The Allure of Incremental Change

It’s been a weird week or two for me. I was horribly sick starting after getting back from trick or treating through to the following week, and honestly still am in a “recovery” mode a week and half later (today was the first day I could take the dog on a walk and after a mile I felt like I’d run a marathon lol). And then there was a big high from the election results on Tuesday (as I’ve said before, I’m exactly the pinko commie vision you have of a Californian, wearing my “Hot Girls for Zohran” shirt because I saw Brad Lander wearing it and was like “if that stereotypical Jewish dude can wear it so can I!”), and then the lows of my wife getting the same horrible cold, to just a normal week of drudgery and my inability to focus enough to even write a second post last week to say “I’m still sick”… it was just a lot you know?

And I was mentally gearing up for this week, where it’s again a long one (aren’t they all) but I had a whole plan, starting with this article, which was going to focus on the idea of calibration and how all of our decisions are a matter of calibrating effects, and it’s a cool idea, and it’ll be what we talk about next week. But after yesterday, I had to change the topic for this week, because honestly I’m mad and I need a place to rant.

Yesterday, after nearly 40 days of the federal government being shut down, and on the heels of one of the bigger election wins the Democratic Party has seen in decades… 8 senators decided that this weekend was the time to fold.

Instead of holding the line, instead of insisting on big bold change, instead of listening to their better angels telling them that the fight they were having is hurting people but is righteous, they decided that it was better to cave. It was better to capitulate. It was better to let the bully win.

And the reasoning was just so striking to me. The claims from these senators were things like, “The Republican’s weren’t going to budge” or “This was the only deal on the table” — and it reminded me of all the conversations that I have at work with people who don’t want to make big bold change in the face of shitty circumstances.

People crave and gravitate toward the ideas of incrementalism because it SOUNDS SO ALLURING. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can have all the wins without all of the pain. And it’s funny, because I just happened to also pick up Brene Brown’s newest book “Strong Ground” over the weekend, and wouldn’t you know that the theme of the books opening chapter (and the book, but I can’t be definitive there since I haven’t read it all yet lol)… the fact that you can’t just nibble around the edges to create lasting and meaningful change!

She starts talking about working with a trainer to help her to get stronger and better at pickleball (yea I rolled my eyes too lol), but this was the up front comment from her trainer about his expectations of the process and of her…

Our work is going to be functional, dynamic, and adaptive. You’ll also need to change how you think. We’re looking for intentionality and consistency over wild intensity. Winning in here will be a focused and systemic change across your life. This is about you making a commitment to body, mind, and spirit, and holding yourself accountable to that commitment.

I think this triggered me to be even more pissed off than I already was at the dems that capitulated. Their work should be functional, dynamic, and adaptive. They should be constantly changing how they think. They should be looking for intentionality and consistency. They should be focus on winning and making systemic changes to do so. They should be making a commitment to themselves and to us. And they should hold themselves accountable to that commitment.

And the same goes for all of us at work.

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My team is probably sick of me saying it, but one of my fundamental beliefs in life is that you are the product of your incentives. Some of those incentives are external (bonuses, paychecks, validation, praise, etc.) and some of them are internal (morals, belief systems, experience, etc.). But regardless, your choices and outcomes are a product of those incentive structures. And one of my biggest frustrations at work is that often people’s external incentives outweigh their internal incentives. I see people constantly making the “right” decision that results in them getting paid more, or getting more praise, or more validation at the expense of their internal values. And I’m not immune, I do it too. But I try really hard to acknowledge what incentives I’m being pushed or pulled by.

And I know that we’re not here to talk incentives we’re here to talk about incremental change, but let me give these examples then pull us back around to the point lol.

The first example, was when I first made the pivot at FIS from being in the professional services game to the product build game. I had wrapped up a few major PS engagements, full on rebuilds or build from scratch work, so the head of our mobile group tapped me to run a team that was going to rebuild our white label mobile app as a part of a larger white label solution we were gonna write from scratch.

