Revolution or Evolution
Sometimes you need a revolution to create a step change.
Revolution is not always a bad thing. Here are some examples:
Semco is an example of a company that embraced revolution. Semco is a Brazilian company that was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1980s. Semco’s new CEO, Ricardo Semler, realized that the company’s bureaucratic structure was hindering its growth and innovation. He fired most of the old-style senior managers on his first day on the job and implemented a new, fluid organizational structure that encouraged collaboration and innovation. The result was staggering — Semco’s annual revenue skyrocketed from $4 million to $212 million within two decades.
The next example comes from Jeff Sutherland.
I decided the best option was for us to change everything — Jeff Sutherland
Jeff Sutherland, the co-founder of Scrum, is a proponent of the evolution approach. In his quote, “I decided the best option was for us to change everything. The operation was too broken to fix piecemeal” he acknowledges that sometimes, incremental changes are not enough. “We came up with tools that found their way into Scrum ten years later” shows how without that revolution, perhaps we would not even have scrum today. (Sutherland quotes are from Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time)
Another example of (serial) revolution comes from Karin Tenelius, who would buy struggling companies, fire most of the management, and transform the company into self-organizing. You can read about Karin’s experiences in the book Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-managing Organizations from Sweden by Karin Tenilius and Lisa Gill.
Extreme Programming is my last example of an agile method born out of revolution. When Kent Beck came to help out a project that was falling behind, it was acknowledged that they were so far behind that they were likely dead in the water anyway — so why not go radical and change everything all at once? They took all the practices that make writing software good, turned the dial to 11 on all of them and implemented them all at once. This suite of practices became Extreme Programming. (Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck — 1st Edition.)
In the era of disruption we are in, expect more examples of revolution I suspect. Watch this space…