Category: Blogs

Occasionally, I enjoy playing computer games and during the Christmas break, I spent some time in Eve Online. It’s an open-world game, set in space, where you’re free to do any activity that you like. As I was spending time in this game, I realized something interesting: the return in terms of in-game currency that I was earning with certain activities was orders of magnitude different from other activities I could be spending time on. Not 10 percent but 10x, 100x or even 1000x!

When I look at my life outside of computer games, I notice something similar. Whether it’s publications (I am a professor after all), financial returns (I invest in startups as well as traditional passive index funds) or health returns (I exercise daily), how I decide to spend my time has a significant impact on the return I generate. For instance, standing on a cross-trainer at a moderate setting for 40 minutes has, according to some research that I read, the same cardiovascular effect as three times one minute of full-out high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Three minutes has the same effect as 40 minutes – that’s more than 10x!

In the companies I work with, in various capacities, I see a similar pattern: most of the people I meet are hardworking and well intentioned, but for many, the return on their activities is quite limited. Especially for us, who are toiling to drive change in companies, many initiatives run out into the sand without any real impact as the resistance to change proves too powerful. It easily starts to feel like “shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic” – you’re close to the lifeboats, but you’re doing little to avoid disaster.

Many moons ago, when I was working for Nokia, one of the senior leaders in the company mentioned a quote that I’ve taken to heart and try to operationalize as often as I can: activity isn’t the same as progress. Being raised traditional Calvinist protestant, the importance of working hard was ingrained deeply in my upbringing. My dad often told me: “There are workhorses and there are show horses. You’re a showy workhorse.” And I must admit that I’ve never met a successful person who didn’t work his or her behind off.

Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. It’s also about working smart. How do we make sure that the things we spend our time on indeed result in the outcomes we’re looking for? The Pareto principle states that 80 percent of the outcomes result from 20 percent of the causes. The effect of this principle can be found in wealth and income distribution, taxation, quality management, sports and even software development, as the hardest 20 percent of the code takes 80 percent of the time.

The Pareto principle also applies to how we spend our time as professionals. Being creatures of habit, it’s easy to step on the treadmill of our daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly tasks and just execute as this is how we’ve always done it. However, as everything we and our companies do commoditizes over time, we should always look for ways to automate or remove activities that add little value in order to free up time for new activities and initiatives that have the potential of an order of magnitude higher return of investment (RoI). Innovation doesn’t only apply to products and services but also to how we organize our workday.

My challenge to you is to evaluate the effect or impact of the activities you spend your time on. Identify the 80 percent that results in little impact, find ways to automate or get rid of those and use the freed-up time to do more of the 20 percent activities that have the high RoI. In the end, we all want to make a difference and just working hard isn’t the optimal way to get there. Remember: activity isn’t the same as progress.

 

 

Last week, I gave a presentation to a company that’s in the midst of a strategy revamp. I always admire leadership teams that take on the incredibly difficult challenge of taking a step back and reviewing how the organization is operating right now and what change in direction is required to achieve future success. As the saying goes, what got us here in many cases won’t get us there.

One of the key discussions was concerned with the R&D resources allocated to providing customizations to some of the most important customers. Large customers often know how important they are to the company and, as a consequence, typically negotiate very hard for special treatment in terms of customization, free services and similar. As these companies provide a significant part of the revenue, the short-term and immediate response often is to go along with their requests.

When a company becomes increasingly dependent on a small set of powerful customers and these customers exploit their power, the consequence may easily be that all R&D resources are consumed by providing customizations and customer requests. The result will be that the company’s offering becomes increasingly commoditized as the R&D resources aren’t used for building differentiating functionality.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with listening to your customers and understanding their needs and wishes. However, there’s a major difference between “customer-first” and “customer-unique” features. Customer-first features are requested by customers that are in many ways leading and happen to identify the need for new functionality before others. Such a feature will be relevant for more customers besides the one initially requesting it and hence valuable. A customer-unique feature is functionality that’s only relevant for the requesting customer. These features are often a drain on the company as their return is quite low.

At the company where I gave the presentation, the discussion led to an interesting question: are these important but demanding customers really the right customers for us? In this context, I brought up the difference between “making customers happy” and “making happy customers.” The company had worked incredibly hard at making customers happy, but were they really the customers they wanted to serve? Although the discussion didn’t lead to a clear conclusion, it was clear that it was far from obvious that this was the case.

