Crossing the chasm

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, Dave. How are you doing today? Peter, good to see you again. How are things? They're good. It's good. It's been a productive day, a busy one, and uh pretty sure it's still not over, but it's good to see you and uh have a good chat. So uh I I I understand we're talking about crossing chasms today.

Well, that's uh thinking about organizational change and what we can learn from uh Jeffrey Moore's interpretation of market adoption in terms of products, and of course, we nowadays use it for organizational change as well, how we can how we can understand the sort of things that we're going to see in an organization as we go through a transformation.

Yes, yeah. And it it's interesting how many places this actually applies. I mean, this this idea that we have people who will see something new and immediately jump on it and want to try it, uh, especially if it's something that's interesting to them, uh, versus those who will wait a while and see what others do first and before they decide whether they're going to come along for the journey.

Well, I think we all relate to that, right? Whether it's you know new movie genres coming out, or whether it's new products, or whether it's change in the organizations that we work in, there are people who are enthusiastic and they're early adopters and they get behind it and become the evangelists for whatever that change might be. And there are those that are a little bit more reluctant to change their status quo.

Yes, yeah. And uh uh Jeffrey Moore's model, as I recall, is this this idea that there's a chasm, there's a point where there's a certain part of the of the organization of the population that will adopt a new idea and they will will jump on that and they'll say, Okay, I'm I'm I'm gonna try this because it's interesting to me. It's something that uh that has relevance to me. I could see it, I I and I want to try it out and see what it does. Um, and then you hit this this wall where it's uh or the chasm where I've got to get past that to bring everybody else along with me on that journey. And this is you you see this occur in a lot of different models and a lot of different spaces, but uh this is a very common one that gets uh used quite a lot to explain this phenomenon.

Well, it's it's an inflection point, right? It's the the practices or the behaviors or the approach that you take before the chasm has to shift and change to accommodate the expectations and the differences post-Casm. And part of the, I mean, Jeffrey Moore's argument was that the many companies struggle to cross that chasm because they don't understand that shift in mindset and the shift in approach they have to take. I think after 30 odd years in the market nowadays, everybody's kind of, you know, we're we're all uh very, very familiar with the market adoption curve, but it still raises the question of what behaviors or how what approaches do we need to change given the context that we might be looking at. So if we're looking at organizational change, what is it pre-Casm? What does organizational change look like? And how do you uh if you think of John Cotter and his institutionalized change, that's the post-Casm bit. That's the okay, now you've got the change going, now roll it out everywhere. And both initiating change and rolling out the change are two quite distinct, large problems in their own context, separated by that inflection point, the chasm.

Yeah, and well, in the and in Cotter's model, it's funny because that's I was thinking of the same piece around going into like how that overlays to this because Cotter's model starts from the from the leadership forming your core team, uh describing that and the like the problem and making it something people can consume so they can see why this is important and why it's important to them, and then building that community around that. And that's that's that the crossing the chasm comes, I think, there, that that piece of you go from that like insular core, having been able to demonstrate the problem now. How do I bring others along on that journey? How do you expand? How do you get others to change their mindset too? Uh, so that they can also see the value of this uh great book in that space is uh the uh the one about penguins and melting icebergs, the uh parable of the melting icebergs. That's right.

Yes. Uh um something about uh melting, my iceberg is melting.

Yeah, my iceberg is melting, yes, uh which does a very good job of explaining the the importance of all this.

