When working with any form of change we need to Think Big and Start Small. We need to both conjure up a better world and start with a small change that could have an effect in the right direction. This goes for any type of complex change, be it in product or software development, enterprise architecture or process improvement.
Greta Thunberg was 15 years old and she knew we needed radical, societal change to sustain a habitable world for her and future generations. She imagined a world without fossil fuels. What did she do? Did she write and propose radical (and youthful) environmental changes to the Swedish government? Or did she decide to study to become an academic so she could speak with more credibility? None of that. What she did was both simple and brilliant: One fine Friday she skipped school, painted a simple sign, went into the city, and sat herself down in front of the Swedish parliament building. Just a kid with a sign. That’s it. Today, #FridaysForFuture is a global protest movement.
By following our Think Big motto we allow ourselves to imagine a positive future. We use our hopes and wishes for the future to find a shared belief in a new, favorable situation. It could be in the form of a North Star, a vision poster, a desired state or any kind of image of a future we’d like to create.
There is much power in this, as it kickstarts the engine of change within us; saying to ourselves: “It doesn’t have to be like this. I can see a better way now”. Without a shared vision, very little will pull us in the direction of change. We desperately need pull to overcome our intrinsic inertia.
If Think Big is our Yin, then Start Small is our Yang. By following Start Small, we allow ourselves to naively ignore all that work and all those obstacles and difficulties we will need to overcome to reach our goal. And just start. All we need to do is to take a good, first step in a direction that looks about right.
For a product, this could mean solving just a part of the problem, in a specific situation, for a certain type of customer using a specific device, etcetera. We need to get specific. For an organisation, it could mean just finding one aspect of your goal, thinking about what’s not working in the current state and identify something you could try instead.
There is huge power in this as well. The power of taking action. Without action, it’s incredibly easy to get stuck, paralyzed by all the complexity and uncertainty.
Thing Big, Start Small may sound mundane but in my experience from the business world, it’s not that common at all. Most software teams I work with are handed big problems and create big solutions for them. Many organisations create massive “transformations” to rethink, not only their organisation, roles and processes, but even organisational culture. Big solutions to big problems.
The problem of big solutions is rooted in one of the human biases that we all share: Belief bias. In simple terms, Belief bias can be described as evaluating statements and accepting them as true, not primarily based on their logic or objective fact, but on how credible they seem to us. That means, for a big problem, we tend to look for solutions of similar size and complexity. Trivial solutions to a big problem are just not credible.
To overcome a pandemic merely by washing our hands, coughing in our armpits, and staying home when feeling ill, just seems wrong to many of us. It’s not enough! We should hoard toilet paper, close the schools, and force everyone to wear a protective mask. Even if it’s not rational, not based in science, and ignores consequences from those measures, at least it feels appropriate1 2.
Thinking big and working big is an anti-pattern. It gets us into all kinds of trouble. Analysis paralysis, lack of customer focus, long feedback loops, and loss of engagement, just to mention a few effects of that way of thinking. If you’ve ever seen a government IT contract with an outsourced development company cancelled after 3-5 years with not discernible value you know what I mean. Typical outcomes are projects without value and change efforts that run out of steam.
Starting small and then continue working in small steps give us ample opportunity to find value early and get feedback that will allow us to become better. This is the agile way. But it also creates momentum and gets us results early. It’s always hard to see that we’re making progress in a complex world but a series of many small achievements is an indication, at least.
If you want to go places, combine your big thoughts with small steps.
Working in small steps in an iterative and incremental fashion is probably not news to anyone who knows anything about agile development. However, combining this with thinking BIG was probably first articulated to me in the Unlearn podcast with Barry O’Reilly, which has “Think Big, Start Small, and Learn Fast” in the introduction. I recommend checking it out.
1 Pandemins psykologi (“Psychology of the pandemic”, in Swedish)
2 I’m not saying these measures are necessarily ill-advised, just that, from what I understand, there is little scientific support for them at this time. But hey, I’m no epidemiologist so save your rants. Well okay, hoarding toilet paper was probably neither particularly clever, nor kind to your fellow citizens.
Earlier posts in the series on principles for organisational development: