Activist organizers are in the business of changing minds and behaviors. Here’s a list of their tips and practices to use in your company’s transformation …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. In the software industry’s recent past, the biggest disruptive wave was Agile methodologies. While Site Reliability Engineering is still early in its adoption, those of us who experienced the disruptive transformation of Agile see the writing on the wall: SRE will impact everyone. Any kind of major transformation like this requires a change in culture, which is a catch-all term for changing people’s principles and behaviors. As your organization grows, this will extend beyond product and engineering. At some point you also need to convince the key power-holders in your organization to invest in this transformation. Folks who’ve been successful at managing these multi-year complex transformations point to a piece of invaluable advice: you must treat the transformation as its own project — with business outcomes, executive buy-in, and a project team. And there is an unexpected place to look for learning, strategy, and tactics to achieve this goal: activist organizing. Activist organizers are in the business of changing minds and behaviors, leading decision-makers and traditional power holders in new directions. Here’s a curated list of their tips and practices that you can use to bolster your company’s transformation efforts. The main principle to the spectrum of allies is that some people are more aligned with your cause than others. People will range from active allies, passive allies, neutral, passive opposition, and active opposition. There’s a few lessons to take away from this concept: Executives and other decision-makers are examples of concentrated power.