Now I’d always just been on a small team, 10-12 people, so part of what happened next is naivety and part is “doing the thing I felt was right in the face of external incentives telling me to do the wrong thing”. We went into our first Program Increment (PI) planning event, and I had no idea what to expect. We spent three days doing really in depth planning, identifying where all our problems were going to come up and all the things that you do when you’re trying to figure out what the next three months of your work life are going to look like.

I had my same team of about 10-12 people, so we all knew how we worked, looked at our plan and said “this is what’s accomplishable in the next 3 months” — and it was very little. Mostly because we were going to build this the right way! We were going to put all the logic we could in the service layer to reduce the number of places things could go wrong, we were going to rely on build systems to create customizations, we were going to do all these things that required other things to exist and to be built properly.

And so we get to the readout where we decide if our plan is going to work. And I’m sitting there watching every other team go and say “we’re going to do so much we’re going to get xyz done and abc done and we have 100% confidence”. I couldn’t believe it. They were clearly saying things that weren’t possible. I knew they were full of shit. But they stood there and said it and everyone said “sounds great” and we moved on. Until it was my turn… and I told them what was accomplishable and everyone stopped and turned quiet.

They were like… so you’re saying we’re not going to hit our dates with your group? And I laughed and said something like “obviously we’re not going to. None of you are and you know it, but we’re playing a game here to say that we’re fine so we keep the next layer of leaders off our backs right?”. Oof, probably not the right forum for a statement like that right lol. But it caused a chain reaction. We all started saying what was true instead of what was convenient.

In the end guess what happened… they tabled the project. The people holding the purse strings were told a date that was clearly impossible, and when they were told that it was clearly impossible, they said “then why bother” (I’m sure the discussion was more lengthy and I know that at one point I said “I’m not building this” because I knew it would never see the light of day, and for sure I took credit for killing it… but also I was naive but not so naive as to think I had the ability to kill a tens of millions of dollars project on my own lol) and we just went back to doing things the way we’d always done them and my scope went from “rewrite the app” to “maybe your team can handle the mobile platform code” lol.

So for the next few years, I was a product owner, then a group product owner, then had some other titles that I honestly can’t even remember. But all the while I was still looking at our way of working and thinking “This is so inefficient! Why are we still using all this dumb code to do stuff that we don’t want it to do!?”

You see our solution was built on top of a house of cards - the backend was still the same structurally as when our little startup mFoundry had built it. Which meant that we needed a layer that could connect to an FIS but also to a Fiserv or independent bank and still work. So that’s obfuscation layer number one. But then FIS had their own layer to translate data because they didn’t want us directly accessing the source of truth, so then there’s a second obfuscation layer. And within that second layer there was ANOTHER layer that was built by consultants who weren’t around anymore and didn’t ever give us the source code, just the compiled code, so now we’re at 3 layers, one of which we can’t even alter because we don’t have the code!

And I’m looking at this daily, having people try to get me to make small incremental changes to these obfuscation layers just to make something simple like… password reset… work (which literally, we never could pull off). It was crazy making. And eventually, after the 3rd or 4th time hearing that it was functionally impossible to do something because of our spaghetti code, I wrote a proposal. Tear the whole thing down and write it over (sound familiar lol).

The irony was palpable for sure lol. But I also felt in my bones that it was right. Everyone told me that it would be too hard to do and that it would take skills we didn’t have and gave me the riot act on every reason it wouldn’t be successful. But I didn’t really care. It didn’t hurt anyone for me to keep saying “this is right” and I had no REAL power so what’s the problem… right?

Then someone decided that “maybe Scott should run this show” and let me start implementing the plan that I’d put together… and let me tell you, it’s very easy to go from “the guy accidentally killing a tens of millions of dollar project because he told the truth” to “guy who is overly optimistic because now he’s in charge” lol.

But I tried to keep playing to my internal incentive, which was to make it easier for our people to work and make it easier for our clients to work with us. The only problem, was that it was constantly at odds with the external incentive of “come in under budget while adding revenue that you have no real control over” from our business leaders.

So how does this all relate back to the trap of incrementalism?

