Initiatives: Start small, be consistent
Many big initiatives end up failing, and it’s not because the initiative is bad. Big initiatives fail because the effort required to pull them off isn’t easily feasible, or the intended value isn’t actualised. Smaller initiatives cost less, in terms of time or resources, though may have smaller impacts.
In my current role, I have to try many different things. Whether it’s building culture, influencing teams, or writing code, I have several initiatives going on at once. I’ve found it more effective to start small, start often, and stop quickly. Big ideas don’t always need big solutions, and can be solved in pieces.
As a tech enabler, I set some general principles of what I want to influence or enable, then when ideas or opportunities pop up to do so, I test them out. If the idea works, I try to repeat it, if it doesn’t, I drop it.
Some initiatives have to be big, by default, and it’s hard to break it down. Consider gathering an entire company in one place. It needs everyone to travel, to be free on the same day, and for the organisation to see worth in gathering.
Small initiatives
Smaller initiatives can be carried out locally, with a few people. For these it’s often to ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission, i.e do them without the bureaucracy of an approval chain, and if it causes friction, adjust. The idea being that tying up initiatives in paperwork often will kill the idea before it properly starts, so if your judgement is sound, carry it out.
Some typical smaller initiatives I see happening that can skip the permission step:
Going for low-key dinner or drinks with colleagues in your direct area
Making Slack channels for sharing relevant content with others (e.g tech news, pet pictures)
Refactors that don’t require many synchronised changes across multiple teams
Big initiatives
An organisation-wide initiative usually will need a bunch of different people involved, not just to approve the idea, but also to help give it weight. Many ideas might start ground-up rather than top-down, but benefit from having the backing from the top. This is particularly the case with initiatives that will take a lot of resources, time or effort to pull off. Resources can be money, or time, and both of these are easier to get if a leader approves of an idea. Depending on the initiative, you’ll need funds for food, drink, meeting spaces, streaming setups, servers, etc. In terms of time, there’s a combination of background work taking up time, along with time for participants to take part.
Some typical bigger initiatives that probably need leadership backing:
Gathering everyone in the company for a 3 day offsite.
A week long hackathon including all teams.
Restructuring of teams in a way that risks positions.
Calculating initiative costs
There’s a neat idea I’ve seen floating around the internet of estimating the cost of a meeting through a simple equation:
sum(time_taken * (employee.salary_per_hour / 60) for employee in meeting)
Things to note, which could be obvious:
The higher the seniority of the people involved, the more it costs.
The more people involved, the more it costs.
A mix (typically where the majority of employees are less senior, and only a couple of leadership are involved) can scale effectively.
Since the cost increases with seniority, it often makes sense for non-leadership to take part in most of the planning. As an enabler, your role can be to lift up non-leadership. It saves costs, but it also provides crucial experience and a voice to non-leadership employees. Senior and leadership roles play an important part too - they may be more comfortable and familiar with navigating the company.
Launching an initiative
To launch a bigger initiative, these are the steps I usually take:
Identify key champions that might help, and see what they think of the idea.
Identify risks, and value provided.
Get buy in from management and a mandate.
Get buy in from managers, and leads.
Get buy in from employees.
Many of these initiatives might start bottom up, but going through this process can leverage the influence of leadership into getting everyone on-board.
A great example of where big ideas fail without many small ideas to support them is culture building. If you tell a group people “okay we are one big culture together now” without understanding the existing cultures, their dynamics, and personal biases, the people involved will not mesh and it can be more harmful than beneficial. It’s true of company cultures, online groups, or society. If a direction is set, then there must be follow-through in order to support and reinforce the direction.
On the other hand, if you start culture building by creating a space where people can chat, talk to each other, or share things they’re working on, then the culture happens. It can often seem organic, but needs “seeding” with input. Perhaps someone starts an engaging discussion, or creates a relevant Slack channel, or mentions “hey have you shared this with X team? They’d be interested I’m sure”. These are all small actions which bring alignment to the overall goal: a health shared culture. It is often leadership, seniors, or enablers that need to plant the first seeds before the culture flowers.
As an enabler
Try many things, don’t feel bad when something doesn’t work. Detach initiatives from your emotional feelings. Don’t tie your personal worth to your ideas. Even good ideas, with backing from multiple people, often end up failing. Excluding personal bias or politics, ideas not succeeding aren’t a reflection of what people think of you.
