Every single time I travel to my homeland, I get an epiphany. The long haul gives me time to reflect on my experiences and impressions I gather throughout the trip. This time was no different.

While at home, I was chatting with a very close friend about renovations, as I am preparing to make some changes at home.

He had this old house, and he wanted to increase the living space. For that, he needed to reinforce the old structure to be able to build on top of it. After a long time and at a high cost, he concluded: "It would've cost me way less to tear down the house and build it anew."

This was not the first time hearing such a statement, but his remark made me reflect a bit. And I realized why...

Organizations are like never-ending home renovation shows - always under construction!

Sometimes organizations try to reinforce a structure which is unsustainable for the current needs. Fearing a productivity disruption, they maintain an artificial harmony, while they try to do superficial renovations. Commonly packaged as an "Agile Transformation."

Pitfall #1: Painting only one room in the entire house

When our first child was born, we managed to renovate only his room. Back then, we believed we didn't have the time to do a full renovation of our house. First-time parents' naivety. In retrospect, we couldn't have been more wrong, come second child.

While in his room everything felt fresh, new, welcoming, it felt very strange. The reason being the rest of the house. As soon as we were going out, we could see the marks of time on the rest of our home. After a while, the marks of time made their appearance on the walls there as well. It didn't feel strange anymore; it was looking just like the rest of the house.

The attempt at improving only one part, say engineering, of your organization will not change much. It may make you feel good in the beginning, but once out of that room, you will see that something doesn't fit. Eventually, the newly renovated team will soon wear the marks of the rest of your organization. The environment will always tend to homogenize.

Walking from room to room in your organization should make you feel common emotions, a common vibe, but at the same time, it should surprise you with the uniqueness of each team's way of working.

Pitfall #2: Painting all the walls

Looking at my situation, once my second child was born, whatever setup I had before suddenly became obsolete. This is why I need to renovate the house, rearranging things to create more space.

Painting the walls may change the mood and atmosphere for a while. But when you need a different setup to live in, that won't cut it. When your organization grows, you need more space; you need to set up your environment differently, according to your current needs.

Painting out values and beautifully packaged slogans will not be sufficient to make you better. Re-branding some departments, but keeping the status quo, will only lead you to waste money.

Renovating the organization as a whole will make place for the new culture to emerge.

To give you an example, we offer our kids the right to their walls. In their room, they can do whatever they want on their walls; they belong to them. As they grow, we know we will need to re-paint those walls, give them new ones, and we accept that. It's not only part of what growing up means, but also creative act. Here's the proof:

So, this time I've learned my lesson. I am not only re-arranging the house to create more space, I am also painting every single wall. It is a chance to create another home for us, a home we know which offers new possibilities. It is a difficult task, as logistics are a bit complicated, but we found a way. It's going to be an intense 2 weeks for me, at least I get to do some sports.😅

Pitfall #3: Whitewashing

I remember the years of my university time. Every year I had to paint the dorm room I was receiving. This was the only thing that I could do. I wasn't able to afford buying new furniture, nor eliminate all the cockroaches, which seemed to be a protected species in the dormitory.

These were those times. Even though my room was somewhat white, as I had no clue how to paint, I was not feeling very well there. The good feeling was taking exactly 3 days to fade away and to start seeing again the reality of my living situation.

What I've observed most of the time in organizations is something similar. They hire an army of Agile Coaches to fix the way of working, to standardize. As that doesn't pan out well, they go ahead and bring in a bunch of consultants. All to no avail. After a while, they come to realize that they had invested their scarce time and energy in maintaining a precarious equilibrium, just to end up with a sub-optimal structure and a broken way of working. On top of that, they have now on their payroll people of which they have no understanding.

Instead, what's needed is facilitation. Getting someone onboard who can harness the potential within, ahem! 🙋. Someone who doesn't provide you with all the answers, or the answer you want to hear, but is courageous enough to discover the way ahead with the team.

In my experience the team already knows what they need, the answer to improving and productivity lies within. And I can share without a doubt that ready-made recipes are not the answer.

We are beings of habit and routine; change comes particularly difficult to us. It is hard to give up what we know. All the memories, the things we are used to, make it hard to let go of the past. On top of that, no person in their right mind would willingly want to throw themselves into chaos for a brief moment. Or would they?

Sometimes "better" means tearing down and starting anew

One organization I worked for did go through a process of demolishing and building anew. They were panicking and desperate.

When we started, it was scary as hell; productivity went down, chaos settled in for a good couple of weeks. But suddenly, there was a breakthrough; the S effect kicked in as predicted.

Prior to this moment, I prepared the management by introducing them to the S effect: before it gets better, it will get worse.

It all started with scrapping the team structure and the processes, as they knew them. We kept in place only the vital aspects of the business, as we couldn't take a break from providing our services. The organization became a big construction site, making some people struggle with what was going on.

Our first step was to understand which were our products and build the portfolio. That gave us the direction for the team structure. Second was to understand the game we were playing and what kind of processes we needed.

With that in place, we went on and started redesigning and reinstating the critical processes one after the other. We defined new domains to mitigate gaps in management and leadership.

With the team structure in place and the new processes implemented, it was only a matter of repetition and calibration. Collecting feedback and changing the way of working. Little by little, teams started taking ownership of the products and processes.

It was a tense period, very hectic and full of emotions, but at the end of it, the changes set the company for growth and success.