Interchange: Close the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Running an organization is all about balancing the needs of now with being able to address the needs of the future. Even the best-run companies find themselves mortgaging the future in order to imperfectly meet the needs of the present, and it's almost always due to a perceived lack of time, expertise, or resources.

We see it all the time. "I know there's a better way to do it, but we don't have room in our sprint," or "We really should start doing automated testing, but I'm not sure where to even begin." Or, even worse, "I know we should be doing this, but there's no way I can get buy-in from our leadership team."

Every company (and every person) has that list of things they should be doing but aren't. Every company and person also have that list of things they want to be doing but aren't, things that will make the future better.

It feels good to say "no" to opportunities that aren't right for us. It feels terrible to say "no" to things we want to do or should do, but (for whatever reason) can't.

Your employees feel it, too. They understand that not every idea is worth acting on right now (or even ever). They understand that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that some things are the way they are because they have to be.

But when your employees see the company consistently turning down valuable opportunities, or consistently refusing to address (or even consider addressing) perpetual pain points, they make note of it. They become disengaged. They get frustrated. They say "What's the use?" and hold back ideas and knowledge. They stop trying to remedy existing problems and instead chalk it up to yet another thing everyone has to live with.

Contrast that with a company that consistently follows through on doing what it should be doing. That company can say "yes" to new ideas, even those that might not pan out. That company's employees have ownership over their work and trust that their concerns and ideas will be taken seriously. When a problem or opportunity comes up, those employees know that they'll have the time and space necessary to investigate, and a management team that will help them evaluate the fitness of their eventual solution against the company's goals and capabilities.

The Costs of the Gap are Real

When a company feels it cannot say "yes" to the things it should be doing or the things that make the future better (or even the things that make the lives of its employees better), it accrues some real costs.

First, a company unwilling to change in response to existing needs now gradually loses its ability to change in the future. We see this in the form of technical debt -- where before it took a few days to release a new feature, it now takes a few weeks or a few months.

Not planning for change makes change, even necessary change, painful. Painful changes keep companies stagnating, or at least delaying until it's too late.

Second, a company unwilling to address current needs or pursue opportunities, where even minor changes come with a high degree of both institutional and technical friction, and where ideas go to die will absolutely lose its best employees, and with them, their accumulated knowledge, talent, and relationships. In general, people seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose -- if your employees cannot find those things working with you, they will go elsewhere. If even a minor decision requires months of committee meetings, if your employees do not feel they're learning, or if no one sees or uses the work they're doing, they will go elsewhere.

Your employees do not necessarily want or need to be working with the latest technology, in the coolest fields, or at the hottest start-ups. They want to do good work with tangible and visible impact. They want to work in an organization that takes them seriously and generally does its best to make good decisions. There are literally thousands of profitable tech companies creating software to solve important problems, even if those problems don't make for particularly interesting dinner conversation.

Of course we cannot be perfect, and of course sometimes the things we think we should be doing turn out to not be the right fit for us, or the market changes, or it's simply not profitable. Sometimes we simply do not have the ability to do all the things we want to or should, and so find ourselves having to choose the one or two most important items. This can be disappointing, but does not usually affect morale for very long. Your employees and customers do not expect you to be perfect. They merely expect you to do your best with what you have.

More succinctly, your employees and customers expect you to be decisive and proactive, and to make the best decisions you can with the infomration you have. Even more succinctly, they expect you to translate knowing what you should do into actually doing it.

But how do we translate knowing into doing?

We know what we should do. Now let's translate that into action. Unabridged Software's Interchange Professional Learning Communities program provides a guided structure for testing ideas and taking action. Here's what it looks like:

Identify an Essential Question - Even if we have a specific goal in mind, we rephrase as a question. "What does a good automated testing set-up look like if our goal is preventing dangerous regressions?" or "How can our developers better collaborate with designers and make better decisions around design?" Phrasing as a question helps to identify the actual need, rather than jumping straight to a conclusion.
Form an Ad Hoc Team - Three to five of your employees group together to investigate the essential question.
Consider the Shape of the Answer - Given the context of your company, the team enumerates the qualities of a good answer to the essential question. This varies by question, but in general a good answer is one decision-makers can meaningfully evaluate by looking at something concrete.
Plan an Approach - Teams typically meet for an hour or two per week and for no more than six weeks. They identify resources and do their best to build out the smallest possible artifact where they can look at it and say "Yes, this is enough for us to make a decision." A team focusing on preventing regressions through automated testing might evaluate a few test frameworks and select a candidate to write a handful of representative tests in, as well as selecting tooling. A team looking to make better design decisions might build a descriptive library of interface components or a styleguide they can use for existing products, or may work with designers to build a glossary of shared vocabulary.
Present Findings - Doing this research is nice but also useless unless findings are shared with relevant stakeholders. The group prepares a presentation of findings and a demonstration of whatever artifacts they have produced. This keeps knowledge flowing through the company, builds accountability, and ensures follow-through

This work happens concurrently with normal work, so very little of the organization's day-to-day operations are disrupted, if any at all.

