Belief systems and why most improvement initiatives are doomed to fail

I have spent many years working in the software product development industry, across 3 countries, and I've witnessed many failed initiatives.

Companies often try to change things, but these attempts inevitably fail to produce the benefits they aimed at producing.

And it's not just me. I know many software product development professionals, and they have all witnessed this.

The diagnosis is that people behave based on what they believe, so attempting to get different behaviour without changing how people think is doomed to fail.

Before you go ahead, a word of caution: this article paints a bleak picture of the situation most companies find themselves in, so if you're not up for bad news you might want to stop reading now.

You decided to continue reading uh? Well here we go then, don't say I didn't warn you.

Companies are systems, and so are their sub-systems: divisions, processes, ways of working, technologies, teams, and products.

You might say, so what? There would be a lot to say about systems and no article on LinkedIn would ever do justice to this subject, but for the sake of this discussion, here are some important properties of systems:

1. A system is never the sum of its parts; it’s the product of their interaction.
2. The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together – how they interact, not on how they act, taken separately.
3. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

For companies, these have many important implications. For our discussion, the key ones are:

1. Trying to improve various parts in isolation in unlikely to produce anything good.
2. If the results a company currently gets are undesired, asking people to do better or hoping that things will sort themselves out is naive, and the only way to get different results is to change the system that is producing those results.

Now you might be thinking "ouch, not a nice picture, yeah", but this is more like a gentle introduction to the real problem.

Companies don't make decisions, people do. And companies end up being the result of the decisions made by their employees, at all levels.

People make decisions based on their belief system. A belief system is a set of beliefs or principles that helps us interpret our everyday reality, understand, organize, and make sense of the world. A belief system is a network of beliefs that we each hold about what is, or should be, right and wrong and what is, or should be, true and false.

People behave based on what they believe, nothing new here uh? So what's the big deal?

The big deal is that without a tremendous conscious effort, companies always end up hiring people with different belief systems. These people replicate through hiring, creating strongholds of a given worldview. This clearly destroys effectiveness, as companies are the product of the interaction of their sub-systems.

But it gets even worse. Have you ever witnessed a big reboot? When a company is so displeased by its results that it decides to completely replace something, building anew? How did that go?

Well, most of the time these attempts fail miserably, because they end up producing either the same system or an alternative system that produces the same results.

The reason for this is that systems are created by people and reflect those people's belief systems. Without changing their belief system, people will produce what theyn think it's best, regardless of how many times you ask them to do so.

When companies try to rebuild things - whether it's teams, tech systems, processes, departments, or products - the incorrect assumption is that the existing system they want to replace wasn't built right. They believe the problem was execution. Somebody messed something up, so the system ended up wrong.

Unfortunately the problem has pretty much always to do with not doing the right thing, rather than not doing the thing right.

And if your belief system doesn't change, you won't change your definition of what "the right thing" means.

"So all you need to do is change how people think! It doesn't sound that bad".

Even worse news here: you cannot change how people think. There's is absolutely nothing you can do that can directly affect how somebody else's think.

Moreover, considering the idea that a different belief system might be more true or effective is very hard, as it requires facing the possibility that you were wrong about something. People tend to hate this, and they'd normally do anything to avoid having to consider this possibility.

And yet people do change how they think - though very rarely - so how does this happen?

Primarily in either of these 2 ways:

1. Through encountering other belief systems, and getting curious about it. This is a very rare and gradual thing, but it is possible for somebody to change their worldview this way.
2. Through experimenting a paradox, which is an impossibility according to somebody's belief system. Imagine you believe that knowledge of algorithms and data-structures is necessary to be a great team member, if you discover that somebody you believe to be tremendously good team member knows nothing about algorithm and data-structures, you might change your belief.

Most people though might change their mind about their colleague or even convince themselves that their colleague knows algorithms and data-structures after all. Also, this is a single belief. A belief system is a set of beliefs that reinforce each other, so changing an entire belief system is hard, because it requires admitting the possibility of having been wrong about many things.

In order to make it possible for people to experience a paradox and nudge them to change, you'd need to put them in contact with a system produced by an alternative set of beliefs. If the person recognizes the effectiveness of the system, and cannot reconcile this system with their own set of beliefs, there are good chances that they might adopt the set of beliefs that produced the system.

Sounds like a way forward? Well, yeah, but it's tricky because it only works for a small amount of people at the time.

Imagine you have a team working on trunk, without individual tasks, using ensemble programming cross-functionally, with Test-Driven-Development, pushing commits every 5 or 10 minutes, getting each commit to the main branch automatically built, tested, and released without human actions involved. No code reviews, no Jira. And imagine this team was effective, with a very low defect rate, and a very low time to fix a defect when it manifests itself.

You could add 1 or 2 people to this team, and there are good chances that they'll adopt not only the ways of working, but also the belief system behind these ways of working - quality is speed, a team is a group of people working together towards the same goals, small steps make you safe and smooth, diversity makes a good team, effectiveness over efficiency.

But if you add enough people with a different belief system, they'll recreate a stronghold of their own thinking, reinforcing each other's beliefs. They might even destroy the team in terms of effectiveness.

So is there anything that can be done?

Big discontinuous changes are needed to address this problem, and these type of changes require buy-in from the very top of a company.

In a company where a CEO/founder has a strong vision, an effective belief system, and the willingness and power to hire, promote, and fire to keep the company under 1 belief system, things are likely going to go well.

It's rare though that a CEO/founder has the willingness to take the necessary steps, especially these days, where conflict and top-down initiatives are seen as negative. Even more rare is a CEO/founder with the power to do so, since most companies have a board and/or investors, and even a CEO needs to be careful not to do things that might violate common sense or etiquette and bring trouble to themselves.

Thanks for reading! I hope I was capable of describing what I believe is a fundamental problem in most companies, and this will be somewhat useful to you. Let me know your thoughts on the post or in DM!

#management #systemthinking #agile #productdevelopment