Statics, Dynamics, and Relativity

I have a regular meeting with some of the senior technologists on my team.  It’s a small, varied and global group.  They have little in common except their deep technical experience, a readiness to debate, and a strong tendency toward sarcasm (things that seem to transcend national and cultural boundaries among technologists).

During many of these meetings we discuss the barriers to change that Others (it’s always Others ;-) are erecting as we seek to change cause change in our environment.  Sometimes it’s change to help things go Faster.  Sometimes it’s to help improve Quality.  And other times, it’s to lower Cost.

The example last week was around our development process and how the Others were hindering the improvement of Scrum.  (In this case, it happened to be the need to have better quality and depth of product backlog.)  The team had plenty of commentary about what needed to be done and how Others needed to not be resisting the change.

From there, the discussion pivoted toward some work that other team members were doing on an automation platform.  In this case, a team had been working extensively with Puppet to accomplish cross-platform installation and configuration automation.  And (seemingly) “out of nowhere” another team started talking about the importance of Ansible.

The team had been used to hearing about the Puppet vs Chef debate, which seemed to break largely along sysadmin vs programmer lines.  However, they said, Ansible seemed to be swaying previous Puppet advocates due to its agentless architecture…  They added that there doesn’t yet seem to be a clear-cut winner in this debate.

From there, the discussion started to go meta as the participants began to observe that “this automation stuff seems unsettled.”  And then began to wonder “when is it going to get figured out."

Listening to the conversation, I could feel that there were tendencies, lurking just beneath the surface, to “wait and see” before taking on certain automation projects.  There it was... resistance to change.  Just which the team didn't want to see in Others.

And it was then that I realized (or perhaps was reminded) that for all of us, our perception of change is relative.  In the former case, the team felt the environment was too static and change wasn’t happening fast enough… in the latter case, the team felt the environment was too dynamic and change was happening too fast.

So in a time of change, remember that regardless of what side of the times we find ourselves, understanding the Other’s worldview will help to smooth the transition.