IT Leaders

Alright. I'll dive in. Make sure I have my coffee. No. Really great stuff.

I have one more round of applause for Kathy, everybody. You know, Doug, you were asking in the beginning one of the first things you changed. I don't know if I don't I I wish I could say it was the first thing that I changed. But going through the progression of promotion over my career in IT, it's like I am over delivering. I get recognized.

I am bringing innovation, I get recognized, and I move from kind of junior to mid level to senior to associate to principal to whatever to team lead. And the pattern that I saw was always, oh, well, I must be the smartest person in the room. And suddenly, there's that voice in the back of my head that says, but what if you're not? What if they find out? And so I went for an embarrassingly long time thinking that my title meant that I had to have all the answers.

And and I'm ashamed of the times I've led my team the wrong direction because I didn't have the courage and the strength to say, I don't know. But, you know, we learn these lessons and maybe this is one of my hard way lessons. I don't know. One of my favorite stories, Richard Feynman, doctor Feynman, famous physicist, inspirationally curious individual. I I read his kind of collection of of short stories, memoirs, surely you're joking, mister Feynman.

And I learned the story about the time that he got kinda conscripted into the Manhattan project. You know, being one of the the the preeminent physicists living at that time, he was put in in a position of leadership on that project. And he comes into Los Alamos, and everybody is just fawning over this man. And he's like, I don't know. I'm not sure that I'm the person that you think I am.

But they they're so excited. And and then immediately, they sit him down, they start laying out all of these blueprints that he has zero experience to read. That that's not his field. He's like like civil engineering drafting, blueprints, all of that. He's like, I mean, that looks cool.

I I don't know what it is. And they're looking for his approval. And he's like, I don't know how to interpret this. And he's terrified that he says, I don't even know what I'm looking at. Everybody's gonna panic because, like, there's not a lot of margin for error when you're dealing with fistile materials.

And he's look and he's staring at this thing and everybody's talking and they're laying sheets out in front of him and and his mind is swimming and he's trying to find like one fact, one thing that he knows that he could grasp onto. And he sees something on the drawing. I think that's a valve. That's as much as he knows. Now he doesn't wanna say, what's that?

Is that a valve? They're like, you don't even know if that's a valve or not? They were gonna panic. So he he twists it a little bit. He says, unless I'm mistaken, that's a valve.

Hey, what happens if that valve fails? And the engineers look at it, and then they scramble and they look at each other and they said, oh my goodness. That is an amazing cash. Thank you so much, sir. We're gonna go back to the drawing board on this.

And he got credit. But I think the reality we have to face is that we are in a field that is not only changing so rapidly, but is already so large. It's bigger than we can fit into our heads or load into our heads. It's storage isn't really of limitation, it's input bandwidth. That's that's the challenge.

A guy named Sam O'Neill coined the term a person bite, which is the maximum amount of information that one person can conceivably learn and know in a lifetime. Our field is bigger than that. It just is, and it always will be. So how do we navigate that? And there's two things.

One is, as you say, realizing we're not gonna know all the answers and that's okay. I love the rule from Disneyland. If you ask a cast member at Disneyland, hey, where can I get the best churro in the park? Where can I find a churro? Where can I get the best whatever?

Where's something? If that cast member doesn't know, they're not allowed to say I don't know. And on the face of it, you'd think that's a little antithetical to what we're talking about, but their answer, it's always productive. And I like that as sort of a kind of meet meet in the middle. They'll say, let me find out for you.

I'm gonna find that out for you. And it's it's positive, it's productive, and it kind of acknowledges the fact that we're we're not always gonna know. I'm ostensibly primarily a software architect, independent hands on software architect, and so I have a natural ouch. Somebody asked me the question, I can go, well, it depends. On what?

Oh, a number of factors. Let me noodle on that. That's one of my favorite turns of phrase as well. But there are other things that happen in our career. See, we all have different backgrounds.

