Chapter Six. Take Action!
You’ve started to grow a community and now you’re ready for action. Just Do It(177), Study Group(228), and Mentor(192) are the patterns we offer for your next bold step.
Linda recently received an e-mail from an old friend. He knows that she’s written three books and has another in progress. He’s thinking about writing one so he asked her advice. They exchanged some e-mails. He asked about the format for the proposal and whether he should have most of the book written before he contacted the publisher and if his idea was too broad or whether he should focus on just one part of it and….Finally Linda said, “Brad, I’ve got a great pattern that you might think about applying at this point in your writing adventure. It’s called Just Do It(177).”
We can understand why Brad wanted to consider every detail before he started his book. In his profession, product development, this condition is often the death knell for complex projects. It’s called “analysis paralysis.” Engineering types tend to wallow in details. They need to plan strategies to anticipate every problem before it occurs and (here comes the killer) strive for perfection. Someone once explained the difference between perfection and excellence (because it’s easy to get them confused). People striving for perfection try to make things “perfect,” that is, without errors. On the other hand, people striving for excellence know that it’s impossible to avoid mistakes.
Thomas Edison understood this. He said, “The secret is not the 71 times you fail, but to persevere to the 72nd time, in which you succeed.” Gandhi observed, “Only a fool expects perfection. A wise man seeks learning.” So what should you do to learn? Our answer is in the pattern Just Do It. Take a step on the path to your goal. As Goethe observed, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Just do it!
This is especially true now during the current chaotic upheaval of change and transition we are all experiencing. If you’re interested in innovation and taking on the role of a change agent, you will likely make more headway pursuing excellence than perfection. So, the best advice for Brad, the writer, and for you, someone interested in introducing new ideas into your organization, is—just do it. You don’t have to do it all at once, just take Goethe’s advice and begin it. Remember that package of patterns we introduced in Chapter 3? Just stick a toe in the water—use the pattern Test the Waters(237). Once you begin, take time to learn from your experience—use the pattern Time for Reflection(240), and then use the pattern Step by Step(224) to reach your goal of excellence. The result will be better than if you had tried to plan everything up front because you will be learning and improving as you go.
Anne Lamott is talking to writers in her book Bird by Bird, but the advice applies to anyone starting any kind of journey:
You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and wool-gathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.[*]
The best way to take action is in your own work. You may not be an expert in the innovation (there probably are few experts!). When something is just getting off the ground there are lots of opportunities to experiment. Trying out the new approach for yourself will give you a chance to see the costs and benefits. When you have some experience, you can do a better job of convincing others that there are real gains to using your new idea.
E. M. Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovations, has written that lack of experience is easy for resistors to attack while positive experience is more difficult to refute. In addition, an understanding of the innovation’s limitations helps you avoid overselling and provides insight into approaches that will work.
One change agent asked, “How do I sell my executive team on doing this stuff?” The answer from internationally known consultant, Jim Highsmith, “Don’t. Just do it. They don’t know what you’re doing anyway.”
Other Ways to Learn
Eric Hoffer, American social philosopher and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said, “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” Yet a change agent can get caught in a Catch-22: You don’t know enough to do much, but until you do something how can you learn? One way out of this vicious cycle is to find a small group of like-minded folks who are willing to help you use the pattern Study Group(228). As psychologist Carl Rogers has observed, “The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning—truth that has been assimilated in experience.” This is especially true for adult learners.
Study groups have been used to support adult learning in Sweden for over a hundred years. The practice began with the establishment of the first folk high schools and “study circles” to provide education for the children of farm families who often could not attend school because they were needed to work on the farms.
Study groups are interesting learning models because no expert is present. Each member of the group takes turns leading a session and preparing a “lesson.” When eight people read a section or a chapter, it’s astounding to see the eight different interpretations that show up at each meeting. Even more astounding is how much you learn from hearing the different views of your colleagues. It’s bootstrapping at its best!
Spreading out the learning over several weeks means that participants have time to digest the ideas. We once heard someone compare week-long training sessions to “trying to drink from a fire hose.” In contrast, a study group takes a small bite each week and rotates the role of leader. This offers a slower pace for the learning, which means that there’s time for insight and deeper understanding to develop.
We’ve known many organizations that sponsor study groups. The company buys the books and, in some cases, also buys lunch for the participants. Mary Lynn’s organization offers a small stipend to group participants as a way to show that their time is valued. Even with these expenses, study groups are more cost effective than in-house or offsite training of any kind.
While you are learning, you can begin to help others using the Mentor(192) pattern. When teams are just beginning to apply an innovation, it can be invaluable to have someone around that knows more than they do, even if it is only a little more. Mentoring will make it more likely that the team’s experiment with the innovation will be successful and less frustrating along the way. This is important because the early experiences people have will be a strong influence on their decision to continue using it. And, of course, the benefit for you is that no one learns as much as the mentor, especially in the early days.
Fellow Evangelist Steven Newton shows how he “just did it” and was then able to offer mentoring in his experience as a change agent leading the introduction of JUnit, a new method of unit testing in developing software.
I thought our software development team should do more unit testing and, to do this, we had to start using testing tools. I was playing the role of Evangelist but I wasn’t an expert on testing. So I played with the tools and was then able to talk with the team leader and give a presentation to the group about the tools. Everyone thought it was a good idea. We decided that rather than have the team lead mandate it, we would just start using the tools. This would allow us to learn more and would show us whether or not the tools were worthwhile.
Teams started asking me for mentoring and demonstrations because they recognized the quality of my work. When I was consulting with teams on specific projects, I would give one-on-one assistance, especially to those new to unit testing. When they asked for details and help with their issues, I used that as a “teaching moment” and brought up the topic of unit testing. The following is a common scenario.
Co-worker: I can’t figure out how to fix this bug.
Steven: Have you written a unit test to isolate the error?
Co-worker: How do I do that?
Steven: Let me show you JUnit….
In addition to the action-oriented patterns we’ve introduced in this chapter—Just Do It(177), Mentor(192), and Study Group(228)—you’ll need some influence strategies. The next chapter provides some patterns to help you with that.