notes.md

Outline

• Lead the Change You Want To See at Work
• A Story of Change - FED@IBM
  • Crisis and Urgency
    • General Sense of uneasiness amongst FEDs in the Design Org out of Austin
    • One FED conducted a little research
      • Neither Design nor Engineering understood FED as a unique skillset that encompassed both
      • On Design teams, many did UX/Research work, not development
      • When developing, many found that Engineering didn't view them as "real developers"
        • Instead, viewed as designers who had never worked with "enterprise" code
      • FEDs in Design often viewed Engineering developers as out-of-date with modern tools, techniques, and best practices
    • All of this created lots of tension and frustration, with many of our FEDs considering leaving
  • Innovators and Community
    • Innovation started with local practitioners who could leverage local channels to become leaders before FED@IBM existed
      • Una Kravets, a FED with a background doing technical community organizing, started an IBM Austin-local P2P knowledge sharing meetup
      • Kevin Suttle and I were FED thought leaders in our respective business units, and created a virtual community on Slack
      • Jessica Trembly, a visual designer who helps lead the Austin chapter of the AIGA professional design community, put together a twice-a-month lunch-and-learn called FEDucation
    • The actions led in January 2015 for Phil Gilbert, the GM of Design, to empower FEDucation as an official Design program and create FED@IBM
    • In April of 2015, Damon Deaner, a proven leader from within IBM, was brought in by Phil as a member of the IBM Design Leadership specifically to guide the global FED@IBM community, something that was unique amongst similar disciplines in IBM
  • A Shared New Vision
    • The FED@IBM community identified a number of problems with the way work was currently being done, and those who had risen to be leaders worked with Damon to look in to what changes could be made
      • From very early, we had a shared vision for what the FED discipline at IBM could be
        • Working with modern tools, techniques, and best practices while shipping UI code to production
      • To get there, we needed our BUs to acknowledge FED as a unique skill set and career path with specializations, like they already had with design and back-end development
      • Interestingly, all of the early leaders had more or less the same vision without needing to discuss it
        • Values around craft were shaped by similar principles, especially Social Coding and Open Source
  • Innovation and Action
    • The programs and communication channels our leaders put together allowed us to diffuse our new vision across our community and grow it
      • FED Date allows our FEDs regardless of where they came from to share what's new, cool, and relevant for their local group
      • FEDucation provides twice-a-month recorded education to the global community on topics relevant to everyone
        • This includes thought leaders from inside our community and outside
        • FEDucation has hosted Alex Russell, Sarah Drasner, GitHub, VUE, the Mozilla Dev Roadshow, and more!
      • Hackademy, a week long traveling training and enablement program, brings the shared vision directly to those who need it most, giving them direct interaction with our community's thought leaders
    • All of these programs empower our community members with new knowledge and connections with other members of the larger IBM community
    • FED Date and FEDucation have shown quick wins that this type of knowledge is wanted throughout the community. Hackademy gets our community working in these new ways to feel what it can be like, and that way of working is brought back to their teams.
      • Some of the projects done during Hackademy have gone on to become widely-used at IBM and have even helped win client work
  • Anchor Change
    • Our values align closely with larger initiatives at IBM, including social coding, continuous delivery, and agile
    • Our practices align with the tools being adopted at IBM, like GitHub Enterprise, Slack, Travis, and ZenHub
    • This close connection sets up our community to be innovators and early adopters within their business units, turning them in to leaders of our new culture
• Phil Quote
  • [I]t's not simply the FED community at IBM that has benefited... engineering as a whole has prospered at IBM.
• Scaling Change
  • Three concepts describe how our transformation has evolved; paradigm shifts, the diffusion of innovations, and organizational change.
  • Paradigm Shifts
    • First described by Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark publication The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a paradigm can roughly be described as the agreed upon ways of doing work amongst a group
    • "Normal work" is done within an existing paradigm.
    • A a paradigm reaches its limits, anomalies - failures of the current paradigm to take into account observed phenomena - accumulate.
    • When individuals in a community judge the anomalies significant enough, they a crisis occurs, and those individuals embark on revolutionary thinking to explore alternatives.
    • This revolutionary thinking can lead to new candidate paradigms that may wind up replacing the existing one. When this happens, it is a paradigm shift
    • The FED@IBM story started with our initial leaders seeing that the paradigm IBM was working in couldn't sustain the front-end development needed to fulfill the FEDs hired in to Design, or their connection to the Design mission. They saw a crisis and embarked in revolutionary thinking to come up with a new paradigm for us to work in. We currently are in the midst of a paradigm shift across IBM that FED@IBM has started,
  • Diffusion of Innovations
    • Ad theorized by Everett Rogers, how revolutionary thinking spreads, or diffuses, is a matter of 5 items: the innovation itself, its adopters, the communication channels it moves over, the social systems it moves through, and time
      • The innovation is the actual revolutionary thinking, be it an idea, a practice, or an object
      • The adopters are the "minimal unit of analysis", usually an individual but can be an organization
      • The communication channels innovation moves through allow for the transformation of information from one adopter to another
      • The social systems are the external and internal influences of the adopters
      • Finally time is needed for any innovation diffusion. Innovations are rarely adopted instantaneously.
