There is a lot of tweets in the Twitterverse about changing organisations, people, processes. Not too long ago I was a consultant with “change everything” mind set. I was also surrounded by like minded people. We tried together in our crusade against bad, bad things in software development industry. I don’t feel we have achieved substantial success.

After many attempts I realised the biggest problem that we have never tackled properly. PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF CHANGES. This rather simple psychological thing has no technical or economical background.

However, there is something I observed during my attempts at the place I work.

 

On the other hand I observed that adopting different approach in the place I work at the moment produces better results.

I started as usual with the same consulting spiel of “we need to change“. Even with the people who saw problems it was hard to convince them to change. I got a little bit demotivated at work.

Coming back from holidays gave me new energy and new will to tackle problems. This time however I change the spiel from “we need to change” into “how about I improve this thing by doing that“. I found that in most cases there was very little resistance for improvement. Very often I tried to hide the change behind the innovation.

So, my little advise is: don’t change where/what you can’t. Disguise the change behind innovation and improvement. The change will happen by itself, the difference is: people won’t be scared of it. It also goes much better with management as they fear big bang changes the most.

Greg