As part of the strategy work that every company needs to engage in, it’s of critical importance to identify the profile of the customer you want to serve – for at least three reasons. The first is that a company trying to be everything to everyone is bound to fail. As you can’t stand out and differentiate yourself without focus, the only strategic path left is to be the lowest-cost player, which is a hard game.

Second, strategic investments made by any organization should be prioritized such that the skills and capabilities the company has used to differentiate itself from the competition are developed further and those that the company needs going forward receive sufficient attention. Failing to be strategic in these investments typically leads to a politicized process and a scattered set of results.

Third, as any company needs customers and it’s the sales function that’s delivering these, it’s important to ensure that those active in sales are aware of the profile of the customer that the company seeks to serve. Failing to provide sales with a clear customer profile easily leads to the aforementioned problem where sales has promised customers specific customizations and extensions as part of the process of “closing the deal.”

So, as part of your strategy process, make sure to create a clear profile of the type of customer you’re looking to serve. And that profile may require you to “fire” customers that no longer fit that profile, or at least put them in maintenance mode and not invest in any further customization work for them. In the end, the goal isn’t to make all customers happy but to make the customers that you want to serve happy.

 

 

 

During the Christmas break, I read several books including “Sense & respond” by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The authors frame the difference between traditional and digital companies in terms of the absence or presence, respectively, of a continuous dialog with the market and the customers. Of course, traditional companies interact with the market and talk to customers, but once a product specification has been defined, the product developed and the product is ready for sales, the discussion is mostly concerned with getting customers to actually buy the darn thing.

If the sales are disappointing or if there are many requests for changes, there often is an upgrade or next version of the product. However, the frequency of updates tends to be low and is often measured in years. In automotive, a car model usually lives for 5-7 years and has a mid-life upgrade after 3 years. Even traditional software products experience a yearly release cycle at most.

Digital companies, on the other hand, are in a constant dialog or conversation with the market. Through a variety of different metrics and mechanisms, they continuously learn from the feedback from customers, make changes and measure their effectiveness. These mechanisms include instrumenting the product to understand how the product is used, the ability to provide different feature versions and ways to assign users to different groups. And, of course, digital companies assume continuous deployment (DevOps) to be in place as the feedback cycle should be as short as possible and preferably be measured in days and weeks.

Another main difference between traditional and digital companies is that the former tend to focus on what customers say while the latter focus on what customers actually do. This is a very important distinction as, although we all view ourselves as rational people, it turns out that in almost all cases, there’s a significant gap between what people say and what they do. Deciding based on what people say can therefore really throw you off the optimal path as the things you build or add to your product may not deliver any actual value.

Going from focusing on what people say to what people do can be a difficult transition, especially in B2B contexts. Customers may walk as they feel you’re not listening to them. Also, it’s really hard to tell them that they may believe something about their behavior that’s actually incorrect. However, the alternative is to build functionality that won’t add any business value in the long term.

Especially for embedded-systems companies, there often is a belief that these principles only apply to software, but not to electronics and mechanics. The interesting development is that more and more companies are now starting to explore mechanisms to deploy new electronics and, perhaps, even mechanical components to products in the field. Of course, the release frequency is lower for anything that includes atoms, but it’s entirely possible to also have a dialog with the market for these types of components. It’s mostly a matter of finding the right business model to support it.

Many in R&D don’t realize the economics of R&D budgets. For a company that allocates 5 percent of its revenue to research and development, it means that every euro invested has to generate 20 euros of business value. It’s not enough that the R&D costs are covered. The best way to ensure that R&D activities deliver the 20x return is to take small steps, measure continuously whether you deliver on the expectations and change immediately if the response from the market is different than expected.

Digital companies are in a continuous dialog with the market, have short feedback cycles and focus on customer behavior (rather than on what customers say). As digitalization continues to be the theme for 2021 as well, evaluate your business and technology strategy to ensure that you’re incorporating these principles and transitioning towards these. The only constant is change and not changing has a very predictable outcome: extinction. And who wants that?