    • Diffusion science describes five types of adopters, each with different needs and rates of adoption
      • Innovators
        • Innovators are willing to take risk. They tend to have high social status within their community, can absorb the cost of taking risks,willing to adopt innovations that may fail, and are social and have very close contacts and interactions with those doing the revolutionary thinking (or they themselves are).
        • They make up about 2.5% of potential adopters
      • Early Adopters
        • Early adopters tend to have the highest degree of though leadership amongst other categories of adoption. They have high social status within their community, and tend to be socially forward. They tend to be more discreet in adoption choices than innovators and bank on their good judgment to help them maintain their position as a central communication point.
        • They make up about 13.5% of potential adopters
      • Early Majority
        • The early majority tends to adopt innovation after a varying degree of time that's much longer than those of innovators and early adopters. They tend to have average social status within their community and have come connection with early adopters. They rarely are considered thought leaders.
        • They make up about 34% of potential adopters
        • Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority together make up about 50% of total potential adopters
      • Late Majority
        • The late majority only adopts an innovation after the average adopter. They tend to approach innovation with a high degree of skepticism, only really have contact with individuals in the early majority or others in the late majority, and tend to not be thought leaders
        • They make up about 34% of potential adopters
      • Laggards
        • Laggards are the last to adopt innovation, often only after they have no other choice. They tend to have aversion to change agents and focus on "traditions". Laggards tend to have a very small social circle.
        • They make up about 16% of potential adopters
    • In our work, our first group of leaders were innovators that not only helped codify the new paradigm we wanted to see, but helped to set up the communication channels and social structure for adopters to live in. We focused our initial set of innovations on those early adopters we had close relationships with in Austin and expanded to other early adopters who were looking to make changes in their global areas. Our Slack community and Hackademy have allowed us to reach more deeply in to the community of potential adopters, helping to build our early majority and empower local early adopters.
  • Leading Change
    • John Kotter's Leading Change widely considered one of the seminal works on strategy and change management. In it, Kotter describes the what he views as the 8-step process for getting change to stick:
      • Establish a Sense of Urgency
      • Create a Guiding Coalition
      • Develop a Vision and Strategy
      • Communicate the Vision
      • Empower Employees for Action
      • Generate Short-Term Wins
      • Sustain wins by using Smaller Gains to Power Larger Ones
      • Anchor New Approaches in the Culture
    • Each of these steps winds up being a prerequisite for the step before, starting with a Sense of Urgency
      • John Kotter discusses that urgency needs to come from a crisis, either one naturally occurring or one that's generated to spur change.
      • The anomalies in the current working paradigm is what causes crisis!
      • Kuhn provides us with a template to understand crisis and revolution in detail
    • A Guiding Coalition of individuals empowered by by leadership (they don't need to come from leadership, but they need to be empowered) is required to set up and lead a change initiative
    • The Guiding Coalition needs a shared vision and strategy for affecting change. This is where revolutionary thinking happens and a competing paradigm to what is currently in place is formed
    • The vision needs to be disseminated to those who need to change. This is where Diffusion Science comes in. Understanding who the Innovators and Early Adopters are, who to get the vision to first to spread the vision and what communication channels are needed to get the vision spread. Get them bought in to the vision, and they will bring others
    • A vision is only worthwhile if individuals can actually take action on it. Providing programs, training, new systems, paving cowpaths, etc… to empower individuals to start working towards the new paradigm. If individuals can't take action on the new vision, it will fail. Leveraging Innovators and Early Adopters here is critical.
    • With empowered individuals, the programs, trainings, systems, etc… need to show that they're moving the needle, and need to show it quickly. For a multi-year change initiative, this means in a matter of months. Being able to prove the new paradigm is working will gain more Early Adopters and start to bring in the Early Majority
    • Short-term wins can't be where change initiatives stop. It's tempting to mistake short wins for completion. It's important to parlay these short-term wins to larger and larger ones. The more these gains build, the more of the Early Majority will adopt the vision.
    • In order for a change initiative to gain critical mass, enough of the Early Majority needs to adopt to bring along the Late Majority while dissuading Laggards from bringing it down. To do so, the change that's happening needs to be anchored in culture of the organization. By tying the paradigm shift to how an organization operates.
    • Looking back on the FED@IBM journey, I noticed that we wound up following the the 8 steps Kotter laid out. Our company's pretty large, so we're expecting a multi-year change process. We've set ourselves up for success, and are making good gains with our Early Majority.
• Wrapup
  • Change is hard, because people are hard. But that doesn't mean it can't be accomplished
  • Understanding change starts by understanding your current working paradigm
    • What isn't working
    • Are the anomalies you see a normal part of the paradigm, or are there enough that you see a crisis
    • You don't need to already be a leader to initiate and lead change
  • If you see the need for a paradigm shift to resolve these anomalies, you've gotta make that felt.
    • Share the urgency you see
    • Build a guiding coalition to support the change
    • Develop your vision of a new paradigm, and communicate it
  • Getting a change initiative to scale and stick requires understanding how innovations diffuse
    • Communicate and get Innovators and Early Adopters on board with the vision
    • Make sure they're empowered to actually take action on the vision
    • Show wins of the new paradigm quickly to reinforce the movement of Innovators and Early Adopters and begin to gain Early Majority
    • Build on the small wins for larger ones to grow the Early Majority base
    • Anchor the new paradigm in the culture of the organization to bring along the Late Majority and silence the Laggards
  • With this in mind, you should be able to create, sustain, and lead the change you want to see at work