For some time I’ve wanted to write a book in the style of The Phoenix Project or The Goal about organisation transformation. I’ve worked as a consultant for more than thirty years, both with ThoughtWorks and others, supporting many different organisations on their transformation journeys. Some were better than others. And I wanted to encapsulate both the challenges that organisations face and the learnings that I’ve had about how to do this kind of endeavour gracefully and successfully in a narrative story.
I’ve read no end of really good management books which talk about the What and the How To with graphs and case studies and matrices and checklists, which give great information. However, I believe that the story narrative, with fictional characters, is a) easier and more accessible to many of us and b) allows us to identify with the actual problems and challenges that we might experience. The “How To” books, even those with good case studies, find it difficult to introduce the challenges and crises that make up much of the work of organisation change.
Then I met Edin through some work we were doing with his employer and hit it off. At some point towards the end of last year Edin was leaving his job and in an idle conversation we both admitted to our pretensions to authorship and found that we had pretty common objectives in the book we wanted to write. Thus was born our plan to co-author our first book together.
We had our first planning meeting in a little cafe in the delightful converted State Treasury building in Perth, an airy calm place for a nice cuppa and a meeting of minds. We agreed to set up a trello wall, have biweekly stand-ups and commit to writing a certain amount each week. This was all a bit complicated by the fact that Edin was just starting to set up his own new consulting business, Action Twelve and I was about to head back to Melbourne for a short break followed by picking up the CDO role at LATAM airlines in Chile. We also immediately broke the first rule of Build-Measure-Learn and introduced scope creep by deciding that we probably had to write two books not one…