Organisational Change Through Experiments

First up, a huge thanks to Mike Pollard for the inspiration on this one. This all started with a meeting invite from Mike to set up some experiments in organisational change. We all know that organisational change is hard. Organisations tend to resist change so doing any sort of substantial change is a lot of work, and also prone to failure as organisations slip quietly back into their old way of doing things. Since real agile success relies somewhat on changing some pretty fundamental things in the organisation, this has always been a pretty major limiting factor in agile adoptions - success relies on change and is limited by how much change we can introduce. Change is hard which limits the amount of success we can have.

Mike's idea was quite simple - rather than try to change the whole organisation, why not set up some small experiments instead? That gives the organisation a low risk way to see what works and what doesn't. Once we have some successful experiments we should have some good, hard data to back us up when we push for a wider rollout.