When You Need to Change the Unchangeable

A lot of enterprise architecture comes down to hard choices. What do you accept? What do you change? Great enterprise architecture is the delicate art of balancing competing challenges and priorities, understanding the needs of your company as well as the team’s capacity for disruption and transformation. To be effective, we have to be visionaries and planners but also diplomats and, on occasion, therapists.

I lived for many years in Boston, a city with a history and a road system that dates back to the establishment of Beacon Hill in 1630. Boston’s roads have had to evolve to suit the growth of the city and the changes in society and technology that have happened over 300+ years.  Transportation dominated by walking and horses led eventually to trains, automobiles, subways, planes.  A city built around farmland and settlements became a seaport and trading center, and then a manufacturing hotbed, and eventually a hub for financial services, healthcare, biotech and higher education.  In fits and starts, Boston’s transportation infrastructure has had to transform itself to effectively support the city.

These changes almost never came easily, despite (in some cases) the obvious benefits.  Some historical roads in Boston are famously ill-suited to the city today, and this leads to irritating or downright dangerous intersections, confusing navigation, and even compromises in terms of the design of city housing and office space.  Visitors to Boston will get flummoxed by this, and curse the “designers” of these roadways, when in fact the roads were likely seen as acceptable, even exceptional, in prior eras.

These “badly designed” roads are still in place because of momentum and risk.  Changing roads is costly and disruptive, impacting not just the drivers on the affected roads, but general transportation and other infrastructure, adjacent property and businesses, emergency services, etc.  Facing all that, rebuilding roads can seem like an insurmountable change.  It’s unchangeable – “It sort of works”, the arguments will go, “let’s live with it.”

Lifting Thor’s hammer

Of course, “unchangeable” things are almost never that.  It is almost always physically possible to make the required change.  I’ve never in my career seen a proposal for a transformational project that required time travel or a perpetual motion machine.  And there is often a pretty compelling value proposition to be made for the transformation.  The reason initiatives like this are not pursued usually comes down to political dynamics, lack of buy-in to the value of the transformation, and/or lack of leadership to drive the initiative.

As an IT leader, you will eventually face these “unchangeable” situations in your career.  That’s because IT leaders manage an existing technology ecosystem that they have to grow and evolve, and there are points in time in an organization where the level of growth and evolution is truly transformational. Maybe your enterprise system landscape has become too fragmented and the business is laden with process issues, integration costs, integration reliability issues, data quality and data visibility issues. Or maybe your business has simply outgrown your key systems and you need to up-level the architecture in core areas. Or maybe the business is heading in a fundamentally new direction (new markets, new offerings, new business models), and the system landscape isn’t well-suited for the new territory you are heading into.

Regardless of the context, these “unchangeable” situations will become obvious very quickly.  You may be driving an effort to migrate from costly legacy systems to a modern SaaS cloud platform, and you encounter that executive stakeholder who owns the supported business, AND has a strong commitment to the legacy vendor.  Or you may be facing growing technical debt with your integration platform with fragile point-to-point connections, and face the daunting task of rallying dozens of business teams around a rationalization program that will force them to invest time and effort on change management for something that, from their perspective, either works “well enough”, or is someone else’s problem to solve, not theirs.

Making friends and influencing people

Obviously, having a strong value proposition to defend these initiatives is table stakes.  If you can’t answer the question of “what do we get out of this, exactly?”, you’re finished before you start.  But even with a rock-solid business value justification, the headwinds described above will need to be managed.  And the tools to manage them fall less in the area of financial spreadsheets and technology expertise, and more in the areas of human nature.

Specifically, you need to have “mad skills” in diplomacy, therapy and evangelism for the future.

Things are often “unchangeable” because the change impacts lots of different parties involved.  This can lead you into a “United Nations” dynamic requiring a diplomatic mindset. Everyone has conflicting agendas, everyone wants to be assured that they are “being taken care of”, and everyone wants to be assured that they are winning and not losing. Your diplomatic duty is to try to maximize the actual benefits for these conflicting agendas, and to maximize the perception of the various constituents of those benefits.

