Timing and starting together is important for successful change
In teamwork, one or more members often have ideas for making a significant change. Sometimes, most or all of the team may support the change, yet it still fails to take hold. Why is that?
I’ve led teams through significant integrations of newly acquired businesses. The most challenging was two competing, similarly sized businesses came together as one - an experience I’ve written and spoken about a few times, such as here:
And here:
The change involved (re)forming teams to focus on systems relevant to both brands (eventually to come under a single brand) and modernising each team's development and operations practices. We didn’t leap straight into change and restructuring. We spent significant time observing and talking with the teams to understand their improvement aspirations.
The Issue of Being Ready and Available to Work Together
One interesting observation was that one or more people within each team often agitated for change and struggled to get their peers' buy-in on these changes. Even more interesting was that there were usually others on the team who, in 1:1 chats with leaders, would admit they were also interested in the suggested change but might not be ready for it for various reasons.
Sometimes, they felt their change was the priority; sometimes, they had a commitment they wanted to address first; sometimes, they had priorities their managers had indicated. Sometimes, there wasn’t a warning that the idea would be raised, and they wanted time to process rather than make a significant decision.
All of these can be considered timing challenges; that is, they’d be open to collaborating if there wasn’t an individual priority or work in progress competing.
Incremental Organisational Change Guided By a Shared Direction
We approached the organisational change by communicating a vision of how we intended to work, what we would focus on, and our best guess at how we would be organised.
For our organisation, we applied some Domain-Driven Design principles to identify areas for teams to be responsible for the product's outcomes. It wasn’t perfect, and we were upfront about this—we’d adjust as we learned more.
But unlike restructures at other organisations I have worked at, we didn’t change all the teams in a big bang. Instead, we used concepts from Heidi Helfland's dynamic reteaming book. We actually did our first reteaming before the book was published, but we certainly improved our process with more ideas from the book, so I can recommend this as a great resource.
My colleague wrote about some of these experiences here:
Self-selection With Distributed Teams
And I’ve covered some of my experiences here:
And here:
The quick rundown: We would develop a pitch for a given domain and then recruit for it internally. The pitch would provide more details about the domain's responsibility, why it would be an interesting area to work in, and what roles and skillsets would be needed to be successful. Anyone was eligible to apply for the open roles we identified.
People would self-select from these opportunities, which helped them engage with and accept the big change. We would support the onboarding of each new domain team with a week-long onboarding boot camp, which covered team identity, delving deeper into responsibilities, and educating on new practices and ways of working we’d be using.
Observing the Effect of Starting Together
The remarkable thing we noticed was that changes that had been hard to progress on in previous team structures, where the timing issues I mentioned earlier were at play, seemed much easier for a new group of people who were all starting together. This was even true when the team personnel were the same people, but the effect of running boot camps and reinitialising work enabled them to begin the work together. We saw this over and over—we established over 20 teams using the above-described methods.
Of course, there are many other reasons why change doesn’t take—for instance, change is often not approached proactively or intentionally. One of the most common areas of coaching I have provided over the years is the level of proactive communication required to support change.
It’s common to find people only raising issues that require a change reactively as they arise. Experience has taught me that this can be the hardest point in time to persuade others.
The Problems That Arise From Starting Apart
Often, to move faster, people try to get ‘ahead of the work’. The Product person or Designer runs ahead and makes some decisions. When others join the team later, they are in the position of trying to brief people who are new to the work. For the new joiners, it never feels like they own their part of the work.
They are on the back foot trying to overcome the cognitive divide of attempting to ascertain why each decision was made, as handing over the context is more difficult. The download’s recipient gets lower fidelity than if they’ve experienced it and have no agency in the decisions already made.
How Can We Leverage Starting Together to Help Change?
Dissolving and reconstituting teams is an impractical way to approach most change. But knowing that timing can be an issue can help us in various ways.
Firstly, if there is a reason to change or form teams, it can be a useful time to consider what other changes or new practices might be worth instilling in the new team. The opportunity to onboard and embed new thinking is often not taken advantage of. A week-long boot camp may seem like overkill, but if the difference is twice the engagement and productivity over the long term, it’s an investment you would be mad not to make.
It can also be helpful to use the knowledge of timing people’s readiness for change with other events. It could be returning from break after a significant initiative or planning for intentional downtime. It’s about creating the opportunity for people to start together.
Once you establish Starting Together as a principle, you will see more opportunities where simple choices about when work starts or when people are involved can help reduce the issues of beginning work apart.
Have you noticed that timing can be a factor in successful change? What examples can you share? Share your experiences in the comments.
> It’s common to find people only raising issues that require a change reactively as the issue comes up.
So true!
Thanks for sharing. I have a blunt question: while people were aligned under the same vision or self organized through reteaming, what happened to some priority that wasn't included or supported, but strongly felt by one or very few individuals? I suppose they understood their ultimate role as a leader or some chose to leave.
Part of the work was getting into each area of the organisation and working with experienced people in those areas to understand what they thought was important.
We'd capture that in various ways, trying to relate activities to problems, needs, capabilities and outcomes. This often identified important work that we'd otherwise be unaware of.
We might not have been able to prioritise everything at once but recognising and acknowledging needs and helping make timely and clear prioritisation decisions goes a long way.
Still trust takes time to build and certainly people left before trust was established. And sometimes we made missteps where trust was lost. Most important is you are open to learning and improving. You don't start with perfect knowledge.