I have a very nontraditional background in IT. I got my first job as a software engineer when I was working as the house magician at TGI Fridays. And I met an individual and and impressed him sufficiently that he offered a job on the spot in that restaurant. I wish I had time to tell the whole version of that story, but I have to tell a different story. And but we all have nontraditional backgrounds, and that means we bring things to the table that we don't always value.

You know, sometimes a little fact, little idea from one of our hobbies, or from some dark and distant corner of our past intersects with a challenge that we're facing right now. And we have this sort of MacGyver moment. I realize that's a very dated reference. I'm not getting any younger. I don't I don't know what the current equivalent is to MacGyver, so I'm gonna assume I'm amongst friends.

And we have that MacGyver moment. Oh, if we take this thing and we rotate it that way, we put it over there, suddenly the picture becomes clear. And you see something. And then you go back to your organization and you find out you are the only person that sees that solution. How do you navigate that?

Because as they say, it takes a village. Well, I'm gonna start with this. I have a deck of cards in my back pocket. Why not? It's early.

I'm not gonna do anything fancy. That that wasn't fancy, by the way. No. No. Fancy would be going up.

Okay. I'm not gonna do anything else fancy other than oh, that's what I get for coffee and an empty stomach. Other than give the cards a little mix. And let's imagine for a moment that I have an idea. And this is this is my idea.

But you have agency. You know, when I was building my teams, I took great care to surround myself with people smarter than me. And so because you're smart and you have other ideas, you're going to arrive somewhere in this set of possibilities. And Patrick, do me a favor. Just cut those middle ish.

It doesn't have to be exact. And you're gonna exercise your agency. So there you go. Perfect. So you cut right about there.

Now he's got free choice, but I have an outcome that I'm hoping that we align we arrive at. Now wouldn't it great if I could completely manipulate your free choice? In fact, take the card you cut to, hold it up, and show it to everybody. Wouldn't it be great if we were just magically on the same page? Thank you.

Give them a round of applause. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that in real life, and that's why we're gonna talk about this topic right here, leading with the art of innovation. Because the very fact that you're here right now, taking time out of your day, taking time out of your schedule to meet with a diverse and interesting group of people who all have their stories to tell, that means you're likely an innovator. What what what defines an innovator? Well, innovators tend to be active information seekers.

They attend conferences and professional development events like this one. They have a breadth of knowledge beyond just the narrow expertise that they have in their field. They tend to have cultivated more diverse interpersonal networks. You tend to be able to cope with more, a little more uncertainty than other people. You're willing to adopt new ideas.

In a word, you are venturesome. And so this idea, this concept that we have of an innovator, the type of person who's here right now, they make up just 2.5 of a social system or organization according to Everett Rogers, the author of diffusion of innovations. It's the unique cognitive and social diversity that this group offers, that give you unique insights into opportunities and possibilities and solutions ahead of the mainstream. And the reality is, the kind of people who are with us that we are surrounded by right now, if you're not innovators, you will be. That's that's as close to a guarantee as anybody can make in this world.

And you you hear something like that. We think, okay, well that's a good thing. Right? We're innovators. That's a great thing.

But it actually puts you at a huge disadvantage. Now unintentionally, one of the best case studies on this topic was the film Moneyball based on the book by Michael Lewis on the 2001 season of the Oakland Athletics where we had a team that was presented with an insurmountable challenge. They just didn't have the kind of budget to be competitive in Major League Baseball. And they had to pivot. They had to try something new.

They had to try something different. And what did they do? They took a data driven approach, which was radical at the time, especially in the sport of baseball. And it didn't go smoothly, if you've seen the film or you know the story. But it's a great case study on how knowing the answer isn't enough.

In this film, we meet a character named Peter Brand, who is largely based on a real person named Ari Kaplan, I got to meet at a conference in India last year. And he talked about what it was like to be an innovator and how challenging that really was. But this character is largely based on him and the the scene where we meet Peter Brandt, again, based on Ari Kaplan and and some of the other folks, we find out some of the challenges he's facing. So let's say so let's see if we get an ad. No.

Hey. Hooray. Look at that shame he just jumps right back into. Yale, economics, and baseball. Not the traditional recipe, but you put in the same ingredients, you get the same results.

