's on another blog, all the answers. So I never knew that. I never knew that this was the thing that apparently people wanted to read. So I tried many things and you should do that as well. And there's a nice quote by Donella Meadows, a systems thinker.
18:41
And she said, it is like dancing with a system. There is this social system, your team or your organization, and you wanted to move over there, so you dance with it. And it's probably not a dance that goes straight. It is not a tango. It is a little more like a waltz that goes in all directions. But you want to move the system to move over there. Well, if you're a good dancer, if you're a good change agent,
19:02
you are able to move over there. But you have to respond to how the system behaves. This is a nice metaphor, by the way. Brian Merrick, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, he used the same metaphor two years ago at Agile Conference in Madrid. He made everyone stand up, the whole audience during his keynote,
19:24
and he made us dance the tango with each other, with the person next to us. So the person next to us was Lasse Koskela, a guy from Finland, another speaker. So he made us dance the tango. Now, I was very happy that it was Lasse, because people from Finland are very silent people.
19:41
They don't say much. So I was trusting him to keep his mouth shut about us having danced the tango in Madrid. Unfortunately, now it says on his Twitter page, I want to dance the tango with Jurgen Apolo, for the whole world to see. It's been there for two years.
20:01
Lesson learned, never dance with Finnish people. All right. So, you want to change something, you want to introduce Agile, you want to get people started with test-driven development, or you want to introduce pair programming, whatever it is, then I have some questions for you. What exactly is your goal and where are things going well? What are the simple crucial steps?
20:22
When and where do you start? Have you thought about that? How do you get quick feedback cycle? And are you prepared to do this again and again and again? Because hardly any time the first attempt will work. You have to try again and again. All right. Part two. Mind the people.
20:40
People have to change at the individual level. They have to change at the individual level. There's a model for that. Adcar. It says it starts with awareness. Creating awareness of the need for change. Well, that is sort of easy. Still, apparently many people struggle with it because it is hard to communicate well
21:03
and it's hard to set the right example. Even there sometimes people fail. I see other speakers, I see other writers and I see them struggling with communicating well. So that is already a bit difficult sometimes but then still the easiest part of that whole model perhaps.
21:22
For example, you have this on your cigarettes as well, right? Does it work? Is it working? I see people shaking their heads. Have they changed them already to pictures here in Norway? They're discussing that at the European level. Yeah, they're changing them to pictures? No, not yet.
21:40
In Canada they switched to pictures. Well, that's better communication. Make it visual. It's still only awareness, one part of the model. You need to do more. You need to touch upon people's intrinsic desires. Make them want to change. Make it feel urgent. Make it feel desirable. My father was very much into french fries with mayonnaise.
22:03
He loved that. And hamburgers and all that stuff. Until he wasn't feeling very well and he went to the doctor two years ago and the doctor examined him and he said, well, I estimate you have only three months to live unless you start changing your eating habits right now. He had severe cardiovascular problems.
22:23
Well, that worked, I could tell you. He started changing immediately and I'm glad to say he's still with us. Much healthier than before. And he always knew it was important to change. It was just never urgent. And Kotter calls this, create a sense of urgency.
22:41
We always do the things that are urgent. We know what's important, but yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, tomorrow. Today I will do what's urgent. So, make it feel urgent. If you want people to get started with pair programming, communicate to them, we have to start now or in three months you're dead. Or I'll kill you. Something like that.
23:02
Make it feel urgent somehow. There's great examples of that in the books, of making it feel urgent. The other one is make it desirable. I have a scale for that, the champfrog scale it is called. Curiosity, honor, acceptance, I have it from various sources.
23:22
And here's an example. This is one of the best Dutch inventions ever. I'm so proud of it as a Dutchman. They had a problem at Schiphol Airport. Has anyone seen these little flies in the urinals at Schiphol Airport? Yes, yes, I see some of the ladies nodding. That is strange.
23:42
All right. So, just pretend that you're at Schiphol Airport and just pretend that you're a man or one of the ladies nodding their heads here. And you're there ready to relieve yourself. And you see this fly. And you think, hmm, interesting.