Let’s go back to our examples, because the reason I used them was to highlight two specific fallacies that we keep getting mired in:

Big change rarely works
Small changes can create big results

Let’s dive into each:

Big change rarely works

Look at that first example, and it’s why people believe this is true. They see these big swings that companies take that fall flat on their face and say “SEE YOU SHOULDN’T TRY THESE BIG EFFORTS! THEY JUST FAIL!” Those big swings are typically very visible too, which makes their failures more impactful on people’s perceptions. And again, this isn’t just in business, this in all walks of life, people take big swings and fail all the time, we make big changes in our lives and don’t succeed seemingly daily, and it’s a reinforcing factor driving people toward incrementalism. Small goals make for easier attainment, and a better feeling about yourself right!

Small changes can create big results

This one is a little more insidious. We have a belief system here especially in the US that small things can make big changes. But I think that it’s a misnomer. Because normally we think of “change starts with one person” or something like that — think of Hamilton and the story of tonight, it’s just 4 or 5 guys coming up with ideas and turns into the United States! But that’s not small changes making big results. That’s small groups of people making big results. But they make BIG changes to create those results!

What this illuminates to me is that most people don’t know what actually causes change. It happens or it doesn’t, but they think that the smaller incremental change has more value because it’s easily trackable, it feels impactful in the moment, and it’s something you can easily point to… and most importantly, it’s not that painful!

But, of course that’s not how it actually works. The reason our first big swing failed at FIS wasn’t because we took a big swing. It’s because we weren’t being realistic about what it took to achieve our goals. We couldn’t just keep operating like we had been, or operating on hope, or being less than transparent with what it would take to achieve our goals. We needed not just the big idea, but the big fundamental changes to ensure success. And those fundamental changes are more difficult! They’re routine based, they’re habit based, and they inherently make it so that we need to look ourselves in the face and admit that our way of doing things isn’t working and needs to be altered.

That’s all hard shit, and we didn’t do any of it. We just had the big idea and the big brains in a room, but didn’t try to change the accountability structures or the incentives to get us to our goals.

Then, when we tried it again… I tried to learn from that lesson, by fundamentally changing our way of working. My proposals weren’t JUST about how the technology needed to change. It was the end result, but it also needed to include a value stream mapping exercise, a reorg, a clear statement of value that we expected from each team, new leaders who had clear expectations of how we were going to operate, and a whole hell of a lot of change management to ensure that we were all plotting on the same course.

And then on top of that… repetition repetition repetition. It’s where I learned the hard lesson that as a leader, you gotta say the same thing in multiple forums over and over and over again to get people to start understanding what our goals are.

Again, there’s an allure to not making those fundamental changes because it doesn’t require anything of you. Saying “I’m going to get healthier” and adding a scoop of protein powder to your morning routine isn’t helping, just like doing a work out routine focused on your biceps and lats and ignoring your core isn’t helping. You’re making some superficial gains that don’t address the underlying goals.

And that gets back to why I’m so pissed off at these stupid Democrats.

They bought into all the fallacies that make up doing big things well! They think that a promise to hold a vote is progress! It’s not! They think that this “was the only deal on the table” and it’s not!

Doing big things isn’t easy. And it’s not always you that bears the pain that comes along with doing hard things. Sometimes it’s going to be on the people around you. That doesn’t make the thing less worth doing!

Yes people are hurting from the shutdown. Yes the longer the shutdown lasts the crazier that the Republicans and Trump will be and the crazier their ideas will become.

But you don’t fix big problems with half measures. They’re going to end up just like we did at FIS after our first transformation attempt. Back to where they were before but feeling even less enfranchised and doing things that are barely helping along the edges while their entire world falls apart around them. And they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. Because we know what is coming next! The Republican’s will delay the vote to January, then again to March, and then again to after tax day, then again until after the midterms.

Even if they DON’T do that, the only way the dems will get the vote they just callously threw their values away to get, is if the republicans know it’s a loser! And that means either extend the ACA credits to right after the midterms so the dems can’t run on it, or just make it so that the bill is poison pilled putting in things like teaching that Donald Trump is actually an agent of god or some bullshit, or just ensuring that no matter what gets put up it’s killed by the republican caucus.

And it’s what we do in business day in and day out too. We take the safe ground thinking that it’s what’s going to keep us safe and get us ahead, when in reality it’s what’s holding us back and keeping us from achieving anything.