Put in different ingredients, you get a different result. That unique background gave Peter Brandt insights that nobody else had. The information was there, but he had the background to connect those in a very unique way and see opportunity, and he just needed somebody that would listen. And and you could see the trauma response there in his body language and his demeanor because even talking about this was risky. And it's true.

When I talked to Ari Kaplan about this, I said, what was it like? He said, you would not believe the hostility that I received when I tried to give people new perspectives and new ways at looking at old problems. He said people would spit on him. Like, people would get aggressive. People would get violent.

It's not easy. Yep. And in fact, Everett Rogers writes this in his book. He says, the most innovative member of a system is very often perceived as deviant from the social system and is afforded a status of low credibility by the average members of the system. The individual's role in diffusion, especially in persuading others to adopt the innovation, is therefore very limited.

What does this mean? Does this mean we're hosed? That we are destined to live the life of Cassandra, a woman who was blessed by the god Apollo with the ability to utter true prophecies? And the cruel twist that she didn't see coming was, yes, she can see the future. She can tell you what's gonna happen in the future, but the twist, nobody would ever believe her.

And that's why we see her there standing on the ruins of a decaying city tearing her hair out because she tried to warn people and nobody listened. That's not a very fulfilling place to spend your career. So what we're gonna talk about a little bit today is how to lead change in the other '97 and a half percent of the of the population. And this isn't easy. We have skeptics.

Even if you've got an idea that has clear and obvious advantages, there are skeptics that have to be won over. There are old entrenched habits that need to be replaced. These ideas need to be evaluated and explored. The whole process is risky and is slow. And I can't give you a magic trick like making you pick the four of diamonds, but there is an art and a science to the diffusion of innovations.

This is me, I'm a holistic software architect, speaker magician, I wrote a book called Mastering Software Architecture, very proud of that. I live somewhere in the intersection of magic and technology. It's an interesting, but not always lucrative place to be. But the same thing, being a magician, being a magician as an additional occupation, you look at problems differently. Right?

If you think about engineering, we wanna engineer up to the limits of impossibility and that's where we stop. As a magician, if what you're about to do isn't impossible, it's not worth doing. So where engineering stops, magic starts. And we have to engineer a way to make these miracles a reality, even if they're just illusions. Because sometimes an illusion is enough.

And as a consequence of all of this, just decades of training, solving problems in very unorthodox ways, I just developed a set of skills that I didn't appreciate. I thought, well, there's the magic side of my career and there's the tech side of my career and never the two shall meet. But suddenly I realized, no, this gives me entirely new perspectives, entirely new insights, entirely new cognitive tools. I was that person that could see the solutions. I could just see them.

We'd be in a room when I was when I was on IC, and the team's getting around and the and the the project product leadership was laying out some grand vision of what we were gonna do next, and the rest of the team is all wall eyed looking at us like a cow looks at an oncoming train, just silent and staring. I'm over there like, yeah. Yeah. We could do that. That's probably one sprint, but they're kicking me under the table.

In fact, my old boss used to make jokes about how my mouth would always write these giant checks. He says, I hope your butt can cash that. I'll never forget the day that I I think it was actually this moment when I'm like, yeah, we could do that. We could do that in two weeks. And and and the the product leader there, Andre, his name was, he says, yeah, you would sign that check.

I felt challenged. And I said, you know what? I would sign that check. And he reached behind his desk and pulled out a giant novelty check. And he filled it out and he made me sign it.

So immediately, of course, I start backpedaling. There's a little asterisk in the in the payee line. I I've got a little star there that says regression testing. Basically, I was saying it would be done, but it wouldn't, you know, be done done. And it certainly wouldn't be done done done done done.

Five done's. Five done's meant actually in production at that company. But I was always that person. I could just see the answers, but that wasn't enough. I was rarely effective.

And that's when I learned that to be effective, we we don't just need to know the answers, we need to be effective. And I love this quote that came from the Carnegie Institute. They said that even in highly technical fields like engineering, all our technical oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry.