24:03
Am I able to flush away the fly? That's curiosity. This is number one on the champfrog scale. Number two is, am I able to hit it right between the eyes? That would be mastery. This is number two. Other people might think, huh, say goodbye to the world little fly.
24:21
There will be power. This is number three. That's three check marks on the champfrog scale. That's a good idea. It has absolutely nothing to do with keeping the room clean, of course. But they did something smart in order to change the man's behavior in the restrooms. And it works like crazy.
24:41
We now export them to the whole world, of course, this idea. People send me pictures. That's amazing. They send me pictures of urinals in other countries. Like, I saw one from Japan. It was like a game with a high score in it. An electronic version with a counter.
25:00
It's amazing. How long you can pee or something like that. I don't know. Fantastic. So, change people's behavior by doing something sneaky that will touch upon their intrinsic desires. Number three. This might be easy. Making knowledge available. Well, you can pay for that.
25:21
You can have trainers and consultants and coaches and senseis and whatever available to help people change their behaviors. So, I will skip that for now. Ability. Ooh, this can be difficult sometimes. I've noticed it myself. When I introduced Scrum and I wanted people to start also with XP practices
25:44
such as test driven development. Wow, that was hard. Because we had legacy frameworks and old platforms and it was so hard to introduce a test driven development. So, that was an environmental thing. This is typically something Scrum Masters focus on.
26:01
The impediments. How to remove those. Get all the stuff out of the way so that people are able to move forward. A silly example is this one by Amazon. Buy now with one click. It's after the red button in the White House, the most dangerous button in the world.
26:21
I've been warning people for months and I clicked on it last month when I wanted to store something in my wish list. I clicked on buy now with one click. Ta-da, I bought the book. I'm glad it was a book and not an airplane I was looking at. So, Amazon removes all the obstacles. That's important. Make it very easy to slide in the right direction, so to speak.
26:45
Scrum Masters have a big responsibility there. And then the last one. Reinforcement. Short term wins as I had with my blog. The compliments and the criticism got me fired up to write another blog post. I am now at blog post 700. I could keep up because of that feedback that I got.
27:04
People have to somehow be able to keep up with other practices as well. Because sometimes they move forward and then they fall back into old patterns. We all know that the fitness schools are back to their usual levels in February. January full, then February everything back to normal again.
27:23
Because people don't know how to keep up. Well, there are ways of doing that. Gamification. Datafication. Socialization. All kinds of agents. Just apply them to running or to working out. Some people hook up their Nike shoes to their smartphones and start running against people on the other side of the planet.
27:42
Hey, whatever works. Whatever works. Or they work out with their friends in the morning. Oh, I don't want to. Yeah, come on, because I'm standing here and I'll kill you if you don't come with me. Oh, okay. So that's how it can work. So some kind of reinforcement is needed.
28:01
So sometimes people send the rational message like starting next week everyone will be on time in meetings. Yeah, right. If that's going to work. No, of course not. That's just a message. We need more. We need the whole ad car model probably in order to get people on time in meetings.
28:21
So it's more than just sending messages. So if you have something that you want to change, like I want to help developers change the way they write their code or I want to switch from Scrum to Kanban or whatever it is, you probably have to ask yourself some questions. How do I communicate well? Set the right example. Also make it feel urgent and desirable.
28:42
Hit the champ rock scale on several items. Will that people be around to assist them, teach them as senseis? Is it somebody to remove all the impediments that people encounter? And is it some kind of feedback cycle for short-term wins so that it makes it sustainable?
29:01
All good questions and I stole all of them from those four books. Number three. Number three out of the four. This is about stimulating the network. Making sure that the behavior is copied across the whole system. Now there's a model for that too.
29:21
It's a very famous one actually. The innovation adoption curve by Rogers. He said any change, any innovation follows a sort of a curve of different groups of people. Don't take it too literal, but it is sort of a normal distribution of different kinds of people. And he said it starts with the innovators, but actually I added one in front of it.
29:45
The initiators. Those are the ones who want the change to get started. That would be you if you have a good idea and you want other people to change. So the initiators, the change agents. Here's an example. You've probably seen this guy before.