 

 

Many years ago, together with a few colleagues, I wrote a paper on the BAPO model. The BAPO model says that business and business strategy should drive architecture and technology choices (A). These should, in turn, drive process, ways of working and tooling choices (P). Finally, these should be used to define an organization that makes sense to realize the business and technology strategy (O). Although this model is intuitively very appealing and in many ways makes a lot of sense, the challenge is that it misses an important point: technology is becoming increasingly central in business and the way that companies traditionally work with business strategy is becoming increasingly obsolete.

No matter what business you’re in, you’re a digital technology company. The success of the clothing store Zara is often attributed to its ability to detect trends in fashion and respond to these trends in weeks. The only way it can do this is by using digital technologies. Similarly, banks are huge IT houses and the budget for IT often is on par with, if not larger than, the other functions in a bank. The implication is that developing a business strategy without incorporating technology is impossible and makes no sense. Instead, the technology and business strategy are so tightly interwoven that these need to become one and the same.

One reason for this is that the nature of business is changing from a one-directional, transactional model where the company stresses the features of the product and tries to convince customers to buy it, to a bi-directional, continuous model where there’s a continuous dialog between the company and its customers. This dialog can take more of a qualitative approach, such as surveys and questionnaires. With the increasing digitalization of the industry, however, it often tends to be more quantitative and driven by mechanisms to measure customer behavior, such as A/B testing.

A second reason is that digital technologies allow for the automation of processes to an extent that was infeasible even a few years ago. Ranging from robotic process automation (RPA) to full AI solutions, processes requiring significant human effort can these days be fully automated, reducing cost and error rates and significantly speeding things up. And with the increasing prevalence of no-code and low-code solutions, processes can be automated by teams mostly consisting of domain experts with minimal support from engineers. All this is of course not constrained to the boundaries of the organization but can, and in fact should extend to your ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers.

Third, the pace of technology development is now so high that the traditional infrequent, time-consuming strategy process needs to become continuous as well. We don’t do strategy once per year, but continuously. New technologies enable new business models, new ways of serving customers, and so on, and if you don’t exploit those immediately, others will do it for you. Similarly, new business models require new technologies, which in turn often require new partners to interact with.

Business strategy and technology strategy are becoming one and the same. This requires us to suspend the traditional division of the business side and the R&D side of the house, and build a continuous conversation with the market, continuously engage in the strategy process and constantly experiment and test to inform the strategy. Remember, no matter what business you’re in, you’re a digital technology company. So, you better start behaving like one.

An engineer asks:

I am a test expert and I regularly have to try very hard to convince project leaders to have a certain test performed. I find convincing them difficult, especially if the project leader has a dismissive attitude. How can I sell my service better?

The communication trainer answers: 

Even if there is no sales function on your business card, you must regularly “sell” your services to internal customers. For example, because your customer can get your service from outside or simply because he doesn’t need to buy your service or product at all. Selling is a dirty word for many technicians. And yes, selling nonsense or deceiving someone is something you shouldn’t do if you want to sleep peacefully. But if you really have something to add and help the customer solve the problem, you have to bite the bullet.

How do you do that? In the sales process, you go through the steps of the Aipa process: attention, inventory, presentation and approval. The first step involves making it clear who you are and exactly what you or your department is offering. Here, it is important that you know how to get the attention of the customer. In your introduction you will therefore have to name something that you know or estimate that your customer will benefit from. For example, “We are developing a new test that can detect errors in your process early”.

Once interest is piqued, you ‘earn’ the right to start asking questions. The big mistake you can make here is simply telling people how great your service or product is. After all, you don’t know if the customer really needs it at this point yet.

You must look for the problem and the desire of the customer. You do this by asking open questions: “What is the problem?”, “What are you up against?”, “What exactly is going wrong?”, and also “What negative effects does this have?”. In this way, the client’s pain comes to the table and this provides motivation to want to do something about it. You also ask about the goals to be achieved. This creates a creative tension between the here and now (‘ouch’) and where the customer wants to go (smiling faces and full glasses). Your added value lies in helping them to take that step.

Once the problem is on the table, you move to the third step: offering your solution. Here, it is important that you also dare to promise something. After all, you stand for your product. If you can’t guarantee a result yet, state the degree of uncertainty, but do choose a position. Say, for example, “I still see a ten percent risk that we will not achieve the desired result, but I want to go for it and minimize the risk”. Waiting until you are 100 percent sure is science; taking a position in uncertain circumstances is leadership and this is often necessary.