That's that's a different quote. I got ahead of myself. But no, this is it. Our technical skills, they're just our ante. They get us into the game, but all they do is get us into the game.

Everything beyond that point depends on everything else we bring to the table. We gotta be influential. Oh, there's my Carnegie Institute quote, got ahead of myself. We have to be influential. And this is the key soft skill, how we deal with people.

So the Carnegie Institute said, now I'm ready for it. Even in highly technical fields like engineering, only 15% of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge. The other 85% is due to human engineering and the ability to lead people. That was the challenge. It wasn't me seeing the answers, it was getting other people to see the answers.

And I have I have studied this for years. I've tried to get better at this. These these are some of the books I've read. I've read a lot of books on this topic, but after a particularly disappointing change effort, I went to the source, the granddaddy of them all, Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. It is a wonderful book and it is a terrible book.

It is a wonderful book because it is comprehensive. It is almost 600 pages of dense academic prose, meticulously researched, hundreds of citations and references. That is the culmination of everything we know about how ideas spread, what the variables are. But it's written by and for academics. This is why it's terrible.

It doesn't tell you what to do. And that is a huge problem in our industry. Anybody anybody kind of in a quote, unquote agile organization? Yeah. Yeah.

I say quote, unquote But yeah. Well, we don't really know how to do agile. And it doesn't really fit into a package. In fact, if you go read the agile manifesto, it's still there. It's still online in its original form.

If you read it, it just kinda has a bunch of ideas. Hey. We and we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. We value customer collaboration over comprehensive document or whatever, contract negotiation. There are the value statements, and then there's the 12 principles.

And that's all well and good, but it tells you precisely nothing about how your team should operate. And in the end, somebody out there said, I smell an opportunity, and they sold us processes and tools that we kind of blindly follow. But that's why we're there, that's why agile has developed the reputation that it has, because nobody can really tell you what to do except maybe you in agile and diffusion of innovation and anything else. But there are variables. There is an art and science to all of this.

And one of the realities that we have to contend with is everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change. Because all the time, whatever your innovation is, it's always perceived as new even if it's not objectively new. Doug and I were having a conversation before everything started. I said, you know, I'm more focusing on a lot of the older and increasingly forgotten ideas because there's still gold and then there are hills. But we're so busy chasing the cutting edge, we end up losing sight of the stuff that is timeless and we mistakenly believe it's obsolete.

And we end up relearning those lessons and reinventing those ideas. And there's about a seven year cycle in IT where we reinvent the same years about ideas about every seven years because that's about how long it takes us to forget. And so I might have an idea that's not new at all, that's old, established, proven. But to the masses, it's a new idea and it has to spread. How does this work?

How does this happen? Well, diffusion innovation gave us over a century of focused research on how ideas spread. And despite the diversity of contexts and innovations and social groups, the similarities are always strikingly consistent. We start with an innovation, which is an idea, a practice, a tool, an object, technology, anything that's gonna give some degree of benefit for potential adopters. Any kind of change that we wanna see take place.

But as we've established the sphere of influence of your average innovators, fairly small. And in innovation, the hands of a small number of innovation innovators won't take root. It has to spread. It has to be increasingly adopted. And so in practice, successful innovation spread from the innovator to a small number of early adopters.

And if the early adopters are sufficiently well regarded and well connected in the organization, it will continue to spread to a larger group. This is the early majority. There's my early adopters. There's my early majority. There we go.

And it's typically at this point that the innovation kinda takes root and takes off and starts to accelerate. This is where it gains a bit of a critical mass. And as the ideas spread and we get repeated confirmations of the benefits and the success, the more the more skeptical late majority starts to adopt. And finally, the most skeptical, the laggards, they will adopt the innovation after all of that. And so a lot of this stuff is initially slow to start with, but it accelerates over time.

And that 10 to 20% adoption figure is where the critical mass happens. And that's why a fantastic book was written called Crossing the Chasm. And it was all about how to get from here to here. This is the chasm. And it's one of many great books because it's all about hitting that point of critical mass.