30:03
He received a Nobel Prize for the idea of changing the world. I thought it was unfair because I wrote a book about it. He didn't. I'm still waiting for you guys to call me. Anyways, he got a Nobel Prize and I think he's at least trying to do a good job.
30:22
Not making much progress as far as I'm concerned. But he tries to do a good job. He is committed. He's certainly committed. And he has some shoulders to cry on. And those are two important questions. Are you really committed? And do you have some people helping you out? I had some negative feedback when I got started with the Agile Lean Europe network.
30:43
One or two people told us that we were being xenophobic. Because we were being anti-American. I thought, what? I was trying to unite Europe. Well, in the eyes of some, that meant obviously that we were being anti-American. Because the Americans were not invited. I thought, oh my God, I'm just trying to get Europe to work together.
31:03
That's difficult enough already. So, anyway, that was a bit difficult to swallow, such criticism. But hey, I was not on my own. That made a difference. I had some shoulders to cry on, like he has. And then the innovators.
31:22
That's the first group. Those are the easiest. They love your idea to start pair programming. They love your idea to switch from Visual Basic to Python. Anyone would love that idea, I think. But these are the most enthusiastic people. They stand in line for hours to be the first ones to purchase the iPad.
31:43
No matter what it is from Apple, we will be there the whole morning until the doors open. No matter if they screw us financially, whatever. It's Apple, so it must be good. That's easy. But Apple gives them special attention. They treat them well, those innovators. Because they are the ones who get that whole wave started.
32:03
The next group is the early adopters. They're not prepared to stand in line for hours. They will get back next week when the lines are gone, but they're very interested. But only the innovators have to be positive about it. And when they're positive, all right. They will be there as well.
32:21
And the books say it is important to find the influencers among the early adopters. What are the people who are like the hubs in the social network that know many others so that they broadcast everything? Because the innovation usually doesn't start in the hubs, it starts with isolated people who have one connection to a hub.
32:42
And then the hub picks up the idea and spreads it. It's like the airport for viruses, right? Making sure it gets everywhere. Those are the hubs and it is useful to know who they are among the early adopters. It could be the janitor in your organization. It could be the office manager, whatever.
33:01
Get them on your side to speak positively about your change. And then it gets more difficult because then you get to the majority and basically the majority doesn't care about your idea. And the problem is that most people try the same approach with the majority as they tried with the early adopters and the innovators,
33:22
but that's not going to work because they have different needs. And then your idea falls in a chasm, as some experts say. It falls in a chasm here between the early adopters and the early majority. Many ideas fail. Like for example, lots of people have iPads, but out of the majority
33:43
those people don't care that it's from Apple, they care about watching Game of Thrones on the train. There's a very different need that these people have. Well, hey, you can do that with an iPad. You can also do it with a Samsung tablet. People won't care as long as they can watch the series.
34:01
So different kind of message that you will need for the majority. And probably if you have a big organization, you will have to somehow make things go viral so that people start changing each other because you cannot address everyone individually anymore. So they will have to address each other.
34:21
And then it gets even more difficult. Then we get to the skeptics. And the skeptics say, your idea is not going to work. It's a stupid idea. The iPad is just four iPhones taped together. Makes no sense. I was like that. I admit I was a skeptic. I thought it was a stupid idea. A phone this big.
34:41
Who's going to walk around with a phone this big? It doesn't fit in my pocket, I said, literally. Well, I was wrong. I admit. I was a skeptic. Now I am convinced. You are able to convince your skeptics. They are just being very obnoxious and not nice in phrasing their reservedness and criticism.
35:02
But listen to them. Like, I listened to the people who said we were being xenophobic and anti-American. I thought, what the... How do they come up with something like this? But at least it enabled me to change my message, to improve my language, so that I neutralized the skeptics.
35:22
Ah, and then the laggards. The last group. I need a drink before we reach that one. There is only one thing that you can do. Hope that they die. Even Linda Rising. Sweet old lady, 70 years old. I will see her next week. She wrote a book, Fearless Change.
