I’ve grown a bit tired of strategies for ‘digital transformation’ that focus on agile, team structure, customer research, architecture, continuous delivery and ways of working (lots of them quite good advice, btw) but don’t say one word about the strategies to motivate and get people to change. Agile, lean, software engineering and product development practices are the easiest parts to solve but the people aspect, buy-in and ‘stickiness’ of those changes are not as straightforward.

There is a common trend for teams to push ahead with partially completed work, irrespective if it no longer aligns to our goals. It feels counter intuitive to halt this work, but if done in a conscious and informed manner, I encourage teams to have the brave and open conversation about whether they are still aligned to their goals.

For the recent second PragmaBirthday, the whole team was asked for their favourite quote on "change". Now, that's fairly broad ask and it's hard to pick out one. Here I explain why I chose this one.

Even if we are not managers, we may encounter many opportunities for coaching and supporting each other every day. We just rarely encounter them consciously.