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Change

Engineering for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner​

In order to make real change, we need to connect people to the why. The change is to address something...

Seek to understand... The people you hired are smart. You need to trust them to tell you the truth, and tell you things you might have not considered. You still need to set direction at the end of the day. But your direction will be clearer and more tangible if you have understood the whole problem space...

Be specific about why the changes are made. Cover many parts of the reasoning for change, because this will resonate over a spectrum of beliefs and points of view. Address tradeoffs too, so that people know you have taken them into account. Be transparent... Be forward looking and honest about problems you're addressing, but don't brush off past work...

Be accountable. Your new concepts and vision might come under fire. Some things may fail. No innovation comes without some failures. When this happens, you need to be accountable. You can't blame the team. You can't blame the process. You have to own the situation, and you have to acknowledge that as the leader you are accountable... [16]

Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky​

  • When you become poised to adapt, it helps to consider the mantra Be Quick, But Don't Hurry. Don't rush learning, and don't hurry to adapt. Learning often involves failing for a time and learning from what went wrong. Safety helps make that possible. If it isn't safe to fail, it will be difficult to learn.
  • Change is tricky. When people aren't motivated to change, even successful experiments will fail to make a difference.
  • Learned helplessness, a term coined by American psychologist Martin Seligman, is a common problem. People who suffer from it become powerless to make changes, often based on prior negative experiences.
  • If you want to become significantly better at something, be willing to become worse before you become far better.

Change five things experiment​

  • Begin by asking participants to find a partner.
  • Request to face each other and observe their partner's clothing, jewelry, and whatever else they are wearing.
  • After a minute or so, ask them to turn away from each other and change five things about their appearance.
  • Turn back to face each other, and each participant gets to identify the other person's changes.
  • Once that is done, they are asked to turn around again and make five additional changes without undoing any changes they made in the first round.
  • Turn around again and try to identify them.
  • Ask to do it one last time. A few participants tend to shout out, "I don't have any more clothes to remove," or "This could become an HR incident." These objections are the perfect cue for stopping the exercise and beginning the important debrief. Participants recount the objects they removed and now ask, "What if we continued to run more rounds of this exercise?" Many people say, "We'd be naked". The big question is, "Why is it that you removed things when asked to change five things? why didn't you find things in the room and add them to your appearance?" There are plenty of things to add, like pieces of paper, pens, and cables. So why do we naturally tend to remove items? Because humans associate change with loss. If you can change your perspective, you may discover how change can produce gain.