35:41
She said, some people you just have to kick out. You just have to fire. Make sure that they move elsewhere. One person on my course last month said, we moved the laggards onto their own project. Where they could not do any harm anymore. I thought, that's a great idea, if you are able to do that.
36:01
That's wonderful. There is a quote that says, even science advances one funeral at a time. It takes some generations to die out. For you to make progress. Because people will resist in any irrational way that they can. It makes no sense, but they just don't want it.
36:23
So, the message here is, you are not able to convince them. You just have to wait it out until they are gone. Neutralize them, move them elsewhere, whatever you can do. But, don't stop too soon. Because sometimes people cry victory when they are here. Well, you made good progress, if you made it up to here.
36:42
If almost everyone in the organization is using Scrum. If almost everyone is switched to a new language or whatever. When only the laggards are still there. The problem is, and some consultants confirm this to me. When you then turn your back, you move to somewhere else.
37:01
The laggards rise. And they start introducing all kinds of practices. The whole organization reverts back to its old position. And basically you can start all over again. It's an interesting business model. You can start again and again and again with the same customer. You stop just too soon.
37:22
And then it will all unwind again. And you have to do it again and again and again. I would find it a bit unethical, but anyways. That's the message. Don't stop too soon. Hang around until the laggards are really gone or moved elsewhere. So, this is the third model. Behavior is transmitted from person to person.
37:41
And it is useful to remember where you are. Like for example, I know with my courses that I am now addressing the early adopters and the innovators. Most managers do not go to a two-day course. The majority doesn't go to a two-day course. They go to a golf course.
38:02
It's an other kind of course. So I have to sell the ideas in a different way to the majority. The majority has different needs. But I'm aware of it. At least I'm aware of it. So I should be able to cross the chasm. If you have some questions like, I want people to use my services. I want them to buy my products. I want them to come to my party. Whatever.
38:23
Those are all ideas to change people's behaviors. The questions are, are you really committed? It can be really tough. Are there people assisting you? It can be a lot of work. Sometimes it is depressing. You need to have some shoulders to cry on. Do you know who the innovators are?
38:42
Treat them well. Hug them until they get sick of you. The early adopters, who are they? Where are the leaders among them? How can you reach the early majority? Are you prepared and thinking about changing your message? Because they will have different needs. You sometimes have to make it go viral.
39:00
Deal with the skeptics. And wait it out until the laggards are gone. But don't turn your back on them. All right. Number four. Change the environment. There's another Nobel Prize winner. One who actually achieved something. Ilia Prigogine in Belgium, Brussels.
39:22
He is one of the fathers of complexity science. And he came up with the concept that self-organization only exists when there is a boundary. If there is no boundary, there will be no self-organization. There's a systems insight. Systems thinking insight.
39:41
All that makes sense. That means that we have the opportunity to tweak the boundary and thereby influence self-organization. Because the boundary determines what will happen inside. There's a model for that too. Surprise, surprise. It's called the five I's. There's a model for everything. There's a model for everything. Just Google around, you will find a model for it.
40:01
So this is a model for tweaking the environment to influence self-organization. It is the five I's. Actually it was the four I's. But I changed it. I inserted infrastructure. Which makes it now the much better and cooler five I's model than the stupid old four I's model. This one is mine. All right. Let's start with the first one.
40:21
Information. Oh, we're good at that. We're very good at that. Broadcasting information. Information radiators, we often call them. In the agile world. I have seen some teams, some scrum teams with red lights going off when somebody broke the build
40:41
with a big name. He did it. He did it. And then that person had to wear the fluffy bunny hat with the ears for a whole day at least. Well that communicates something to everyone. That's an information radiator. Never break the build. Here's another one from traffic management.
41:00
The idea is, well you can see it. The speed limit is 25. You are going 48. Figure out what we mean. It turns out most people slow down. Oops. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I didn't know I was going that fast. Oh, was somebody watching? Apparently not. Oh, phew. This is what usually happens with people.
