The Lily Pad Problem

A notification appears on your phone.

It’s an email from the new VP announcing a series of org changes.

You’re not surprised, but it’s a tough pill to swallow.

You finally felt like you were in a groove with your boss, and your team, and you were starting to really see the results of your sustained effort.

You’ve been through this before, so you’re not scared this time, but you roll your eyes a bit and brace yourself for the next few weeks of meetings, process changes, and new responsibilities.

You remember the last time a bunch of big changes came down the pike around 2 years ago. The new guy had his way of doing things, and of course, the old guard grumbled, and you all eventually got used to it. At least those of you who stuck around.

Thinking back, some of those new ideas weren’t bad. Your quality of work is probably better now. And you’re glad you don’t have to do the quarterly updates anymore.

Every new boss comes in and surveys the landscape and finds a bunch of loose ends. It always looks like a bit of a mess, like you’re picking up someone else’s legacy codebase or documentation. It often seems inexplicably busted, like the previous regime was disorganized or grossly mistaken.

That’s because the fresh eyes of a newcomer will see the current state, but they can’t always see the past, or the intended future, quite as clearly. Their new perspective is valuable, because the incumbents have the opposite problem. They have a desired end state in mind, and they know where things came from, so this suboptimal situation today is just one step on the journey towards something better and away from something worse. They’ll get to the promised land, if you just give them a little more time.

So who is right? The newcomer with fresh eyes, seeing the mess for what it is today, or the veteran teammates who have been around long enough to see through multiple cycles of change?

It doesn’t matter.

In most cases, the new leadership will reshape the organization with their own signature. If you’re lucky, they have the humility to really understand the history first, and if you’re really lucky, they’ll be on board with a similar vision and desired end state, but they’ll add their own wisdom to the mix. But in so many cases, the new leadership is under pressure to perform, the current state is deemed inadequate, and sweeping changes are imminent.

We are all burdened by the same challenges of change management. Whether it’s an established business, a startup on a hockey stick growth trajectory, or an old city trying to fix its infrastructure. We find ourselves trapped in a liminal state between a broken past and an unrealized future, the music stops and we’re told to put our pencils down.

We’re trying to cross the water to get from one patch of stable ground to another. And we cannot cross in one giant leap.

We want to find the lily pads along our path, a set of viable intermediate states where we can make small changes towards our destination.

If we try to make sweeping, sudden changes, we risk falling into the water. We want to upgrade our Livable House, but we don’t want to make it unlivable in the meantime. If we get stuck along the way, and can’t make forward progress, we still want to land on a lily pad and hope that it can support our weight.

An aside for the technical crowd:

You're building an application that processes complex transactions, say, the movement of inventory within a warehouse. 

Whenever you move a part, the application has to perform a set of validations: 
(1) is the part allowed to be moved by this person? 
(2) is the new location open? 
(3) will the part fit in the new location? 
(4) is there another part to backfill this part? 
(5) is there a resource available to move it? 

Once the part is moved, it also has to update the master inventory summary report and the part history log.

You're working with a set of microservices that can handle different domains. There's one that deals with permissions, another with part sizes, another for storage conditions, etc. You would prefer to keep the transactions simpler to make testing easier, reduce the number of vectors for error, and maintain reliable transactions that don't result in dirty reads, or race conditions, or latency issues. 

You can't make your transactions too small, because you have to ensure that everything is in a legal state, that is, that you don't perform changes that place the application into invalid intermediate states that will prevent transactions from progressing, or irreversible states that you can't get out of without some nasty manual date changes. Yuck! 

You have to find the lily pads to cross the water. 

Often, you can’t buy a new home with home equity until you’re able to sell your current home.

An economy can’t transition overnight to 100% renewable sources of energy unless it can withstand the days with extreme heat, extreme cold, no wind, or no sun (unless you’re a fan of nuclear) .

The Lily Pad Problem is why the old guard looks like fools. They didn’t expect that anyone would fully judge their work before it was “done.”

Whether you’re building a new application, changing the processes in a department, or trying to drive reforms in your local government— sell your vision, point people in the right direction, but be extra mindful of the many intermediate states you’ll reach along the way.

Those who have truly mastered change know the stable ground is a mirage in the desert.

The lily pads are all you’ve got.