Well, I I I mean if you so if we reference, go back to that that whole chasm in the curve, one of the things that we look at is we need to understand that pre-Casm, when you're dealing with the innovators, the early adopters, their expectations are distinctly different to post-Casm and like after the inflection point. And whether it's uh I I've there's a great short video by Simon Sinek who explains using the market adoption curve, explains that if you're seeking to recruit those volunteers that John Cotter to kind of mix our references, if you like, the the volunteer army that John Cotter talks about, if you're in the early adopter innovator stage, Simon Sinek argues that you you need to create a little bit of a barrier, put a little bit of pain associated with getting involved with it. So in the video, he talks about meeting on a Saturday morning. So people kind of have to get out of their comfort zone, take the make an effort to get part, become part of an initiative. And this is very true of the early adopters and the innovators. They're they um pride themselves on being there first, on being the evangelists who know more about a product or a particular change or whatever it is than than nearly anybody else. And they, you know, they value if you think back to you know Gmail, having your name at gmail.com or whatever it might be, the the initials that you use as your email address if you're at a startup. There's there's something associated with being the first ones through the door for a particular initiative. The the interesting thing is the initiative doesn't have to be well thought out. We're not going through that door first to find a complete plan or a really clear definition of it. That quality side of what we're going to see is is not necessary. We don't need to understand all the bells and whistles, all the direction that's going to be taken from that. But once you go across that inflection point and you start talking to the majority of the people in your organization, whether early adopters or early majority or late majority, you do need a plan. You do need clarification of what's there. You do, you, you don't need uh a painful sort of investment of effort by individuals coming into it. In fact, they want it to be frictionless.

Yes, yeah, exactly. You you it's got to be easy at that point. So I and I love that uh that that point that you put there. It's like uh I think it's the same reason that Apple makes the initial versions things scarce, so you wind up with big lineups and so that uh they come into the store. Whereas but you want to make it easy for the the other people, so you need how do I make it easy for people to get one of these uh once you've passed that initial inflection point. And it's uh there's this the adoption of the the next generation, the next piece of technology, the next thing that's coming down the pipe. Um, and you'll have the people who are willing to cue, and especially if there's a little bit of pain, but I'm the first one to get one. And that uh view of it.

Well, and and I I think this is something that those that those people who really appreciate the innovator early adopters, they also lose the kind of uh the that feeling of oh of being a part of something as more and more and more and more people have the product or or are jumping on the bandwagon as it goes through. It loses its its appeal. So there is an uh you know, the whole point, if you like, of crossing that chasm is to do with you know maximizing the profit you can get. If you're selling a profit uh a product, you want to get it into the market, or whatever that might be. There's something there about how do you maximize the number of people who can use your product and therefore maximize the profit you can get, even though the profit per piece drops, you're selling so many of them that you're going to make plenty of money, as per Apple and nearly every product they've produced in the last 15 years.

Yes, yeah. I wonder if we can uh here's a crazy idea. If we apply um lean principles uh to this, then lean fits into that uh after the chasm space very nicely, reducing the waste, reduce making it easier in the the system for delivery. And whereas early adopters, you're wanting to experiment, you're wanting to see what we can do. And uh does can we draw that distinction, do you think?

I the way I always think of this one is before the before the chasm is the innovators, and innovation is a different practice to after the chasm. And after the chasm, I see those as the accelerators, they're the ones who accelerate adoption. And so they're much more driven by well, reducing the cost per unit if you're building a product, or reducing, as we've talked about, making it making it uh as frictionless as possible. So that's about making the adoption of those, whatever it might be, new organizational cultural practices that we're trying to adopt, or maybe new products. Digital transformations are a great example where you often end up adopting products and practices at the same time, which just you know increases the complexity of what we're doing. But after that inflection point, the accelerator mindset is about, as you said, lean six sigma is reducing the cost of getting something out of the door, becoming very, very efficient at rolling it through and making it a smooth, sort of frictionless experience to adopt that new practice or product.

Yeah. And when we think of this from a practice perspective as well, I mean, this is uh this is one of the mistakes people make when they they go down the, hey, we're gonna buy a tool and we're going to implement the tool, and it's gonna do everything that we need it to do, and we're we're gonna do that first. And we're gonna put that in and make sure it's absolutely like gold plated and absolutely perfect and do all the things that we need, even though those those innovators don't need that. The the innovators the ability to experiment, they want to know the core of the ideas, and as you say, a little bit of pain is actually gonna help them solve and get to where you want them to get to. Um whereas if you if you try to make something absolutely perfect, it won't be, and you're just gonna slow yourself down.

