Inception!
A better way to introduce massive change into your organization
What was your favorite movie of the 2000’s? Mine was Inception with Leonardo Dicaprio as “dream thief” on a mission of redemption to clear his name. It’s a well-paced and superbly acted movie built on one simple premise. Can you plant the seed of an idea into someone’s mind as if it were their own?
My favorite moment in the film was during the middle of a gun fight, when one of the characters comes up from behind to support his colleague wielding a ridiculously massive gun, saying:
It’s dream after all, why not just conjure up a much larger weapon?
Dreams unfortunately do not work in Enterprise IT. There is no magic conjuring up of solutions that will get us out of trouble or solve many of the intractable issues we face when systems fail or code does not work as expected. It’s a world that often reflects Office Space more than Inception.
Despite this stark reality, executives implore their staff to dream bigger. They paint visions in beautiful Powerpoints of digital transformation and business agility and insane customer focus showing a glorious future. Then as Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
The reality is that any large scale organizational change usually dies a slow death. It is not…
