Change the world by bending yourself

Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. 

Have you ever tried to change something within your team or organization? Tried to introduce some new cool methods, practices or ideas? 

You then maybe realized that it is actually not that easy.

Some time ago I wanted to introduce some new methods in our development team. I was eager to change the entire way we communicated with our testers and customers based on Specification by Example. Highly motivated  I composed a very long email about all the things we could do better and listed all the practices we would have to change.

You can imagine that nothing happened, because that is just not the way how change works. At this point I started to ask myself, what do I have to make differently so people would at least try the new approach. The thing is, you cannot change others, you can just change yourself. Each effected individual needs to be seen as a spoon and for everyone you have to bend yourself in another way. Furthermore I did some research and I found and tried the following helpful methods.

The Stone Soup Story

I read about this short (and nice) story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer. To summarize it, lay the foundation and others will build on it. Once I was annoyed by manually uploading some configuration files. Therefore, I wrote a short script to automate it and told my colleagues. Soon they began to contribute and add new features. So, instead of complaining  about it, simply start doing and others will follow.

Highlight the problem not the solution

If you really want people to listen and emphasize you need to concentrate on the problem. Give a short presentation about the underlying issues first and than provide the solution afterwards. Furthermore, define action items so they can participate quickly and thereby experience the difference by themselves.

Do it together

Another possibility is to reserve some time each day or week to sit beside your colleagues and help them. This is extremely useful if it takes some time to learn the new thing. Furthermore, it is an effective way to illustrate the advantages, as they are experienced in practice. And by doing so it is more likely that they will accept it.

The problem with initiating change is that it always comes with a price:  the switching cost (or compatibility). This is the effort required to replace the current thing. For example if you want everybody to use Skype instead of your boring internal chat tool, than they have to download it, create an account, add all contacts etc.

This effort is compared to the relative advantage, the perceived subjective advantage of the new thing. So in case of Skype, that may be animated smileys, group chats etc. If the switching cost is higher than the received advantage, it is unlikely that people will be very euphoric.

So keep in mind to bend yourself, to elaborate the problem and to help people using the new thing. Doing so will  increase the chances of your change to be successful.

P.S. Let me know about techniques that have worked for you so far.