That's when the change initiative becomes self sustaining, and that's where it it really starts to take off and start spreading and accelerating on its own. A leadership lesson in ninety seconds. Somebody did an entire TED talk on this viral video. But there's some music festival somewhere, Sasquatch, I don't know, ten, fifteen years ago. And we have our lone innovator, clearly the lunatic.

Somebody's filming this guy not because they're they're expecting to catch some beautiful visual metaphor of change initiatives, but just because they think this guy's funny. You know, what is he smoking and why isn't he sharing? But we get our first early adopter. Now there's a moment here where this early adopter turns to his friends and just says, hey, we're having fun over here because this guy came alone. He's connected to nobody.

He's the lone innovator. But this first follower, he's connected back to the mainstream. He's the bridge. And so a few moments later, one of this individual in the green shirt's friends joins the dance party. Now they're having a good time, but they're still the lunatic.

But everybody has a threshold. Some people's threshold is lower. Some people's threshold is higher. So three people is somebody's threshold where two people wasn't, where one person wasn't. And we've got our early adopters.

And it doesn't take long from here. Now we've hit that critical mass. If you've ever been to a sporting event, you've tried to start the wave. That was me when I was a kid. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

You can't start a wave alone. You cannot. You need to be connected enough to a group around you to get enough early adopters to start getting that critical mass where the wave will take off. And now everybody who was standing there laughing two minutes ago, they had the FOMO. And there are people in that as well in this in this, on this lawn who have waited too long because all their friends have already left and it's their job to hold their spot and watch everybody's stuff.

But this is how it works. This is exactly how ideas spread. The skeptics are won over now. I wish it wasn't so shaky. Although I will caution you, critical mass does not mean your innervation is unstoppable.

And we'll talk about that in a little bit. So this sigmoid curve, this s curve, this is a generalization of cumulative adoption of successful innovations. And the most important thing is what gets you there, your innovative nature, your divert your cognitive diversity, all the rest of it is not enough to get you there. We have to become change agents. And that's not nearly as scary as it sounds, but we have to look at the problem differently because your idea is probably not gonna take off by chance or even on the merits of the idea alone.

There are multiple key factors. The merits of the idea are one of them. Your ability to identify key individuals in the organization is another one. Finding those early adopters, finding those champions, especially if you're trying to cascade ideas down across the organization. A few years ago, I was the chief architect at S and P Global and I was largely overseeing a startup within the enterprise, a new division.

We were doing really interesting things with rag and language models about one to two years ahead of ChatGPT, which was a cool place to be except we were a little early to the market, and it was very hard to get people to wrap their heads around some of these ideas. But finding those key individuals help. Your relationships, your ability to influence those individuals are key as well. But let's start at the beginning. Let's let's kinda break this down, how this happens.

Given some problem, through some amount of research, the innovator develops a solution that can be adopted and develop a solution and then package that so it can be adopted. And it's at this point that the diffusion and adoption process begins, and ultimately, we have the consequences. The adoption, the innovation might be adopted, it might be rejected, it might be adopted and then later discontinued. There's a lot of things that can happen. Also, these first two, they don't always happen in order.

Sometimes you're researching something else and you stumble across the answer to a problem that you hadn't even thought about. And it's just like, oh. But other times, we get so enamored with something we find that we try to invent a need. So be careful. We don't want to invent need by brute force just because the technology is cool.

Resume driven development is a losing proposition in the long term. So be cautious around those things. And then we have these hurdles. Very Escher esque hurdles. You know, I thought I was looking for some kind of beautiful picture that would encapsulate this vision I had in my mind.

That is a blueprint, not a yoga mat. And I thought, well, I'll just get AI to generate for me. So one, the the legs on these hurdles really breaks my brain, but also, I still had to spend about four hours of photoshop to get close enough to what I was what I was looking for. But the first hurdle we have is the perception of a need. See, we, as technologists, we tend to be techno optimists.

We tend to believe in the march of progress. But the key to success and and building credibility over time lies in our ability to connect a potential innovation to a genuine need in the organization. And we can't, you know, we have to remember that perception is reality. That if people don't perceive a need, it's not gonna happen. Years ago, I worked in an IT department of a company.