Well, and it there is a different uh different places and different needs for it. You you what if you're trying to introduce a new tool, the innovator and early adopters, that's all about understanding the problem, trying out the different tools in the market and really understanding, evaluating which are best suited to a particular organization. What's really interesting is when you start growing, scaling, let's say, an organization with those tools, what you often find is they need different tools because there's a different need as you go into that accelerator. We're just working with a client at the moment, it's a small, small business, it's been scaling, so it's going from a couple of hundred people up to hundreds and thousands of people. And what they're finding is ignoring the fact that they have a bunch of interesting tools and products and the usual software development challenges that you might expect is that what they're finding is the tooling itself is ideal in a startup environment because people want to be using tools that nobody's heard of. They want to be using tools which are very specifically support a particular niche that they're working in. But as they scale, what they find is they actually need to bring tools in which people are much more familiar with because they're now recruiting to scale. They're recruiting people who are interested in just give me the environment that I need and let me go and do my job. And they're not interested in the latest and greatest, newest particular product or tool and how that's the learning curve that's associated with using that to get their job done.

Yeah. So it's it's this, oh, look at all these wonderful, cool open source things I can use for free. They'll do absolutely everything that I need to do. Uh okay, it takes me sort of five weeks to glue it all together to do exactly the thing that I want it to do. And then the new person shows up and goes, What am I supposed to do? How do I get started? Because they don't have all of that knowledge that was built up and built around that, that uh the other person got to spend doing that. And so, yeah, it's like, yeah, could you there's uh the element for for lack of uh thing, let's just install Jira and we'll be fine.

Exactly, exactly. But and now how about when you look at the end of the uh, because everybody always focuses on the chasm and that that sort of inflection point when you're shifting from an innovative mindset, expectation really is on something novel, and you're you're building enthusiasts, if you like. You shift that over, you cross the chasm, and you're now in early adopter, early majority, late majority space. But what about the late majority laggard? What do you see happening there? What's the tell tell signs that you're in that space?

So a lot of what you start to see then um is the uh the organizational immune system, as I like to call it, as you where you start to hit the um, well, it's all very well, but it won't work here. And or no, no, thank you. I'm quite happy with all of this tooling that I have. Um and uh and in in some cases, they may be right. What they have may do it just as well as whatever the new thing coming in. That and that becomes a difficult conversation. And that it's like, well, why do you want me to change exactly? And then and then you've got um the the ones who are gonna be far off the end, which just say, I I want nothing to do with this. And so when you get into the flag odds potentially, who are like they say this you're gonna have to prove to me that everybody else is using this before I'll even possibly consider it. And uh, and even then I won't, and I'm gonna be disgruntled. Or the uh the other way I I sometimes say this is the and I in more general terms, you're gonna have a third of people you're easily gonna be able to get on board, including like the innovators, early middle majority, and the you're gonna have about a third of the kind of you they're gonna come with you. That's not they're not gonna be difficult. Then you're gonna have a middle third that they're gonna take a quite a bit of effort to get there, and then you can have a third that may not come at all, but and uh depending on the nature and the size of the change and what it is you're trying to do, and obviously there's a lot of variables, but in a large um digital transformation type exercise, even if you're doing this incrementally in the organization, what you'll find is that and it's better to do it incrementally than in a big bang under any circumstance, but even incrementally, what you'll find is that it it will just happen more slowly and more with a less damaging effect on your organization.