When you explain your solution, don’t immediately count on applause. It is natural that critical questions will come. It is important to find out what is bothering you. That means you have to go back to the inventory phase and ask open questions, until you have the customer’s concern clear. So you have to go from sending (phase 3) back to asking questions (phase 2).

If your proposal meets the customer’s needs, trust and the desire to make joint agreements emerge – the final stage in the Aida process. You have helped the customer.

In many industries, there’s an implied, often underspecified, architecture of how the different stakeholders in the ecosystem interface with each other. By defining their mutual interfaces, it allows for better alignment. For the typical interactions within the ecosystem, this is very helpful as the different parties have predefined expectations about one another, and transactions and integrations can be conducted, built and deployed more easily.

The existing business ecosystem gets encoded in the way a company organizes itself, including the work processes, workflows, automation, tooling and even job titles. For instance, a company that buys embedded subsystems for its products from suppliers will have processes for defining the requirements, purchasing professionals who negotiate the best deal with suppliers and tooling for testing deliveries from suppliers as well as for tracking the realization of requirements to sign off on contracts and allow suppliers to get paid.

However, there’s a downside to this implied ecosystem architecture: it tends to hinder innovation and experimentation by companies. Experimenting with different business models, introducing DevOps for the product throughout its lifetime, exploring new customer segments with the product – it all tends to upset the existing relationships in the ecosystem. This may easily cause a situation where the cost of innovation and experimentation is so high that it doesn’t get done. This is especially so when innovations require changes by multiple ecosystem partners – generally, the more partners are involved, the less likely it is that the innovation is even experimented with.

Let’s say, for example, that the aforementioned company decides to stop using a supplier and bring the development of the subsystem back in-house – something that happened in the automotive industry during the past years with in-vehicle software. This isn’t simply a technology decision. Rather, it requires changes to the tooling, reassigning of people in purchasing, significant changes to ways of working and internal processes as well as a potentially challenging legal situation with the former supplier.

Where the architecture is especially rigid, for instance driven by regulation or a strong government customer, the ecosystem runs the risk of becoming stale. Due to the difficulty of incorporating change, the ecosystem’s ability to adopt productivity-improving innovations is so limited that, rather than individual players, the ecosystem as a whole may be disrupted. Industries such as construction, healthcare and university education are illustrative examples of where the pace of innovation in the ecosystem is particularly slow and where some are predicting a fundamental disruption may happen in the foreseeable future.

When it comes to the digital transformation of your company, this very often requires the organization to strategically reposition itself in its business ecosystem. Digitalization often causes a transition from a transactional to a continuous value delivery to end-customers. This means that companies that happily used wholesalers, resellers, installers and other partners to get their product out in the market are now looking for ways to build direct customer relationships. Removing the intermediaries requires careful management of the relationship with these partners as the old, transactional, and the new, continuous, business often have to coexist for several years, if not longer.

A second typical pattern is that work that was outsourced needs to be brought back in-house as the suppliers are unable to change their operating model to faster feedback cycles, there’s no good business model or the company considers the technology to be so critical that they want to own the competence internally.

Of course, the opposite happens as well: a technology and associated subsystems that were done in-house because of their strategic nature lose that status due to digitalization and need to be outsourced to new partners that might even have been competitors earlier.

A fourth pattern is that the company needs to involve new partners to manage new digital technologies, such as data and AI, or because the new position in the ecosystem requires new relationships with others serving the same customers. This often calls for a careful strategy as to where the company wants to own the market and where it’s open to partnering and letting others coexist.

Finally, there’s the challenge of startups and established, repositioning companies entering your existing or intended market. The organization needs to decide whether to partner or compete with these new entrants.

The digital transformation almost always requires strategic repositioning in your business ecosystem. You need to have a direct relationship with your end-customer, adopt new technologies and associated new partners, reinvent your business model, jump over existing partners without ruining the relationship for your legacy business and so on. This is complex and calls for careful strategizing and execution. But the alternative is that you get disrupted together with the existing business ecosystem. So, next to executing your New Year’s resolutions, also spend some time thinking about how you’ll initiate the work on repositioning your company in your business ecosystem. I wish you a prosperous 2021.