I was doing kind of system administration, office system development, this was twenty five years ago. And I remember there was one guy in the IT department, guy named Steve. Now Steve was a special kind of human being. His the thing that got him out of bed in the morning every day was writing policy documents and procedures. And God love him.

Somebody has to do it. I'm glad it's not me. And his pet project was always a disaster recovery plan. That was an important thing for an organization like ours to have. But every time we had a meeting we had our monthly meeting, and he would always try to table his Doctor plan.

Hey, let's start making progress on this. Let's let's start putting this in practice. Let's sign the contract. Let's do a Doctor test. They're like, well, we have more pressing issues.

And so it never happened again and again. We kicked the can for a couple of years because there was no perception of a need. And then one day, we had an outage. Three days, evaporated three quarters of profit. You better believe there was a perception of a need after that.

And I've never seen the man smile so big. When we had the the postmortem meeting, he says, it's I think it's time. Boom. His whole thing his whole proposal. We talk about disaster recovery.

And the executives, everybody was all ears. Now it doesn't have to be like that. We can use our skills and influence to shape perception. And at the same time, we have to recognize there is one unshakable perception, and that is change is risk. So that means we need to communicate that the risk of inaction is higher than the risk of action.

And that's not easy to do. Right? Perception drives motivation, we know this. There are two ways to motivate people, towards pleasure or away from pain. Both of these have their challenges.

But the away from pain is always much stronger. And so when it was towards pleasure, hey, this is gonna make things hypothetically better, I could take it or leave it. But when it hurts and somebody says I'm gonna make the pain stop, suddenly we're all ears and this is what we saw with Steve's Doctor plan. We need to communicate these things. We need to understand that different things, the perception of a need and type of benefit is gonna change how we approach these things.

Speculative innovations, preventative innovations are harder because we're not feeling pain right now. So we know an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but it's hard to see that when you're not feeling pain. We have to shape perception. Now a guy named Robert Ciaudini, doctor Robert Ciaudini, who I believe has the honor of being the most cited academic living today, wrote not just Influence of Psychology and Persuasion, is a great book, he wrote another book called Presuasion. And Presuasion, influence is all about how to structure your argument optimally, how to make your case optimally.

And Presuasion is about how to lay a foundation to make people more more perceptive to what it is that you have to say. Right? There are a number of sources. The biggest one is attention. Just driving people's attention.

Maybe you have a change that's gonna require an innovation that's gonna require some radical changes into how you adopt technology, moving from on prem to the cloud or changing technology stacks or anything else. If if I'm an executive, I'm going to you and I'm saying, hey, you're gonna do this new thing, and that's just how it's gonna be. There's a lot of different reactions people are gonna have in that moment, And it usually centers around fear. Hey, I'm really good at this other stuff and now I have to go to this thing I've never worked with before, brand new? This is risky.

I don't know. And we're gonna be looking. We're gonna instinctively looking for ways to get out of that situation. What if I change your attention? And I say, now, Chris, I know you are a bright individual.

You're a passionately curious individual. You you you you get some enjoyment out of being on the cutting edge. You don't like to always be in the in the trenches of legacy stuff. Sometimes you like to be on the cutting edge. Is that a fair statement about you?

Sure. Now I've just reframed his entire perception. Now when I introduce a new idea, that's being filtered through the lens of you're an innovator. You like being on the cutting edge, and suddenly it's exciting. There's a British show that used to be on the air back in the day called Yes Prime Minister, and and there's a beautiful moment.

If I had more time, I'd show you the video. But they're they're politicians. They're, you know, in in, you know, in the British government. And he says he says, well, there's this problem. See, the party had an opinion poll done and it's and it looks like the voters are in favor of bringing back national service.

And so the the veteran politician, politico, says, well, have commission another poll that shows that voters are against it. He says, you can't be for and against? Of course, you can. And he just goes through an example of push polling where one, he asks a set of questions that frames the person's mind to to all the all the positives of national service. And then he asked the same question, but prefaces it with a different set of leading questions that that that reframe about the negatives of national service.

