Our Iceberg Is Melting

 On this week's episode of Definitely Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock dive into the world of change management through a conversation about the book "Our Iceberg is Melting." This easy-to-read parable offers a unique perspective on change through the lens of a colony of penguins living on a melting iceberg. The book explores the eight-step model of change management from Kotter's perspective, providing an accessible entry point to the topic. The conversation delves into the nuances of change management, highlighting the importance of gaining buy-in across different characters and perspectives within an organization. So come listen to Peter and Dave chat about the complexities of change management and what we can learn from those penguins.

 This week's takeaways:
• Identify influential players in the organization.
• Broadening awareness of complexity and existential threats.
• Look for something to learn from any situation, no matter how difficult.
• Allow team members to act independently.
• Listen for opportunities to contribute and offer feedback.

Resource:
Our Iceberg Is Melting- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/419461 

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Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock. How are you today, Dave? Excellent.

Dave: 0:21

I love your energy. This uh this fine day.

Peter: 0:23

I guess the spring spring air is working for you, then is it? Oh, definitely. Spring is in my step. It's uh just got back from my trip. It's like it's good.

Dave: 0:31

I feel so um just speaking of of spring and and uh warm weather, our conversation this week is gonna be about Antarctica and icebergs, I guess. Uh you want to to introduce the book that we were discussing this week?

Peter: 0:47

Well, we get we can't get enough of the cold, right? It's like we need more cold. That's exactly what we need. Yeah. So we're gonna be talking about My Iceberg is melting, which is a uh wonderful little parable of uh John Cotter's uh uh methodology as eight steps of change.

Dave: 1:02

So yeah, and it's uh it's one of those, I mean, obviously an easy read if it's not obvious. It's a short parable and uh very quick to read, but also quite deep in terms of the content that it's trying to cover. We've spent many, many of these conversations talking about change in organizations. Uh we've talked about the eight-step model from Cotta's perspective in a couple of those conversations. Uh, this is sort of the the easy point of entry into that change model um from the perspective of penguins and a melting ice flow.

Peter: 1:33

Yeah, and it's a nice easy read. It's like 150 pages, takes you a couple of hours. It's it's a really, really easy to get into, really easy to consume, and it manages to describe the entire process very, very well. I had uh I I quite uh enjoyed it.

Dave: 1:47

So maybe in summary, just to I mean, the story is about an iceberg with uh or an ice sheet, I guess, with a colony of penguins on it. And um, they've been living on that iceberg for many, many years. That's what they're used to. And the whole thing starts with one of the penguin characters recognizing that there is change coming, there's something wrong with the iceberg, and how to gain buy-in across, in this case, a colony of penguins, which of course is exactly analogous to the many organizations that we work with in the colony of folks in those organizations. But really nice uh way of looking at how to get change up and running. So, what did you take away? What works, what doesn't work about the book?

Peter: 2:29

So I I think even from the the get-go, one of the nice things is that the penguin who realizes that they have a problem is not the penguin at the top of the house in their hierarchical colony. Um and when he goes and tries to convince the the leader, it doesn't go so well. The leader's like sort of, yeah, okay, whatever. And uh then he has to go and ask somebody else who says, Well, I'm gonna go ask a friendly penguin that I know that's willing to listen to me, who might be actually open to the idea that maybe we do need something to change here. Um, and then that's them who goes and convinces the the leader to okay, maybe we should start to look at this and listen about this. And it's it's not all, hey, it's gonna be the guy at the top who's gonna say he's the one with all the vision, he has all of the ideas, and he's the one who's gonna drive us to safety.

Dave: 3:14

What I really liked about just kind of reminding ourselves, first of all, it's not it's not in that business world, but we all understand this inherently. We've seen this happen in organizations, which is the leadership team are made up of many different characters, many different perspectives. And it's not change is not as straightforward as saying, hey, we've seen an opportunity or there's a risk that we need to move away from, an opportunity we need to chase, take it up to a leadership team, everybody nods their heads, buys into the idea, and away we go. The reality, and I think this comes across so well in the book, very early on, and those characters stay in real life, kind of discussed and continue to impact all of the conversations and the actions as they go through the story, is the reality is you're not just going to go and find everybody's on the same page and all wanting to do things, right? You're going to find people who are actively against the idea, who will try and undermine the idea, who will continuously foster a resistance to making those changes. And I thought that was a really interesting takeaway because I think too many times in more sort of clearly instructional books on how to deal with change, they ignore the networking bit, they ignore the politics.