In March it came as a shock: sitting at home and working at home. What have we learned over the past period about what works and what doesn’t? And what can you learn from this for the future?

The pros and cons of working remotely appear to be closely related and are largely determined by the situation. The type of work, the mutual relationship between those who work together and the personality of the individual worker are determining factors whether online works well or not at all. How about that?

Soon during the corona crisis it became clear that much more is possible with working remotely than we thought. It helped of course that the online tools are a lot more stable and advanced than years ago. More is possible. Working from home also prevents the annoying and time-consuming traffic jam. And when you have quiet circumstances at home, it can help you work in a concentrated way. So for some, it can even increase productivity. Many have also experienced that this is not true for everyone. If it’s restless at home or the walls are coming up and you need real people around you, a few days at the office can be a blessing. For the time being we assume that even after the pandemic it will remain a combination of working at the office and at home. Hopefully it will remain possible for everyone to choose their own optimal balance.

Jaco Friedrich is competence owner of the Soft skills & leadership trainings.

Non-verbal communication

When are online conference calls less effective? Three factors determine this. First: when the relationship between the conversation partner is under pressure and conflict is (or already is) lurking, online works less well. After all, you miss a part of the non-verbal communication and therefore ‘feeling’ how someone is in it is a lot more difficult. Especially when you are in a video conference with several people. You are quickly too direct or not clear enough because you do not see how someone reacts to your message. It is less easy to make adjustments. This increases the risk of losing each other.

This also plays a role in situations where you have to be critical of each other’s work, for example at an important review or decision meeting. You are more likely to get into a discussion or people lose the connection and drop out. There is a risk that the quality of reviews will deteriorate as a result.

Secondly, with conference calls it is more difficult to respond to each other quickly, without talking through each other. Being able to connect to each other is less smooth online. For creative sessions it is therefore usually better to meet physically.

The third factor with conference calls is whether the participants already know each other. If that is the case, the relationship is good and there is mutual trust, then working online will also go a lot better. If that trust is not yet there and the participants are new to each other, group formation will be slower than normal. Another factor is that you miss more or less chance encounters. Moments when you ‘drop by someone’, listen in with others, tune something up or chat informally. The part of the information that you normally pick up in this casual way during the day is completely lost.

Camera and microphone on

What does this mean? Probably working remotely will continue to exist. So the question is how to get the most out of it and avoid the pitfalls. Here are a few practical rules. To minimize missing the non-verbal, I recommend always turning on the cameras as a starting point. In this way you are visible to the others and the others to you. This applies to all participants of the meeting. Possibly this gives bandwidth issues. However, do not, as a precaution, turn off your camera. Turn it on; you can always turn it off.

A next principle is that you do not mute your microphone when you are not talking. Turning it on and off is a threshold – no matter how small – to be able to react quickly to each other. So advice: leave it on. Unless your dog is barking or the neighbor is drilling.

To keep each other informed, it can be useful to start every morning with a ‘stand-up’. Everyone briefly tells you how it goes and what he or she is going to do that day. In this way you pick up on each other’s situation, who needs help or where you might be able to think along with each other. Moreover, it creates a moment to start your work day with a clear focus. That in turn helps to prevent your motivation from dropping. If you don’t have a team, an accountability buddy might be the solution. In plain Dutch: someone with whom you go through the day every morning and who keeps you on your toes (‘Did you finish this yesterday?’, ‘Have you already asked them for help or are you going to postpone that until tomorrow?’).

In addition, for everyone: create physical activity every day, make sure you have social contact, make sure you’re outdoors for a while, take a short break every hour and put your computer out of sight when you’re done with work. Actually, these are good routines anyway, so you can use this time to wear down some good habits.

2020 will go into the annals of history as the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people have seen their lives disrupted, gotten sick or worse and suffered from mental health issues due to isolation and loneliness. All the mayhem caused by the pandemic, though, easily makes us lose sight of all the good things that happened this year.

The first, most obvious, one is the fact that the digital transformation of industry and society took a step function improvement. We’re all much, much better at conducting our work online and even if many of us would really want to travel more and meet people in real life (and actually shake hands or hug), we’re getting things done. Teams and individuals that were convinced that they needed to be onsite and in each other’s face to be able to do their job are now operating remotely and working from home.