So the first time he goes through it and he says, would you be in favor of bringing back national service? He's like, well, I yes or no? Yes. And he says, of course, after everything you said, you can't say no to that. He says, but you can get the opposite result.

You just change where that attention is. You know, there's But the other ease and familiarity, how do you make these things familiar? That's a big one. But the big one, the other big one is just survival and self reliant stimuli. We're attracted to stimuli that is related to our own goals and our own survival.

So once you found that solution and you've and you've got that perception or once once once you've got that perception of need, we have to find a solution. Now it seems like there's a solution for everything, but it all it doesn't just have to meet the needs. It has to be in reach for adoption. And that's where packaging comes in. Packaging is where we take the innovation and we make it we remove the friction.

See, it doesn't matter what the innovation is. The the j curve is reality. That we're here and the innovation promises to take us here. And there's this expectation that it's gonna be a nice linear, things are just gonna get better, but that's not how it works. Initially, there is disruption.

You're gonna slow down before you can speed up, and this is where a lot of promising innovations go to die. Packaging is all about minimizing that dip, And there's all kinds of different tools that we have at our disposal for packaging. It could be documentation, a POC reference implementation, training, coaching, mentoring, automation. There's no one size fits all answer. And then we have to reach that critical mass.

That's the key. It doesn't matter how good your innovation is, even properly packaged. It depends. You know, for example, we all know that the QWERTY keyboard is not particularly optimized for the way our hands move or the English language or anything else. There's a lot of stories about how we ended up at that.

Regardless, this is the layout that we have. This is and a guy named Augustus Dvorak said, you know, this is stupid. Like we don't have the limitations of mechanical hammers anymore. People can type faster. The machines are more reliable.

What would the optimal keyboard layout look like? Do this right now. Drum your fingers. Who's going pinky to index finger? All of us.

Who's going index finger to pinky? Yeah. It's awkward going that way, isn't it? And that's something Dvorak understood. So when he defined this keyboard layout, common letter pairs, s t n t s h t h, they all go from the outside to the inside.

It's designed for parallelism, so you alternate hands a lot, but except when you have those digraph pairs. You can type those very effectively, very easily. This is the keyboard layout I well, not this one, this one actually is the one I use. This is programmer Dvorak, it's even dumber. But I can now type a 140 words a minute at a 100% accuracy.

Whoop dee doo. Turns out that typing has never been the bottleneck. It's figuring out what to type has always been the bottleneck. But hey, it's a flex, I guess. At the same time, I had to relearn how to type.

I went from typing 80 words a minute to 18. And it took me about a month, month and a half to get back up to 80 words per minute. And so that's the challenge. And that's why that critical mass is so key. Yeah, quite, oh, okay, yeah, great.

So it's not enough to have the innovation. It's not enough to have the knowledge and the will. We have to find those early adopters. Now in Moneyball, Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A's. And he says, well, I have a direct report, Art Howe.

That's Art Howe. And he says, here's how we're playing the team. And Art Howe, traditional, he was a laggard, he was a skeptic. He was the last person to be convinced. He wouldn't change.

He was right as an early adopter in terms of his position of respect and authority in the team and being very connected to the team, but he was wrong in that he couldn't be an early adopter. He just wasn't wired that way. And so Billy Bean had to pivot and he had to do something he'd never done before, Build relationships with the people on his team and go down to the grassroots instead of trying to do a top down. Sometimes a top down works, and that's great because that means you just have to convince one person. But that's not always the case.

Sometimes we have to convince everybody. And Robert Cianni's other book, Influence and Psychology of Persuasion, is a fantastic tool in being more influential in persuasion, persuading, persuasive, building those relationships. And we have to manage that diffusion because, you know, if everything takes off, great, but it's not the finish line. You know, people are gonna be keep adapting, people are gonna be reinventing innovations and neither is this. So to kind of close everything down in the last few minutes that we have, I'm just gonna talk about the variables.

