Agile Drill Sergeant

So I’ve been reading Switch by the Heath brothers again. They have a model for change with the elephant, rider and path. The rider knows you should start exercising after the Christmas calorie car crash. The elephant would prefer to finish that series on Netflix and doesn’t feel emotionally moved to change their minds. The path is the ease with which you can start exercising. (Given that a walk would work, that’s not usually the problem in this case!)

Anyway, at the start of the book they give an example of moving the elephant. The board of a company accepted that they paid disparate prices for the same clothing at different factories across the country. Although they knew they should do something about it they didn’t. Their elephant wasn’t engaged. They couldn’t be bothered. So a brave manager created physical pile of gloves with all the different price tags on them. Once the board could actually see and feel the differences in a physical and effecting way, they decide to finally do something.

This reminded me of when we say that there’s too much work in progress in the system. You can show that in a PowerPoint presentation – but that only appeals to the rational rider. They understand it’s bad, but the elephant remains unmoved. Hence the idea to get their elephant moving, by creating a Jira shrine with all the active issues printed out, so that the mountain of work is literally physically tangible. The idea for the work in progress limit is more my desire sometimes to burn Jira to ground. Even if I know that Jira isn’t the real problem 😉