Peter: 4:29

Yeah. It's like, well, that doesn't exist, it's all smooth. We go and ask the person, they just do it. So simple as that. Uh and I think that that piece right at the beginning, um so if as I as I call it, the uh iceberg that they're on is full of water, and the penguins knows that if that water freezes, the iceberg's gonna shatter and they'll have nowhere to live. So he the he goes and demonstrates this. So the step one of Kot, create urgency. He demonstrates this by having a bottle filled with water, lets the water freeze, and the water bottle goes. And uh that that's how he convinced him, that's how he creates that sense of urgency of like, hey, we're we've gotta do something about this. If we don't do something about this, um bad things are gonna happen. And then he does it visibly and he shows it and he demonstrates it.

Dave: 5:15

Well, and I and I think that was, and several times in the story, there is an opportunity to effectively present a boring PowerPoint presentation about the risks and the numbers and the analytics and so on. And number a number of times there, you know, a real kind of key takeaway that you take you you walk off with is um numbers and logic and analysis isn't going to get the buy-in that you're looking for. That bottle breaking, the how so a couple of things that really stand out right at the outset is how do you gain buy-in by approaching the right people who are have the right mindset, who are open to a conversation, who are prepared to take a risk and follow your line of thinking to understand what the problem is. Number one, that's that bit about the networking bit. It isn't necessarily top of house. It can be, it's got to be an influencer into that top of house, but you're finding the right individual, and they're possibly not in your sort of line of management. But the second thing is data and analytics and logic don't convey an urgent message in the same way as the breaking bottle, something that people can get around their head around.

Peter: 6:23

Yeah, not not everybody, not everybody is convinced by data. There's another way of looking at that, too.

Dave: 6:28

It's uh Well, and I it's interesting. I would take a slightly, which is the data's helpful, but you don't make the sort of emotional invested decisions that you have to make in order to get these sorts of changes through uh analytics alone.

Peter: 6:43

Yes, well, this is why executives talk in metaphors.

Dave: 6:45

It's the well exactly is storytelling in a nutshell, that narrative leadership. The whole point of this one is how do we communicate it in a way that more most people understand.

Peter: 6:56

Exactly, exactly. It's something that can people can understand and buy into. And yes, a sheet full of numbers won't convince people um in that way. The and the second step, of course, is when they form that that coalition, they they get the penguins together who are gonna do something about this once they've originally once he's actually managed to create some interest in doing something. And uh the the interesting part there was that it it was a cross-functional team. It was it wasn't uh, hey, this is just we're just gonna pick the leaders. It was, well, no, we're gonna we're gonna need the architect down there, and we're gonna need person who knows how to talk to birds, and we need to person the the fisherman, and uh we we're gonna need all these people and all these different perspectives and bring them together uh to form that powerful coalition that is capable of understanding what we should do about this problem.

Dave: 7:43

And and it's uh I I found that one again quite interesting because it was a reminder that it isn't just go get your executives and knowing we've again briefly discussed this in the past, but knowing what we know about networks is really understanding the informal networks in the organization and understanding you need a collection of different perspectives and different positions of authority that touch on those informal networks so that you're building credibility across a very broad swath of the population that you're working with. And in fact, in later on in the book, what you find is that every individual pretty much on that guiding coalition is engaged in supporting activities, whether that's blocking activities, if I remember rightly, there is the character no no that is forever saying no, right? But but also fomenting resistance. And that there was one of the individuals from the guiding coalition, the professor, that basically pushed that individual into the corner so they would you know mute the noise that was coming from that people who were pushing against the idea.

Peter: 8:43

Yes, so they could move forward, they could actually start to do things. It was good. Yeah, yeah. And uh then then, of course, I mean the the next part is that they move on to like how how are we gonna create a vision for this, something that people are gonna understand, which is again this narrative storytelling. How do we come up with the story that people are going to uh resonate, something that they can relate to so that they can uh so that when we say, hey, this is what we want to do, this is why we want to do it, and this is what's driving it, and um, this is why it matters to you, and it's what's in it for you. Yeah. And uh in their case, being safe, being off this iceberg that'll explode.