This diplomacy dynamics tends to lead naturally into opportunities for a technology leader to be an effective therapist.  Transformational efforts involve addressing serious issues, and they can introduce a high level of stress because of the change that they threaten offer. You need to listen, empathize, assure and guide the stakeholders through whatever areas of concern they have, technical or otherwise. They need to be comfortable at a minimum, but ideally they are converted into stakeholders and advocates.

Diplomacy and therapy are honestly part of any leadership role in these situations, but a technology leader also needs to be a strong futurist.  Painting the picture of the world that lies on the other side of the transformation is a critical motivational element, and the technology leader is in a unique position to do just that.  This is a specific facet of the “why do I care?” factor – in your futurist role, you can lay out the technology trends that might be motivating the initiative, the related business factors that are compelling, and how changing the unchangeable will allow these things to come together to make something amazing.

Returning to the Boston transportation analogy, arguably the largest example of a “change the unchangeable” moment for that city was the Big Dig.  If you are not familiar, the executive summary of the “unchangeable” context was this: by the 1980’s, Boston was struggling in terms of their road traffic, with the main inbound thoroughfare, route 93, clogged with slowdowns roughly 10 hours out of 24 every day.  Within Boston itself, route 93 (aka the Central Artery) also divided the city right in half, causing internal friction in terms of intra-city travel.

The pitch that was made can be (somewhat unfairly) summarized as: let’s bury it!  The Big Dig was a proposal to tear down the 6-lane Central Artery and replace it with a 8-10 lane underground tunnel, and reuse part of the space for a massive “greenway” that would connect the two halves of the city.

Changing the unchangeable indeed.

As you can imagine, all of the factors above were critical for the orchestrators of this little project.  Diplomacy?  Imagine telling business owners along the Central Artery, with decades of history in the city, that they would be impacted for years (7 years by initial estimates, more on that in a minute), and that some of them would even have to relocate.  Imagine telling commuters that they would be spending billions of tax dollars (estimated at about $2.5 billion at the start, but more on that in a minute), that they wouldn’t see results for years and that commuting would probably be actually worse while the project was going on.  Add to that historical considerations from many directions, with Boston being one of the oldest cities in the country, impacts to underground transit systems and an international airport, all owned by disparate parts of the transportation authority, environmental concerns, and on and on.

Just the fact that the project started at all shows The Big Dig was a master class in diplomacy combined with highly effective application of therapy.  And imagining the future was the opener for every conversation.

The Big Dig provides a good lesson in the good, the bad and the ugly of transformational initiatives.  The overall results were … mixed, by most accounts. I lived in Boston for almost the entire duration of the Big Dig and commuted on route 93 for that entire time, and looking back on it, I will sometimes say that the results were worth it.  But the costs were astronomical, in more ways than one.  By the end of the project, $2.5 billion dollars had become around $14 billion dollars, a 7-year project became 16 years, numerous construction problems and outright fraud surfaced along the way, in one case resulting in the death of a commuter when incorrectly installed concrete slabs fell and crushed her car as she drove through the new tunnels.

Did the future that the Big Dig team promised come to pass?  Yes, actually – the traffic did improve, the greenway is a drastic improvement to the atmosphere and dynamic of the city, and other adjacent improvements made to the roadways have been hugely valuable to the city.  But the journey impacts the experience at the destination, and the Big Dig journey left a pall over the city in terms of trust and enthusiasm for transformational efforts.

From inertia to velocity to momentum

So this analogy leads me to my final bit of advice around changing the unchangeable – never lose sight of the long view.  The project gets approved, you execute it successfully, … then what?  And of course, no transformational initiative happens without issues – how do you need to manage those issues to sustain the momentum during and after the transformation?

The journey you take the company down for your transformation will start ripples, both good and bad.  Yes, you will have moved that immovable thing, but you will have moved a lot of other smaller things along with it. That experience will establish cultural tone and overall momentum that will last for years to come.  If you lose sight of that as you execute the transformation and focus on project strategy and tactical concerns, you run the risk of losing control of that long-term trajectory.  Participating in the high-risk, high-reward game of changing the unchangeable involves signing up to be a futurist, a diplomat, and a therapist as an ongoing concern, not just as a tactic to get started.