At Unabridged Software, we keep a running list of questions we have and topics we want to investigate, and form these teams quarterly to investigate. We also, when something more urgent comes along, act with more urgency. Our development director guides teams through this process.

The net result is that our developers are constantly learning and sharing information, that we have a better sense of the types of stretch projects we can take on when a client has needs outside the normal scope of services, and we have a more concrete sense of the tech landscape. As a bonus, our developers who work on different teams still have opportunities to collaborate and build working relationships, and some of our findings turn into offerings we can sell.

The biggest change we see is in attitude. Where before we may have hesitated to go too far outside our core scope of offerings, we now have a repeatable, vetted process that lets us experiment without fear of failure. Not all groups see their investigations pan out. We still learn a lot more than if we had done nothing.

As we work through the Interchange process with new groups, we see employees activating their curiosity and asking questions. We see employees building connections between what they learn and what they do day-to-day and applying that knowledge, sometimes in unexpected ways. We see employees becoming more confident and competent problem solvers, and more technically literate. We see employees collaborating outside of their usual channels and anticipating needs and challenges before they become problems. We see employees building relationships centered around learning and excellence.

We see these results consistently. You can too. And we have more than a decade of experience supporting teaching and learning to let us help you. We offer expert facilitation by career educators, a custom-built learning platform that allows for asynchronous and 100% remote collaboration, and a process backed by the cutting edge of cognitive psychology.

Q & A

But what about the cost?

Remember the goal here - we want your organization to be able to respond quickly and effectively to its needs and to changes in the world. We want your employees to be engaged in doing satisfying, impactful work. What is the cost of not being able to respond to change? What is the cost of losing an employee who's tired of having yet another thing they just have to live with instead of being able to make impactful changes for the good of the company?

How do we find the time?

We expect a given Interchange cohort to spend between 8 and 18 hours, spread over 4 to 6 weeks, before having something they can present so stakeholders can make a decision. Even if groups run quarterly, this is still a small amount of time, especially when weighed against how much time inefficient organizations spend making small decisions.

Can we really see results in the amount of time you list?

Absolutely. Even though individual sessions are fairly short, the cumulative effect of those sessions adds up quickly. And because sessions are spread out instead of all in a day, we can make better use of cognitive loading and cover more ground than we would in a one-day workshop. Employees retain information better, learn more, and are less rushed, and they do better work.

Can’t my people just share interesting things on Slack?

It just doesn’t stick. The point of Interchange is that you have an opportunity to practice and not just read. Further, there’s no systematic way to ensure your team is really learning anything from all those shared tidbits. Teams still should share interesting articles and resources across appropriate company channels, but reading (or watching) without practicing does not lead to meaningful improvements.

Shouldn’t my employees just do this on their own time?

Sure, and your best ones do. But there’s no guarantee your company benefits from any of that work, and there’s no cross-pollination or team-building. Your best employees are constantly seeking out new challenges and new information, and when they can’t find it anymore at your company, they leave. The Interchange process keeps your best employees engaged, and gives everyone else a chance to learn from and build patterns like your best employees. This keeps the growth within the company, spreads the benefits, and ensures that, even if people leave, the knowledge is retained.

Why Interchange instead of something like 20% time or hackathons?

Those are great practices, and not mutually exclusive. But 20% time and hackathons are often just fun diversions for employees rather than systematically supported processes that benefit the company. It is our observation that practices like 20% time or company hackathons occasionally produce meaningful results, but those results largely depend on the quality of relationships between employees, the ability of team members to properly scope their work, and the ability of management to identify and articulate the value of those projects and follow through appropriately. Interchange builds those skills and create an environment where practices like hackathons and 20% time are much more likely to be successful and rewarding.

Why not just get my employees the books and courses they want?

You should definitely do that! But without accountability and structure, it is on the employees to follow through, usually on their own time (which means that many simply won’t -- not even out of lack of desire, but lack of time). Similarly, without the group environment, that knowledge is locked to just the employee who requests the book or course.

That said, a particularly effective strategy for a Interchange group is to work through a book or course together.

Why not just send employees to a conference of their choosing?

Great idea! But conferences are expensive, and there are so many sessions that you see diminishing returns (in terms of learning) as the conference progresses. Moreover, simply attending a conference does not produce the type of systemically supported perpetual growth and learning the Interchange process produces.

(One bonus to the Interchange process, though, is that the findings of individual groups can often become interesting conference talk topics!)

So why Interchange?

The world is moving faster than ever. You need a process that lets you keep up without taking over everything

What's Next

Click the "I want to learn more!" link below to download our Interchange Professional Learning Communities Playbook -- this is the definitive resource, and free to read. We'll follow up with you at the email address you provide. Alternatively, you can contact us or schedule a free consultation.