Dave: 9:19

Well, yeah, and persuading people that this was a serious issue that needed addressing. Um, what I also found interesting there, and I and again, it's it's the opposite of uh paralysis analysis, that's always a mouthful, but the opposite of that in the sense that that messaging went out before they had a solution. And I find that one is something, especially in in a world now with shareholders looking over our shoulder and and public conversation about what we're up to as much as private. Some of those is sort of, I guess, courage to step up and say, here is an existential threat to us as a population of penguins in this case, but here is this existential threat. We don't exactly know how we're going to address it, but we need you to know about it to know we need some activity on this. We're gonna start looking at it. And and I think that was actually something that I really took away from because sometimes we try and plan everything to the nth degree, and we try and say, This is what you're gonna do, and this is how your job will change, instead of saying we're all in this together, but we've got to act in some way, we've just got to figure out what that's going to look like.

Peter: 10:21

I I think they also ask people, um, well, you got any ideas? Absolutely, yeah.

Dave: 10:26

Yeah, like yeah, and and that's where the this whole thing with the seagull comes in, which is really, you know, those ideas. And I again, there's so much much depth in a very, very simple uh parable. But one of the things is knowing what we know about complexity and it and real existential threats, which are which are incredibly difficult to plan your way out of, broadening how many people are aware of it so that more and more people are beginning to go, oh, I wonder if what I know or am observing or seeing or understanding may contribute to the end goal is a is again from a from an information network, is that broadening where you get information from so that you're in a better position to be able to identify opportunities that may not be obvious otherwise.

Peter: 11:10

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And then and then they move on to uh communicating the vision so that now that they've designed it, right? So next in our in our line of attack here is the like communicating the vision, and they have to get that that that story, the vision that they've created out to their population of penguins. And uh like the underwater posters, isn't it?

Dave: 11:33

If when they're showing me seeing the posters everywhere, right? And I find this one quite interesting because I think so many times I mean, we've gone virtual over the last few years. Remote work is common, nobody's walking around corridors necessarily seeing the posters. So that that needs shifting, right? That we need to update what we mean when we look at some of these things. But what really struck me was it is like over and over and over again. There's continuous communication, uh and that sort of just going backwards and forwards with one talk after the next after the next, it was just never-ending um reinforcement of that message, which I thought was a really interesting reminder. We forget, we think, oh, we've communicated it a handful of times. What really came out is just how frequently that communication needs to be in place to effectively drown out and raise the morale and keep people on focus. There's a lot that goes into that.

Peter: 12:30

Yes, there is. And I normally when I when I'm talking about uh that creating that powerful collision where I work with organizations in that, it's uh that communications role is the first one that need to uh you say we we need somebody who does this, who's dedicated to this program, who is uh who understand and can do communications well, and is gonna create the buzz around this because they are gonna be absolutely essential and you need them really early. They're kind of the first person you need.

Dave: 12:57

Really early and really frequent. In fact, I I mean I I think just in my own experience, I'd say is it's one of those things. If you skimp on that one, you're you're just dooming. If it's a if it's a challenging change, there needs to be that drumbeat of communication all the time to help people stay focused. Yep, exactly.

Peter: 13:15

Yeah, and I and I've known some fantastic people in those roles over the years who've done a great job of doing that communication and setting up the events and finding new ways of communicating, and it's uh it's a skill and it's uh should never be overlooked. I I liked in the book as well how there was the different reactions, talking about another book, but crossing the chasm, it but it that the piece where the the early adopters were like, that's that's really interesting, we've got to do something about that. I'm on board, how do I help? And to the people who said, Yeah, I'm not gonna worry about that yet. And then the but so there was a piece of that in the narrative around the the different groups of penguins and how they responded to it. And some of them were like, That's not gonna happen, it's just yet another disaster that they're telling us about. It's like didn't happen last year, it's not gonna happen this year.

Dave: 14:01

Well, and I I thought that was very cleverly done in the book because it it draws attention to two things. One is in ad in Agile, we always assume positive intent. And I don't think this is an example of negative intent, but some people's positive intent is to reinforce their state, their view, which means you will have people actively preventing actions that you need to be taken. So if we ignore that, if we don't take action to both mute that and drown it out in some way or recognize that that's happening, then that's also going to be somewhat of a challenge that can lead to it unraveling.