And I'm gonna talk a little bit about optimizing those variables. This is the thirty ish minute version of what is actually a full day workshop for me. But let's talk about these. There are five key variables. Relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability.

All of these variables are positively and negatively correlated to the rate of adoption, depending on what we have. So we have the first one, the relative advantage. The relative advantage is all about the why. That means if we wanna be persuasive, we have to succinctly communicate to whoever we're communicating with, what's in it for me? Right?

If you wanna persuade me of something, you won't be effective if you tell me what's in it for you. Because your goals and your challenges and my goals and my challenges, your incentives, my incentives, they're not aligned necessarily. Now, they may be aligned in terms of the outcomes, but if I'm framing it about how it's gonna make my life better, you know, the upper leadership really isn't gonna care. At a minimum, you need to be able to communicate three things succinctly. What is the thing, what does it do, and why should I care?

As an exercise, whatever it is that you're trying to drop on the world, What's in it for the partners? What's in it for the individuals, the managers? What's in it for you? What's in it for the teams? What's in it for your boss?

What's in it for the executives, stakeholders, the customers, developers? Because the answers to these questions are gonna be different more often than they're going to be the same. Being able to articulate that, that already gives you a huge advantage. Being able to lay that foundation so people are more receptive to your message, that's gonna give you a huge advantage. But it's all about communicating that relative advantage.

The second one is compatibility. Right? So old ideas are the main mental tools that individuals utilize to assess new ideas and give them meaning. We cannot deal with an innovation except on the basis of a familiar of the familiar. That's a big challenge.

How do we bridge that gap? Because to quote quote Nikola Tesla in the film, The Prestige, he says the world only changes tolerates one change at a time. And that means sometimes we need to take baby steps. That's frustrating. That's not where we wanna be.

But remember, perfection is the enemy of progress. And sometimes it's gonna be more sustainable to take a slightly longer view. And innovation always is a long game. Complexity is another one, don't know why I'm talking about microservices here. But complexity, basically, how hard is it to adopt that chain?

This is where the packaging comes in. Observability is another one. Can we show that the benefits are materializing? Because to quote Peter Drucker, you can't improve what you don't measure. So we actually need to find, especially if you're dealing with executive leadership, if you're dealing with, if you're managing up, managing down, managing laterally, find those KPIs that keep them up at night.

And find how what your innovation is is going to move the needle on those metrics. What do we wanna show? That the innovation is successful, the problem is tractable, the benefits are materializing, this is better than the status quo. The fourth one is trialability. Right?

Does it have to be all or nothing? Everett Rogers says, the trialability of an innovation as perceived by the members of a social system is positively related to the rate of adoption. Now I happen to be fortunate enough to have spent a great deal of time with folks like Kent Beck and Dave Thomas, not the Wendy's guy, the other guy, the pragmatic programmer guy. Early signatories of the Agile Manifesto. So I had a better understanding of this early on when we were all still getting excited about scrum.

Because I was doing XP in the early early kind of pre agile days. And so I was trying to bring agile to an organization. And if I just came in to the manager and said, hey, we're doing this new thing and I can't tell you when it's gonna be done and I can't tell you how long it's gonna take, not only would it get rejected, but we'd find random mandatory drug screening Monday morning probably. And instead, I said, look, we're gonna do this for six weeks. There's no amount of damage that we can do in six weeks that we can't undo.

And all I did was I lowered the perceived scope of the change, which lowered the perceived risk of the change. It was the exact same change, but it was a whole lot less scary. Little things like that. So we put this all together. We have the attributes, we have the type of decision.

Is it individual optional? That has one set of strategies. Is it a collective decision? That has strategies, is an authority driven decision. There are different strategies for those kinds of things.

How we communicate the nature of the organization and the extent of our effort as change agents and the change agents we delegate, these are going to influence that factor. So this is kind of a light and quick introduction to some of these ideas, but I'm gonna be around afterwards if you have questions. But for now, I just wanna say thank you so much for being part of this community and spending your Thursday morning here with us. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Michael.