One of the advantages is, of course, that the environment is doing better as air pollution levels are lower in many parts of the world. This is especially advantageous in areas that have snow in winter, as the whiter snow reflects more sunlight. Also, there are several reports of improved water quality in rivers and lakes. The reduction in carbon emissions and pollutants, according to a Wikipedia article, saved 77,000 lives over two months.

Science and technology research is continuing to deliver great results. In the sunniest parts of the world, the cost of solar electricity is now below the cost of fossil fuels. This a decade or even decades ahead of earlier predictions. And of course, we’re not done. The improvements in solar are just continuing, driving down prices even further to the point that electricity will become close to free, according to some predictions.

Also, a recent article in Nature describes how the use of a deep-learning program by Google’s Deepmind solved protein folding in biology. A problem that for decades proved to be incredibly difficult to tackle by traditional algorithms was finally cracked by AI. And this is just one of the main benefits that AI is bringing to humankind.

Something that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly we were able to develop vaccines for Covid-19. This article shows a timeline starting with the genetic sequence of the virus being released by the Chinese authorities early this year and nine months later, there’s a vaccine (in fact, multiple!) available with mass distribution starting early next year.

As a space nerd, I was incredibly excited to see SpaceX sending people into space again. After the space race in the 1960s, interest in space took a nosedive, but I’m one of those that believe humans need to get off this planet and spread through the solar system and the universe. A catastrophic event on this planet won’t mean the end of humankind if we have people out there. To build up a space industry and capability, the first step is to have reliable and cost-effective rockets.

Other news that just blew me away this year is that scientists have now managed to reverse aging in cells, specifically in optic nerves and restoring sight in aging mice. Peter Thiel famously said: “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.” It looks like we’re on track to actually realize cell rejuvenation in bodies for real and if not abolish then at least delay death.

In my posts, I occasionally comment on the apocaholics in our society (and on the interwebs) who loudly claim that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. This is both factually incorrect and, in my opinion, morally wrong as it encourages a victim mindset. Humankind is incredible and has an amazing capability to respond to challenges put in front of it and overcome these. If nothing else, the year 2020 showed, once again, the value of science and technology, the creativity of humans as a species and that, despite everything life throws in our way, we still manage to improve things. I hope you spend Christmas celebrating our combined accomplishments and that you start the new year focusing your energy on what you’re going to do to contribute. Merry Christmas!

A management consultant asks:

In my job, I deal with multiple projects from different clients. That variety makes the work exciting, but the pile of memos and reports is getting too much. When I go home in the evening, I haven’t been able to do what I had planned because of all the phone calls, emails and meetings. It’s very frustrating and I’m getting more and more often commented on not meeting deadlines. How do I create order out of this chaos?

The communication trainer answers:

The theory about prioritizing is simple, but applying it is oh so tricky. Why? Because there are many factors at play at the same time that vary from person to person and from workplace to workplace, and are also constantly changing. Important factors are for example the dynamics of the work, the extent to which you can delegate, the level of the people around you and of course your own personality. Personal tendencies, that can make it difficult for you, are perfectionism (‘never finish, because it has to be 110 percent right’), pleasing (‘if I say I won’t do it, he won’t like me anymore’), disaster thinking (‘if I make a mistake, things will go terribly wrong, so I procrastinate’), enthusiasm (‘I like everything, finishing is something I am less good at’) and helpfulness (‘I like helping people, so I hardly get around to my own work’). All these personal factors in combination with all the constantly changing circumstances mean that you constantly have to be consciously and actively engaged in setting priorities.

How do you do that? In brief, the theory. The priority of a task is determined by the factor ‘importance’ and the factor ‘time’. Whether something is important depends primarily on your core task. What are you paid for? Suppose you are an architect, so working on the architecture of a machine is important. Arranging a meeting or making a calculation that perhaps an engineer could do is less important. Next, you check the urgency. Does it have to be done quickly or can it be left? And for how long?

Based on these two criteria, you decide how much time to spend on a task and when. Is it important and urgent? Then you do it now and well. If it is important and not urgent, you can schedule the work or make a start. Is it not important but urgent? Let someone else do the work or spend as little time as possible on it yourself. Not important and not urgent? Ignore them!