Peter: 14:37

And in some times as well, it's like recognizing it and learning from it because we may be wrong in what we've made as a presumption. And so we've got to also look at it to say, okay, is there something in what they're saying? Uh are they just being maysayers and fighting back against this because they're crutchety, or are they actually do they actually uh uh is there value in what they're they're they're bringing to the table that we need to learn from so we can bring that to the table too? Because we mustn't forget about that.

Dave: 15:03

Yeah, I I always it reminds me of when whenever I'm reading a book, even if I'm finding it really tough, I'm always looking, what's the one thing I can learn from this? Sometimes you have to dig deep, but there is something you're gonna be able to learn, right? Uh one of the other things was the enabling independent action. And again, so I I work with eight cotters all the time when we're working with organizations, and that element of enabling independent action is it was really well explained. This high whole idea of some it's like a celebration event where everybody's bringing fish to feed the the penguins that weren't going to be able to feed themselves because they were contributing elsewhere. But what was interesting is it kind of came up from from out of left field of just uh I think it was a bunch of kid penguins wanting to help. And what that reminded me of just that whole idea of there are people and parties in your organization, groups that want to help. And we so often close the door and plan in a committee type of environment and open the door and go, this is what we're going to do, instead of listening and encouraging and empowering actions elsewhere.

Peter: 16:09

Yes. Yeah. And that's that is a such a key part of it when you say say, Oh, um, I we see this in things like uh DevOps all the time. It's like there's so many people want to remove these barriers and they have ways to do it, and there's things that they want to do. Uh and uh I a classic example member is a DevOps team that was I don't think you can tell because they were DevOps teams, so there's immediate warning signs there, but they're but you do need that, but in that in that sense, they were operating in the bad sense of this in a way, because they were off in their silo building a solution that nobody wanted necessarily. And then when they did show up to interact with the teams, they went and sat in a corner and and then when I was talking to it, it's like, so why is nobody coming to talk to us?

Dave: 16:49

It's like it's like, well, maybe absolutely, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I I mean that one is is I just think it's a great reminder just to go, and and unfortunately, in a in a remote environment, it's tough, right? You can't just walk the corridors and listen out for conversations and contribute, but there are forums that you can just start gaining, um gaining momentum, and also that whole bit of uh there was no feedback saying that's a daft idea, that would never work, right? And of course, part of that is there are ideas that will, you know, flame out really quickly. There are other ideas that will stay damp and you can't get them going, and then there'll be uh the ideas that take off. So part of it is how do you kind of facilitate that so that they all of those ideas get an opportunity to flourish, even if they don't all flourish.

Peter: 17:37

Yeah. And the next piece is uh this idea of like creating quick wins, it's uh which I think comes out of that, right? It's like the uh identifying the ones that will flourish and fanning the flames. Yeah.

Dave: 17:48

Well, yeah, and communicating about it and sharing that success so that it's re it's it's followed through again and again. And I think that was really again, just comes back to that communication book.

Peter: 17:59

Yes, yeah, letting everybody know that uh look what we did. Um that that l builds us into the the next piece, which is that now you have that and you've built that like look at what we did, and you've got that base of it, is now you start to look at then like how do we build on top of that? How do we uh start to uh uh get others to start to pay attention to it? Now in other words, like moving beyond the uh the initial adopters, the ones where we've seen those quick wins and then getting to build out into the rest of it and start to tackle some of the more difficult questions and uh and have people go and start to solve that. I mean, and and again, it's not about that the central people having to come up with all of the solutions, it's about now that we've we've in we've inspired people to do this, we understand what the vision is, it's enabling them to be able to go and carry this themselves and find their ways uh forward with it.

Dave: 18:50

And and there was there's some little subtle hints in in the the parable as well, which talks about if you're going to spend all that time doing these things, you're gonna have to stop doing other things. And that one I thought was uh because as their momentum is building, it's no longer there's one or two individuals that that take a risk and and want to go out and do what's necessary to make the change, but as they're gaining momentum, they're drawing more people to them, obviously it means other things are not being done. And I thought that was quite interesting because again, yeah, we don't always see that.

Peter: 19:25

We we've I I know you and I have both seen this in organizations, in both of the like the main areas we work in where the it takes work to change, and it always will take to work, and we're always changing. So there always needs to be attention to that work and effort put into it. But so often it um comes across as a side of the desk activity and the organization isn't interested in investing in it, either in stopping work to make capacity in the system to enable that change to occur, or by um ramping up and adding more capacity to make it happen. Uh It and basically it just fizzles out, or it takes a starts to take a very, very long time, and the organization gets to the point, well, well, this isn't working. And it's like, well, you don't really actually try.