In an enabler role, consider yourself to be either a champion of initiatives, or a champion enabler, no matter where they come from. They might be yours, they might be other people’s. By “a champion of an initiative”, I mean someone that is actively supporting that idea - spending time promoting, discussing, or organising that initiative. Drive it forward, and help clear any roadblocks that might stop it happening. You might also act as a filter — sometimes ideas don’t provide enough value to work on right now, so redirect efforts to ideas that do provide enough value. Finding others to fill the champion role can help, when you’re stretched for time and energy.
A champion provides consistency and follow-through. Ideas without something to drive them forward stay as ideas. A collective might come up with an idea, but by-stander effect kicks in if someone has not clearly been assigned the owner.
Some good questions to ask anyone who comes to you with an idea:
What value does it provide?
Who should be involved?
What’s the timeline?
How much effort is required?
And finally, how can I help?
One of the most useful and powerful tools in an enabler’s toolkit is personal relations and deep understand of who cares about what. Many of the small things I do each day is to familiarise myself with people, teams, and visions. This foundation helps make getting buy-in easier, from all parts of the organisation. Avoid your own personal biases, be open for discussion, and reach out to people.
Some good questions to get to know people’s needs:
What’s your background?
What do you work with?
What would you like to learn, and what could you help others learn?
What do you enjoy doing?
As an employee
The easiest place to start is close to you: your team, or your part of the organisation. Start an idea there, then if you want to scale it up, identify who can support you in doing so. It's often your manager. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, and if you have an idea that works locally, it might be one that works for other teams, too.
Be aware that the time and energy needed grows with the idea. Letting an idea grow beyond your capacity can be healthy - identify and be honest with yourself about what you reasonably have time for, and find someone who can drive it further than you could alone.
Case study: growing the Elm community
When I started in the Elm community, there were very few active people in the community chats. To help the community grow, I would answer questions — either by providing code examples, or directing people to documentation. A community can’t purely be built by slapping a label on it and saying “okay now you talk to each other”, but through establishing healthy communication and connections. The overall goal is to have a vibrant community, but many small actions have to lead the way.
I think it’s a combination of:
Generating interest in the community (blog posts, releases, conference talks).
Making the community seem active, and friendly (questions don’t go unanswered).
Active community members get something out of it (personal happiness, solved problems).
Once you hit a stable community size, the active members will start creating things which draw interest, leading the whole loop to start over again. As interest dies, the community becomes less active, less people make interesting topics, which again causes the inverse loop to happen over again.
It’s natural in open source communities for interest to grow and fall, sometimes multiple times in the life time of the community. The industry changes, technology changes, and people’s personal contexts on why they got involved might change.
Leadership of an open source community can lead the way, through generating interest, but to back it up, there needs to be people unrelated to leadership to make the community active.
The talk “How to start a movement” demonstrates this with a very visual example - the leader starts dancing, alone, taking a risk. A second person, “the first follower”, joins, giving others confidence to join in the dancing. Without the crowd joining, the dance would not have gotten enough momentum to be noticeable, beyond “oh hey look there’s a guy dancing alone”. The leader sets the direction, the first follower sets an example, and the crowd provide value.
Case study: randomised coffee chats
How do you establish connections in a company with multiple different teams, spread across different locations? My answer to that was to introduce randomised coffee chats, where people would join a Slack channel, and once a week be paired with a random person, ideally someone they haven’t met before.
This is the kind of initiative that doesn’t need leadership backing to test out, if it starts small. It could be started by anyone, and involve anyone. It’s also a great example of an idea starting local, but scaling up to apply to entire company. It demonstrates value: the stronger the network of a company, the stronger the company is. Collaboration becomes easier, and more organic. Employees are happier.
When we hit the scale up stage, it made sense to get leadership on board, to show approval. Employees did the work, demonstrated the value, and leadership gave the stamp of approval, leading to more people joining. It started small, but became big, and fed directly into the bigger initiative to create a company-wide culture.
Summary
In summary:
Initiatives of all sizes, big and small, often fail.
Smaller initiatives are less costly to fail.
Bigger initiatives can be broken down, into smaller pieces, to make it less costly.
Smaller initiatives should follow the “ask for forgiveness, not permission” model.
Bigger initiatives need leadership approval to provide weight, direction, and resources. It’s not about the “okay”, it’s about the “let’s do this!”.
Involving non-leadership can save in costs, and provide elevation and experience to less senior employees.
Don’t attach your personal worth to initiatives.
And for enablers:
Know your company, and employees.
Establish connections, and identify the needs different people have.
Support champions of ideas, or champion them yourself.
Don’t be afraid to drop, filter, or try out ideas.