41:22
According to research in Wired magazine, it is cheaper than having police cars hidden behind billboards. Nobody gets a ticket. All that crap. No, it's just a sign. This is the intended behavior. This is your behavior. Now self-organize. One that did the course half a year in Italy,
41:41
people started laughing. Oh, Jurgen, this is not going to work here, the Italians told me. I'm not kidding. They told me. I'm not making this up. No, no, no, no, no. Italian drivers, they are curious. They want to know if this sign can show a third digit.
42:03
They want to know if it keeps a high score. Well, I can only compliment them for their creativity, I suppose. So it might be culturally dependent, but the suggestion is clear, I think. Use information radiators. It will change people's behaviors.
42:22
Identity. Oh, that's a difficult topic. How can you make identity do its job for you? How can you make people feel part of a social group so that they do whatever it takes to be part of that group, of that team, of that organization? If that identity is strong, people will change their behaviors
42:41
just to be part of the group. Here's an example. This is a picture of a typical Dutch family. You might have seen them before on television or maybe in real life with a big international football match when my fellow Dutchmen walk around in orange, which is the reference to the royal color,
43:02
being crazy with all kinds of stupid references to Dutch culture, saying, basically broadcasting the idea, we're Dutch, we're funny, ha ha ha ha. I make sure I'm out of the country on those days. It also happens on Queen's Day, which has turned into King's Day since this year
43:22
because we switched royalty for some reason. But it works. It works. They do whatever it takes. If you don't wear orange, you're not part of the group. You're not able to hang out with the guys. So you have to do at least something. And of course the Dutch are not the only ones
43:42
dressing up in silly clothes. I have another picture of a typical Canadian family here. I'm surprised they still let me in the country last week. I made so many jokes about Canadians last year. But they still let me in. Nice people they are, actually.
44:01
And I did the same with Agile in Europe. So that was probably one of the reasons why somebody said you were being anti-American. I simply shared the facts. Like at European conferences, half of the keynote speakers are Americans.
44:21
Do you think that at American conferences, half of the keynote speakers are Europeans? No, not at all. There's not a European anywhere in sight at American conferences. So what I said is we have to be better. I said, I don't blame the Americans. I blame us, Europeans. We're not as good as selling ourselves. We should get invitations from across the Atlantic.
44:43
So we should try and work harder. And then people say, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's work harder as Europe to be more important in the Agile Lean world. And several keynote speakers, Brian Merrick said, any joke about Americans works in Europe.
45:02
That's the way to get Europeans all fired up and feel European. Just complain about Americans. So that helped with the identity thing. So we created this logo for the Agile Lean Europe network. Agile Lean Europe, AIL. Get it? Get it? Yeah?
45:23
Though some people, the French think it is a wine glass. I don't blame them, of course. The British think it's the Holy Grail, whatever. Whatever works for you. But it's actually a Belgian beer glass. These wide glasses. I don't know if anyone has been in Brussels.
45:41
That's what they're supposed to be. Anyway, it worked because at the first conference two years ago, when I got to the second floor of the conference, I saw people creating a sticky note version, a sticky art version of the conference logo. Isn't that amazing? I've never seen people do that. Is there a sticky art version of NDC Oslo here somewhere?
46:04
I'm sure there isn't. But there was for AIL, so there was this identity thing doing its job. Here's another example. How many of you have the green bracelet of Uncle Bob? Over there. You are the first one. After one year of asking.
46:21
Anyone else? Okay. Congratulations. So, Uncle Bob's green bracelet. I think this is how Uncle Bob does his identity. I can only imagine when you are at the end of the day, at five o'clock, typing away, and you want to go home,
46:41
and you sit there writing code, and you think, oh crap, I should have written the test first, but I have to pick up the kids, oh whatever, I'll just ship this stuff. And then you look at the bracelet. Oh my God, Uncle Bob is going to kill the crap out of me when he figures this out. I better write a test very fast.
47:02
This is, I think, how he meant it. This is how he wants you to be a clean coder. Be part of that identity. Incentives. That's the third one. We're almost there. Incentives, dangerous area. Dangerous area. But they can work.