But that last third will slowly change, either by leaving or replacing themselves or I I I I think what I really appreciated, for example, about Simon Sinek's short video is the recognition that to get those early adopters, those evangelists on board is a completely different strategy. You need a different tool set to, for example, early late majority, and again for the late majority laggard. So if I think of any sort of organizational transformation, that early those early days, you don't need a well-defined transformation. You need a good objective. But the how is part of why people get involved in the early days. They want to have influence, they want to be part of that journey. As you cross that inflection point, what's interesting, and that I'm thinking here, for example, uh agile coaches working with agile teams. In the, you know, a lot of agile coaches are of the they've they've they've used to the idea of giving teams as much autonomy as possible and bringing them on that journey. And as you cross that chasm, the inflection point, now you don't need to bring them on the journey. You need to give them instructions, a playbook that makes that smooth transition as easy as possible. So what's really interesting, and I've certainly seen that in my career, is that it's sort of getting into the headspace where those early days of autonomous, let's all kind of work on it together and let the new methodology emerge, shift over to the world of roles and responsibilities and playbook in the early late majority space. And then as you get to the late majority and laggard space, well, that's where you end up in a world where you pretty much end up dictating the process change. Because now you're really looking at the last 20, 15, 20%. They they're not interested in a discussion and a learning experience. They need to know what's expected of them when they turn up. That's really what they're there for. And they're really going to want to know how risky is it? If I just push back and say, sorry, it's just not going to change the way I work, then uh what's the impact? Yeah.

I mean, I mean, all of these, I've always seen it as the that first 80%, you'll you'll get there, and the last pieces you need to have somebody sort of sponsoring, and then you at the end, you need to go up to somebody who's got sufficient influence or power over the top of that last 20% to say, look, you're doing it this way. Everybody else is gone. You guys can either come along or what where would you like to go instead? Right? Because it is.

Well, and you can do that respectfully, and we can do that with a conversation and so on. Uh, but it's something that is we've we need to recognize it's a different audience to the audiences and other steps in the journey. Um, anything else when you think of that sort of crossing the chasm and the market adoption curve that jumps out at you, or you think is a great learning for organizations?

Uh, I think we've covered a lot of the different pieces. I think um, uh as you were saying there, that uh understanding what those different uh those different categories are going to want to see as you move along, that you are gonna have to change your messaging, ensure that you have uh we talk about it in terms of guardrails. It's like that's that's kind of middle piece, having sort of the right guardrails in place for the uh at the right times, so the right different groups so they can um and you you do need some form of guardrails, even potentially in the early days to make sure really bad things don't happen. But but uh having the right guardrails help guide people, uh help them see where they can go, make sure that they can experiment safely and that they and they know that it's okay to do this. And that's really a lot of what that is. It's like can can somebody feel like they can safely do this and that they won't get into trouble for doing so. Do they feel like they can go ahead and move forward and try this? And if so you've that's the part that you're really looking to try and enable.

Well, those guidelines and guardrails is that as you cross the chasm, that that inflection point, you need you need you need different sort of processes and strategies in place to handle it because there's there's a lot more sort of implicit discipline or awareness of the boundaries that you're working with, or maybe not awareness, but it's okay because it's a small, safe space to kind of learn and fail in around that. But as you in in the early adopter space, but as you move over, go through that inflection point, you now need to be able to roll it out across different regions, different countries, cultures, whatever the change might be. And you need a lot more structure around it. It's certainly something as a as a somebody who's worked in agile coaching for quite a while now, it's something that took me a while to recognize that structure isn't necessarily bad or or uh reducing in your ability to innovate or do things. It's just a different place within that sort of adoption journey that organizations are going through.

Yes, yeah, exactly. And uh I I think there's there's a few pieces there as well. There's the concept around enabling constraints as well, making sure that the right type of constraints and guard veils and guides that you've got as well, that you you don't accidentally hamstring the transformation by putting the wrong type of pieces into place. So there's another bit there as well that could be unpacked. But um, I I think we've done a fairly good job of covering uh the the end-to-end crossing the chasm diagram there.

Yes, I think so as well. It's always a pleasure to have a bit of a conversation. Key takeaways, what would you say people need to remember as they they step into their next conversation?

I think the I think the key takeaways, uh I think one of the main pieces there is one we've talked about in a few different ways, just there, the the differences between the different stages of adoption of new practices or new things into an all into a number of people, in fact. I mean, this applies to a lot of different circumstances, but understanding you're going to need different methods and techniques and different levels of uh of guidance for different uh groups of people that you're dealing with depending where you are in your journey. Thank you very much. Until next time, Peter. Until next time. Thank you. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts are Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. Focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and devot at scale.