Check with yourself: what gives the most pressure, urgency or importance? Right, urgency. We are lived by the delusion of the day. We give in to pressure. Someone at your desk, an email, everything requires attention now. Some of that stuff you have to do to keep things going, but some of it is a waste of your time. The time you lose because of this, you lack in carrying out the important tasks, which also become urgent as a result.

Prioritizing therefore requires an active attitude and regularly selling no, but with a justification. The approach is as follows.

1) List for yourself the most important and difficult tasks that you really need to do.

2) Make sure you make time in your calendar to do these tasks and be prepared to defend this very hard.

3) Make sure you leave enough time for all kinds of ‘in-between’ things (thirty percent on average).

4) Be prepared to adjust your agenda and planning at any time if necessary.

One last piece of advice: make a realistic schedule and communicate what you can and cannot do. This will make you a reliable colleague. The world is not going to run according to your schedule. You will need to be continuously flexible, but never lose sight of your main goals.

Last week, we organized the sprint 19 reporting workshop of Software Center. The opening keynote by Frances Paulisch (Siemens Healthineers) was about the transition from a transactional business model to continuous value delivery to customers. The closing keynote of Aleksander Fabijan (Microsoft) discussed starting and scaling A/B testing. Though the keynotes focused on very different topics, they shared a common theme.

This theme was concerned with driving change and the challenge of successfully implementing the change. Both Frances and Aleksander raised the point that most changes in organizations touch many individuals, functions and departments, as well as numerous processes and ways of working. As I discussed in earlier posts, in most organizations, to change anything, you have to change everything. However, it’s impossible to change everything completely at the same time. And this is where I see many organizations get stuck.

The way out of this is to accept that all change will need to be gradual and that rather than accomplishing the change in one fell swoop, it will have to be a continuous process for an extended time. The analogy is that of a flywheel. Getting a flywheel from a complete stop to at least some rotation requires quite a bit of energy. Once there’s some motion, you need to keep exerting power to speed up. However, once it achieves more speed, it becomes easier and easier to maintain that speed. The question is how we achieve that in organizations. In my experience, there are three main aspects: showcase the value, increase engagement and build infrastructure.

First, showcasing the value requires finding a small scope where success is virtually guaranteed but where the value of the change you’re looking to accomplish is clearly demonstrated. As you initially have to realize all of this with a small team, it’s important to keep what you’re looking to accomplish as much as possible in your scope of control to minimize the risk of others torpedoing your efforts. For example, when running your first A/B experiment, pick a topic where opinions are highly diverse in the organization, ensure data quality from the A/B experiment and use this to engage with relevant stakeholders to show how the data from the experiment benefits the organization.

Second, once you have a successful case, engage the stakeholders that you need to convince to increase the scope of the change and show the real, concrete, tangible benefits you created in the first loop. Use this to increase engagement with the people that you need in the next iteration of the flywheel to create the next showcase. For example, when upping the release frequency of software on your way to DevOps, initially often the ability to rapidly resolve defects in the field can easily be used as a means to increase awareness and buy-in with relevant stakeholders.

Third, look for ways to automate some of the activities you’ve so far conducted through manual effort so that over time the cost of running through the iterations of the flywheel becomes lower. This is concerned with building the infrastructure for the change you’re looking to realize. For A/B testing, this may mean automating parts of the data collection pipeline and for adopting DevOps, this typically requires automating the CI/CD pipeline, as well as the test infrastructure.

Once you’ve gone through the first iteration of the flywheel, it’s basically rinse and repeat to take the next step and try to accelerate. It’s easy to get discouraged when trying this, but remember that flywheels accelerate very slowly and require a lot of energy to get moving at all. And initially, as everything needs to be done manually, the flywheel has a lot of resistance. With more and more of the infrastructure in place, it rotates easier and easier.

Many of the companies I work with struggle with realizing the changes required in their organization. Some oscillate between trying to realize a big-bang change and a complete deadlock where nothing happens. The most effective way to realize change is the persistent, perhaps slow, but continuous accelerating of the flywheel through showcasing value, engaging stakeholders and building infrastructure. Accept that it takes time and, because of that, start yesterday instead of tomorrow. Build your flywheel and get it spinning!