47:21
They can work. If you incentivize good behavior with small rewards. Two important words. You have to incentivize good behavior, not outcomes. It is very hard to cheat good behavior. Like, for example, if you want your kids to do well at school, you should incentivize them doing their homework.
47:42
It is very easy to test if they did their homework. You should not reward them for earning high grades. There are ways around it. It is big in the news in my country right now. Students stealing exams and selling it to each other and they passed with flying collars, of course.
48:00
These things happen. So don't incentivize an outcome. Incentivize the good behavior and then hope that the outcome is good. And incentivize it with small rewards. Compliments, cookies, whatever. My little nephew was potty trained half a year ago. It involved a lot of cookies and clapping
48:20
and dancing with the whole family around the potty. He was potty trained. It took only two days. He did not get 100 million euros for peeing on a potty. We don't do that with kids. We do that with CEOs.
48:40
So, but it works. Small compliments for good behavior. That can work. This is also how we train animals. Some people don't like it, but it happens. I saw a fantastic horse show in Canada. Beautiful show. And this is how they train animals. First the line is there and if they accidentally swim over the line,
49:03
oh, here's a little fish. Do it again. Oh, do it again. Oh, another fish. And then they raise the line, literally. So it gets harder and harder. And you only get the incentive for the next, a little bit more challenging behavior. That's how they do it. Infrastructure. This is the one that I added,
49:20
because I think it's a bit different from the others. This is playing with the physical environment around us. My favorite example is Kipple Airport. It is rated the third best airport in the world after, I don't know, Sayul and one other Far Eastern airport. They are masters at influencing your behaviors,
49:42
changing the environment, tweaking things like the colors of the signs, and there's days of work just going into the fonts that they have to use. Stuff like that. I saw some articles into the design of Kipple Airport. I also saw some, I also read an article on scientists,
50:04
researchers who had measured people's behaviors in offices. They measured them with small devices, tracked how often they communicated with each other, correlated it with performance of the organization, and then they started changing things without telling anyone.
50:21
Like, for example, they changed the layout of the lunch tables so that they increased the chance of people having lunch together instead of on their own. And they could actually measure the effect that this had on communication across teams and performance in the organization. They changed desks around, they replaced opaque walls with transparent walls,
50:42
stuff like that. Always there was a measurable effect. So you can play with infrastructure. I learned only later when I was grown up why the walls in school were always soft green,
51:01
because soft green soothes children. We didn't know that, of course, but it keeps them quiet, this color. There's science in there, scientific evidence. So that's infrastructure. Institutions. This is the last one that I add. That's one of this model, I mean.
51:23
I have a picture of the guilds in Brussels at the Market Square. Actually, they were guilds in the past. Guilds for masonry, guilds for carpenters, et cetera. Nowadays they are chocolate shops for the naive tourists who think that you can get the best chocolates there.
51:41
You should go elsewhere to Les Sables. Ask me, because I live there, I know. Send me an email if you want to know where the best chocolate is. It's not there. Those are the expensive ones. Anyways, the guilds are self-organized entities, self-organized communities around certain topics.
52:01
In organizations we have that as well. We have guilds for testing. We have guilds for Java development. We have guilds for Python developers, whatever. They organize themselves and then we tend to call them communities of practice. Now these communities of practice can insert new practices.
52:23
That's what they're for. And then everyone who is part of the community of practice will hopefully adopt those behaviors. I think it's even better when we get rid of that term community of practice. Call them guilds. Call them guilds. The word guild has this association with craftsmanship.
52:40
It is built into the word. So I prefer to call them business guilds. Let people create business guilds together. Someone reminded me that in games world, like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, people organizing guilds. They don't call them the community of practice of wizards.
53:02
What? No, it's the wizards guild. That's a much cooler term to be part of a wizards guild. Or even worse, the center of excellence. A center of excellence for thieves. Are you kidding? No, it's a thieves guild. So a center of excellence is a boring word.
53:20
I am a center of excellence. I don't want to be part of a center of excellence. I want to be part of a guild. That's a much better word. So anyways, institutions can work in order to introduce new behaviors. And often we implement them as guilds or communities of practice. So behavior is difficult to change sometimes.
