Preface

…there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries…and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

—NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, the prince

You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.

—WAYNE GRETZKY, HALL OF FAME HOCKEY PLAYER

Since you picked up this book, we assume that you’ve tried to introduce something new into your organization. Maybe you were successful or maybe you were not completely happy with the result. Change is hard. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the people who have had some success in their attempts to introduce a new idea could sit down with you and share their secrets? This book will provide the next best thing. We’ve gathered strategies from those successful people so you can take advantage of their experiences.

We’ve been working on introducing new ideas into the workplace for some time. Mary Lynn Manns is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville whose recent doctoral work concerned this topic. Linda Rising is an independent consultant who has experience introducing new ideas both in academia and industry. Together with all the others who have shared their experiences with us, we have many years of documented successes.

Each technique or strategy we have collected is written as a pattern—a form of knowledge management for capturing a recurring, successful practice. The patterns in this book are the result of years of documenting our observations, hearing from people who have introduced new ideas, reading a variety of views on the topics of change and influence, studying how change agents throughout history have tackled the problems they faced, and sharing our work for comments and feedback. This book does not simply reflect our ideas, but includes those of many different people in many different organizations throughout the world. Expert change leaders are likely to say “I do that!” when they read many of these techniques. We will take this comment as a tribute to our work because our goal was to identify tried and true practices, not just a collection of good ideas that may or may not work.

History of These Patterns

The idea of documenting patterns for successful solutions to recurring problems was introduced by a building architect named Christopher Alexander. Even though we are not architects, a number of us in the software development community have adopted Alexander’s approach as a way to capture known solutions for software architecture, software design, testing, customer interaction, and other aspects of software development. The introduction of new ideas is, of course, not limited to the software area, but it’s where we both began to see a new source for important and useful patterns.

In 1996, Linda was working with a colleague, David DeLano, to introduce patterns into their organization. They were having considerable success, so they began documenting their practices as a collection of patterns. They realized that one instance of a successful solution to a problem is the beginning but not enough to define a pattern. The next step was to validate their experiences with those of change agents in other organizations. They led a workshop at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) conference in 1996 on Introducing Patterns into the Workplace. Workshop participants improved the collection by adding their experiences or Known Uses and by writing new patterns. The resulting collection was shepherded and workshopped at the Pattern Languages of Programs Conference (PLoP) in 1997. In both workshops, participants commented that the patterns could be used for introducing any new idea—not just patterns.

In 1998, Mary Lynn was hired by a large telecommunications company to introduce patterns into that organization. She not only used the patterns David and Linda and others had written (and added Known Uses) but also wrote many new patterns. These were shepherded and workshopped at PLoP ’99. Again, participants commented that the patterns had a broader application than simply introducing patterns.

At the ChiliPLoP conference in March 2000, we collaborated for the first time and sponsored a workshop on Introducing Patterns into the Workplace. Participants worked to combine all the patterns into a fledgling language. At this juncture, after a great deal of soul searching, we decided to follow the advice of many reviewers and expand the topic to include any innovation, not just patterns. The focus was narrowed to just introducing an innovation, that is, targeting Innovators, Early Adopters, and the Early Majority to “cross the chasm.” The resulting context of applying the patterns would be that the innovation would have taken root in the mainstream of the organization.

The patterns were refined in workshops at other conferences (OOPSLA 2000 and OT 2001) and presented in a tutorial for the first time at OOPSLA 2001. At each of these conferences and workshops, participants improved the patterns by sharing their experiences and suggesting new patterns.

We began to apply these patterns in a variety of domains and to hear from others about similar experiences. It’s clear that the techniques can be used to introduce any new idea. The known uses in each pattern and the experience reports describe some of these domains.

How This Book Is Organized

The patterns are listed alphabetically, with a brief summary in the Appendix of this book. Pattern names include a page reference where the complete pattern may be found, for example, Fear Less(151). As we describe pattern uses and experience reports in the first two parts of this book, you will see patterns referenced, and you can turn to the appropriate page and read more about the pattern in Part III. This book can thus become a reference after you have read the initial chapters. When looking for the solution to a particular problem, you can simply skim the summaries in the Appendix and refer to the complete pattern description for a more detailed explanation.

This work is built on the experiences of many people and on research from Robert Cialdini, Malcolm Gladwell, Geoffrey Moore, E. M. Rogers, Peter Senge, and others. We have included a complete list of citations in the References section if you would like to read further.

Audience

This book will be of interest to anyone who is trying to introduce a new idea of any kind into an organization of any size. We have all those “powerless leaders” in mind because we have seen that everyone, at any level in an organization, feels powerless when trying to change the minds of others.

The pattern collection has evolved over several years thanks to many pattern originators and countless others who have provided comments, pattern uses, and other feedback. Even though the book has now been published, we continue to care for these patterns and would like to hear from all of you, our readers. We are always happy to answer any questions about the specific sources and the patterns. As Christopher Alexander noted:

We may then gradually improve these patterns which we share, by testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether these patterns make our surroundings live, or not, by recognizing how they make us feel.^[*]