Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas

Change is hard. I've been part of companies that merged, were acquired, acquired others, downsized drastically, changed the CEO, moved corporate headquarters to another state and completely changed their target market. The change was difficult in each of these circumstances. That's not particularly surprising. What is surprising is that change is also difficult when doing something as seemingly simple as changing the company health plan. I wish I'd read this book before going through those changes. A large part of my current work is in helping companies manage the transition from how they currently develop software to developing software with an "agile process." The book codified some of the things I've done for years without thinking about why but more importantly it also presented ideas I hadn't thought of. For example, the "Champion Skeptic" pattern says to designate a skeptical, strong opinion leader to be the "official skeptic." I've always made a point of involving these skeptics because they can become your best advocates if you convert them. However, I've experimented with the idea as presented here and it works well. Change will remain hard, even after reading this book. But, you'll be much better prepared and you should find many of the patterns here very helpful.

I had found myself moderately successful at introducing new ideas and influencing change in my organizations, but never knew why, or how to improve my ability to influence and sustain the change effort. The lightbulb was illuminated immediately upon getting a few patterns into this book- I had been, in one way or another, using some of these patterns without realizing it. Opportunities I had failed to take advantage of in the past became obvious as well in many patterns that were new to me, and in the past went unrecognized (next time, they will either be easy to spot or part of the plan in the first place!) Once you are able to recognize techniques as patterns, influence becomes something much more controllable. This is a powerful, easy-to-use (and reuse) toolkit for introducing ideas and influencing change. I believe that those experienced in influencing change will find a well thought out set of techniques and those unsure of even how to start will have a great roadmap and set of practices to start with and to invoke as-needed as their change efforts evolve.

In addition to excellent, well written, patterns that tell you what to do, this books is full of stories that help you to understand how to use the patterns to influence people, overcome roadblocks, and spread new ideas. Anyone who has new ideas to share will benefit from this book including: Managers and Team members, Professionals and Volunteers, people in industry and those in community organizations. This book is one that I will reference frequently and share with others.

While rapid change has always been a fundamental component of the computing field, recent changes have been far more substantial and difficult to deal with. In the past, changes were generally things like the introduction of a new language or a change in the structure of an old language. While these were difficult, experienced IT workers grew to accept them as part of the job. However, the recent changes are far more significant and often differences in kind rather than differences in degree. Previously, collaboration between programmers could usually be handled by a gathering in a meeting room. Now, with the globalization of a project, organizing a collaboration literally is a difference between night and day. While it is daytime for some of the workers, for those on the other side of the world it is nighttime. There are also cultural, social and language differences to be factored into the communication protocols. Writing the source code is constantly shrinking as a relative percentage of the effort needed to create a software package. Developers are being forced to learn more about the business side and need to talk intelligently and persuasively about return on investment, time to market and profit/loss expectations. Manns and Rising describe fundamental methods that can be used to introduce change into an organization without having the cure be worse than the disease. As the presence of the word "patterns" in the title indicates, these are not specific recommendations for particular types of changes. They are general formulas for smoothly transitioning a social and political structure from one systemic belief to another. Since organizations are group entities where everyone shares some common beliefs and practices and those beliefs and practices cannot be changed by a mere decree, Manns and Rising provide advice that can aid nearly all companies. Generally, the effectiveness of the aid will rise with the size of the company, as clearly small one or two-person companies can probably introduce change easily. The solution to most problems faced by a company is to modify a process within that company. Since the changes in IT organizations have increased in magnitude over the last few years, this has grown more difficult. Manns and Rising show you how to prepare the ground for the change, which is the first step in solving most problems. I ranked it the best book of the year 2004 in my best books of the year column for the online "Journal of Object Technology."