53:43
Particularly it is difficult to manipulate a person's brain. So maybe consider changing the environment. And then see what happens with the system inside. Now there is a quote by John Carter which I particularly like. Because sometimes the question that I get literally is how do we change the organization's culture?
54:06
Sometimes literally on the sticky notes that I get with people's biggest challenges in my courses. How do I change the organization's culture? It was the number one problem as reported by Agilists around the world. Well he said it changes only when you have successfully altered people's actions.
54:23
And when the new behaviors produce some group benefit for a period of time. In other words, do all that stuff that I have just been talking about. And if you're successful at it and it is sustainable, people will have changed their behaviors. The outcome is a changed culture.
54:41
It is the emergent result. It is not item one on a checklist. I'm afraid. It doesn't work like that. So a lot of work. So if you have some questions like I want my friends to go to a conference. Well how do you radiate information? How do you work with group identity? Make people feel part of that identity.
55:03
Can you use some peer pressure there? Incentivize good behaviors. Remove all the barriers, put some guys in place or work with the infrastructure. And work with some institutions, some self-organized entities that can inject those behaviors in the group.
55:21
And all of this I call change management 3.0. As a tongue-in-cheek reference to the first book, four different parts. Do things in cycles. Nine out of ten things probably won't work. But you can't predict which ones they are so you have to try them all. And then see what happens. It's like a dance that you make.
55:41
It's not a straight line. Two, work at the personal level. Awareness is not enough. Touch upon desire, knowledge, remove all the obstacles, reinforce good behavior. Work with the environment. If you cannot work with the person, work with the environment around him or her. And it is a curve of different people.
56:00
You have to know where you are with your epidemic of this beneficial virus that you are trying to introduce there. So four parts for change. And this is all described in this little book, How to Change the World. This one. Of which I have three copies available for the three people who asked me a good question.
56:24
Anyone have a good question for me? I will take them home. Yes. Yes. So everything that I stole here.
56:41
So the question is would you use the same terms in a generic business environment as opposed to Agile? I speak of Agile because that's where I'm from. I'm a software developer, turned manager, turned Agilist. So that is my frame of reference. But the books that I use, there's no word of Agile in all that stuff.
57:01
This is generic change management stuff. I simply apply it to Agile myself. So all of this applies to everyone. You earn a book. Come here after the last two questions. Another question. Someone has a good question for me. It's hard to see with all of that. Yes, over here.
57:23
That's not a good question. He asks, can I have a copy of the book? Yes, if you ask a good question. That was not a good question. Can we use this to change our bosses? You certainly can. You certainly can.
57:41
So indeed management, I think management is the biggest obstacle in the Agile world. I don't mean managers are bad people. I just mean they have lots of bad practices. And one thing that we have to do is give them the alternatives. That is actually my new book that I'm writing.
58:01
It is more concrete practices because usually what we do is we tell managers, let them self-organize. Trust the team. Well, how do you do that on Monday morning? Stand back from the team I once read. I thought, OK, how many meters? Five? Ten? It doesn't make sense.
58:22
It is not actionable for the manager. We should not be telling them, don't do performance appraisals. There's a stack of scientific evidence this high that says that performance appraisals don't work. But they don't know any alternatives. So we have to give them the alternatives. What else can they do instead of performance appraisals that gives them what they want
58:44
and that are much, much better? I'm trying to write a book about the practices, the very concrete stuff that managers can do. Some developers know lots of concrete practices, pair programming, 15-minute daily stand-ups and all that kind of stuff. Very concrete. One, two week sprints.
59:02
Yes, but we then still need the practices. This meta framework, so to speak, works if you have, question number two, suggestions for where things are going well. If you don't know which practices somewhere else are going well, then you have no idea what to introduce.
59:21
So the model, it has to be applied to something. What behavior is it? What is it you want them to do on Tuesday afternoon? And then if you have a good idea, then you can use all these questions in the model. Last question. You get a book too.
59:41
Is this book written for a manager or for developers? It's for everyone, especially for you. So you get a book as well. Thank you very much for listening. Look at that. One second left.