When trying to influence change during your technology transformation, it’s tempting to punt the hard problems to escalation or authority. And more often than not, that approach fails to produce the necessary change.

Let us take an example. Consider you have a transformational goal of changing your software delivery culture, where decisions about improving product performance, project performance and team performance are based on squishy project management (“PM”) tactics, to a culture where those decisions are made objectively based on hard performance data. In other words, you want to create a culture of data-driven decision making.

To have a culture of data driven decision making, you first need to have consistent and reliable data and that data needs to come from each and every one involved with software delivery. Teams need to be consistent about tracking every part of the value stream within a project tracking system such as JIRA. Based on this data - metrics such as lead times, cycle times, failure rates, deployment frequency, time to repair issues, wastage, predictability etc can be calculated; and insights on project, product and team performance can be derived to make frequent decisions about where and how to improve.
So how do you get people to play their part in consistently recording data related to their part of the value stream day in and day out? You will be requiring people to create new work habits. And the bigger, more distributed and more diverse the teams are in terms of organizations, geography, skills, roles, responsibilities, the harder it is to influence people to adopt this change.

So, in order to make this change happen it could tempting to think that you could command your people, or get a senior leader (by title and role) in your organization to enforce this change.
The problem with this approach, putting aside the fact that it is not scalable, is that it will also likely not work because many people are not moved by power and enforcement through rules or organizational mandates. They won’t change their daily work habits just because some senior leader in their organization asks them of it.

Go horizontal, not vertical

A team member will more likely start to track the value stream in JIRA when others who they know and trust start to do it; when people who have made things better for them start to do it; when people in their circle start to do it; when people of their “tribe” start to do it. In other words we do things that our peers in our tribes do. The network effect is highly powerful in making change happen during your technology transformation. It’s a positive cycle where the addition of each person to the network of people adopting the change compounds the overall adoption of the change.

If we think about it this way, then it's easy to see that people working within the teams will have far more influence in the adoption of a change than typical "senior leaders" in the organizational hierarchy.

So the next time you want to escalate a change that’s not happening, think about whether you have tried to create the network effect. Did you send the right signals to the right people in the network, inside the teams, for it to spread horizontally than trying to get your message pushed top-down vertically?