We talk Esther Derby about why organizations find change difficult, how to lead positive, productive change, and the role of retrospectives in making teams better.

Transcript
Frank Days  00:02
Joining us is Esther Derby. She's a consultant and author who draws on four decades of experience leading observing and living organizational change. She has been particularly active in the Agile community serving two terms on the board of the Agile Alliance and co-authoring a book called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good teams Great. Her latest book is Seven Rules of Positive, Productive Change: Micro shifts, Macro results. Esther, thanks for joining us today.
This episode, we'll talk about why organizations find change difficult, how to lead positive, productive change, and the role of retrospectives and making teams better. So let's get started. Jim.
 
Jim Ewel  01:07
So Esther why exactly is change difficult for many, if not all, organizations?
 
Esther Derby  01:13
Well, I think there's a lot of reasons. But if you think about it, you know, people make changes all the time, right? So, change is not inherently difficult, you know, change happens all around us all the time. People choose change all the time. Often, it is the way companies go about it, that creates friction and makes it more difficult. For example, I see a lot of changes where a dictate falls from the Elysium, the corporate Elysium. And people have really no context, no understanding about what it's about, you know, they might get some talking points, but they don't have a deep understanding of the rationale. So you know, that makes it more difficult. Sometimes people are asked to make, you know, enormous changes, but yet keep up their previous workload. That makes it more difficult. Sometimes companies say they want to do something very, very different, like maybe, for example, that they want to be Agile. And so they overlay a process on top of all of their existing patterns. And they don't address the patterns. And so the patterns reassert themselves that makes change feel difficult.
 
Jim Ewel  02:31
In some sense, I hear you saying it's that people resist being changed. It's not that they resist change. Is that right?
 
02:39
Well, I think that's generally true. I mean, I don't think any of the three of us here would particularly like it if someone we don't know particularly well comes in and tells us to start doing things very differently when we have developed expertise in it for many, many years, which is often how it feels in organizations. Someone who doesn't understand your work comes in and tells you to do it differently. I'm not crazy about the word resistant, people don't resist change, they respond to change. Most people don't like being pushed or told to change, as you just said. 
 
Frank Days  03:15
In your latest book, you talk about two lessons you learned early on about change, that any given change might be positive for some and negative for others. And the second one being that change is ultimately a social process. Can you elaborate on those two lessons a little bit more?
 
03:34
Sure. Well, the story I tell in the book is about the first program I put into production, which was a program to automate an estimating process to making the decorative tape that goes along the sides of cars, I don't know if it's still a thing. But you know, that used to be a thing. You manufacture these decorative tapes and going cars. It was a very mathy program. And I overheard a conversation between the chief estimator and the head of the company the day before that went into production. And, you know,