Chapter Wrap Up

Summary

When the author talked to colleagues about this project, a lot of them said that they would also have liked to work on a project like this and that it sounded like fun. They were right, it was a lot of fun to work on this project, but it was not so much fun at the beginning. We had to work very hard to convince everybody that it was a single project and that we could only succeed if we all worked together.

The author’s takeaway is that there is a deep relationship between the willingness to change and the experience of having failed before. A lot of changes would have been almost impossible to introduce if this project had not been a second attempt at a failed project. The main reason for this is that people are generally more open to change when they have reached their limit for suffering from their old habits. Before they reach this limit, they will do things as they have always done before. So, the fact that the failure of the first attempt at this project brought almost everyone involved to their limit of suffering helped teams to work in a more pragmatic way with other departments, external teams, and the customer.

Instead, it’s generally a good mindset to be open to change, even if things are not that bad, and that we give new approaches a try before condemning them.