Dave: 20:11

Well, it it's almost like Yeah, exactly. There's a sea change from there's a small group of people who are trying to make a change happen to more and more people are their daily activities are shifting from what they used to do to what they need to do to build that momentum. And that shift has to come at a cost to the organization. You have to stop doing something in order to put more effort behind something else. And I think that was just a it uh, you know, when you're looking at that final step of just building um momentum and and and repeating, sort of iterating that forward, there's an element of and doing less of other things as you get that, otherwise you're just not going to cross the line.

Peter: 20:51

Yes, yeah. It's so it's ha it's the organization's capacity to unlearn and relearn there, and that's the rate at which that change can occur.

Dave: 20:58

And if there isn't enough slack in the system to do that, then yeah, you're you're not going to well, and that that sentence you've just said leads us right to the final step of the eight steps, right? Which is institutionalizing the change and the culture is that that ability for an organization to do whatever it is that that changes. But what I found really it was a it was a great way of just putting this in context because the institutionalizing the change wasn't about you know setting up home on this new ice flow that they'd found and got to, but was about building in that sort of mindset of continually exploring and looking out for the next big risk and practicing the skills that we developed. I'm reminded we've worked, been fortunate to listen in and work with federal government groups through, you know, as a following what happened with the pandemic. And what's really interesting is the government, which is traditionally viewed as a slow and bureaucratic, well, in many ways they changed really, really rapidly. And they were able to address those existential threats really quickly. And what's interesting is listening to how they're trying to institutionalize that skill set that they developed through that pandemic period to do the same thing today. And that's exactly that would be the eighth step that is described.

Peter: 22:17

Making the change stick and continuing to do it. I mean, yeah, it's a good example of it. That's even a better example because that the change you're making to stick there is the ability to change. Yeah. It's a little meta.

Dave: 22:32

Yes, that's an ice flow above the ice flow or something like that. I don't know.

Peter: 22:36

Yeah. So yeah, I think I think overall, I think we would say that yeah, this is uh it's a great little story. It's such a quick read, there's so much to draw from it. It's uh it's a really great uh learning uh and a way of communicating it. And again, I mean what's what we were talking about, the narrative, right? If you're going to communicate something, and communicating it as a narrative can be a very powerful way of getting the ideas across. So it's uh it works very well. Um so yeah, it's a good book. I I was talking with you before we started recording a bit about some of the criticism I've seen for it out there, or for the the Cotter's model as opposed to the book, um, per se, which was mostly as being around well, it's very hierarchical, it's very top-down, it's like we start from a leadership, and leadership has to be there to put all this together. Um, but as we were talking, as we're going through this, I think it's it's kind of clear that it it that isn't the way it comes across in the story necessarily. It's not entirely hierarchical. I think there's uh there's perhaps room, but I mean that you can't build a perfect model. It's obviously it's a it's a way of looking at things, but this is one that really does help thinking through what am I going to need to do to introduce the change. It uh it works quite well from that perspective.

Dave: 23:47

Well, what I appreciated, uh what I I mean to your point about what the strengths and weaknesses, I one of the things I think both you and I have talked about is and we've learned over the years is there are always strengths and there are always weaknesses. The goal is we we need to understand what we need right now, what what we can take away from it. And what I find interesting, there are there are change models which are more formulaic in terms of what the change is and how to make it happen. This is one that really focuses on those those intangibles around the side. Like, you know, how are you how who do you talk to when? Or what are the you know, you can't just get top-down. You're going to need more than just pure top-down communication. So, and and the other thing that comes out very clearly in the book is the plan isn't the the transformation. There isn't, there's very little information about what the plan is. There's information about how to get buy-in, how to communicate it, how to gain momentum, but not what should the plan be. Yes. And I think that's an interesting kind of maybe that's a way to end the conversation. It's an interesting takeaway from that.

Peter: 24:48

It is, it is. Well, uh, well, thank you as always, Dave. It's always fun to have these conversations. Uh enjoyed it.

Dave: 24:53

And nice to talk penguins once in a while.

Peter: 24:56

It is, it is. My my son would be overjoyed.

Dave: 24:59

Anyway, until next time, really appreciated it. And let's uh let's catch up soon.

Peter: 25:04

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and devot scale.