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Low-hanging fruit live somewhere between proofs of concept and important results in the business change hierarchy.

Your average proof of concept, far from proving the concept, does nothing more than prove a concept — a more simplistic one, applied to a problem much smaller in scale and complexity. Proofs of concept are usually little more than rigged tests.

Low-hanging fruit, unlike proofs of concept and like important results, provide real business benefit. They’re usually peared up with large-scale change efforts, and even if the big change never happens, you get to keep the business benefits they provide, kumquat may*.

They are, in a word, peachy.

Currant thinking is that the primary value of low-hanging fruit … quick wins … is to create momentum or get the company out of a jam. Achieving a small but real change helps everyone see that this time the change methodology works and change is going to happen, unlike all of those other, previous change efforts that died on the vine.

But success at small change says nothing about how well the same techniques will fare when applied to a big change, any more than aspirin’s success at alleviating a headache proves it can cure malaria.

When the subject is large-scale strategic change, employees are justifiably skeptical, usually considering the next big thing to be nothing more than this year’s passing fad. They’re probably watched more than one high-profile strategic change fail, with none brought to (ahem) fruition.

If you are preparing to lead a large scale business change, here’s something to consider before you spend too much time raisin everyone’s expectations: Maybe low-hanging fruit are the only fruit worth picking.

Software enhancements are IT’s low-hanging fruit. If there’s one certainty in IT, it’s that enhancements succeed. Large projects are where the risk lies.

That’s where Agile, Scrum, Conference Room Pilots and their iterative, incremental, adaptive relatives come into play. Boiled down to their cores, they turn large development efforts into a swarm of small enhancements. They are managed and coordinated for architectural consistency and focus on a common plan, but the coordination and focus are loose enough that the enhancement-like nature of the work is the dominant style.

So I was thinking: Since there’s no such thing as an IT project — it’s always about changing the business, or what’s the point? — maybe we should apply the same thinking to business change that Agile and its relatives bring to software development.

We need a methodology that turns large-scale strategic change into a basketful of low-hanging fruit.

What might such a methodology look like? The question is better than my answer, as you’re about to find out.

One place to start is the 3-1-3-4 formulation I introduced in “Secretive solutions,” Keep the Joint Running, 9/3/2007.

3-1-3-4, you’ll recall, stands for 3-year vision, 1-year strategy, 3-month goals, 4-week plans. The 3-year vision and 1-year strategy provide consistency and focus. The 3-month goals and 4-week plan create the collection of quick wins.

It comes down to finishing one business enhancement effort and then asking, “What can we do next?”

For what we might as well start calling the “Agile Business Change” methodology (ABC — catchy, huh?) the 3-1-3-4 approach needs some enhancement:

The 3-year vision is still a shared vision, and there’s just one.

That isn’t true of the 1-year strategy. For ABC, each member of the executive committee must have one of these, and they have to make sense together.

Now come the 3-month plans. These fan out further, to middle management. Having so many 3-month plans is what will make the enterprise agile.

It’s also where chaos can ensue, because with so many concurrent change plans going on, the need for collaboration can easily lose out to the stiff competition for shared resources.

Like the IT department.

IT, in fact, has a role to play in preventing chaos, because most business change requires new information technology or changes to what’s already in production. If different requests are in logical conflict, IT is in an excellent position to spot the problem and coordinate a resolution.

The other mechanism for preventing chaos must be a corporate culture that encourages managers to ask themselves, about their plans: Who else will be affected by this?

And, after figuring out the answer, collaborating to make sure everything will come together in the end.

As I said, I don’t have a perfect answer to the challenge, just some glimmerings.

If someone reading this column has a better way of going about this and would be kind enough to share, I’d be grapeful.

*Borrowed from this verse, remembered from an old Mad magazine: You’re the apple of my eye/The plum of the day/And I’ll always love you/Kumquat may.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Last week’s column used MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson’s Hillariphobia to introduce the subject of persistent sexism in the workplace(“Managers who have discriminating tastes,” Keep the Joint Running, 5/12/2008).

Last week, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews provided more Hillariphobic drivel to help introduce this week’s column: “It’s almost as if Hillary Clinton is the Al Sharpton of white people.”

Clearly, the Fifth Amendment should override the First. As the t-shirt says, “You have the right to remain silent. Please exercise it.”

We need to continue last week’s discussion, to help out MSNBC if for no other reason.

Among the many e-mails I received were some that changed my view of the subject:

  • An African-American IT professional described his experiences. He did not describe overt racism. What he told me is that over a long career he never stopped being an outsider, and it hurt his career.
  • Another correspondent, Roy Schweiker, pointed out that some women, as well as the boss, like watching professional sports. Not all men do. “Of course,” he said, “if a man fails promotion for not talking sports he can’t file a discrimination suit.” Mr. Schweiker recommends calling the boss a “sportist.”
  • Then there was this: “In my workplace, to ‘be one of the boys’ apparently requires a sincere dedication to video games and movies. This is all my manager and ‘his boys’ talk about, sometimes for hours on end while the rest of us do the work.

Needless to say, the interesting or prestigious projects, and the promotions, go to those employees who are most like the manager, or play ‘World of Warcraft’ with the manager.”

  • And one more: “I’ve been working in corporate America for close to 25 years, in major corporations, including 5 years in Israel. I’m an Orthodox Chassidic Jew and have never been ‘one of the boys’ nor did I want to be.

Did it adversely affect my career? Of course it did. But I chose to be this way and I chose not to join the ‘boys club.’ Did I suffer financially? Of course I did.

Were all these corporations anti-Semitic? I don’t think so. But even if they were, does it really matter? I wish there weren’t anti-Semitism in the world. I also wish we lived in a perfect world. We don’t — we live in the world as it is, and have to deal with it.”

Until this week I considered “diversity training” to be a code phrase for “going through the motions to avoid legal liability.”

That does happen. There’s no excuse for it.

Diversity training has a vital role to play in every company big enough to have a diverse workforce. That role is to help managers especially, and also every employee, recognize how easily employees can divide into insiders and outsiders.

It doesn’t really matter whether the cause is a shared appreciation for sports, video games, soap operas or romance novels. Shared interests help build the trust needed for effective teams to function. When they cross the invisible line where building trust stops and making the workplace exclusionary starts, everyone has work to do.

Leadership has to (of course) take the lead. If a manager loves baseball, and enjoys talking about it with those employees who share her interest, that’s fine … so long as the manager shows just as much interest in talking with other employees about what interests them.

Employees also have a role to play, on their own initiative regardless of how their manager behaves. That role is to recognize outsiders and help them feel included. Not everyone is comfortable barging into a conversation among people who are talking about a subject that’s of intense interest to the group but not to themselves. The group can help by inviting them in.

The group can also help by expressing interest in the outsider: “You don’t talk much about yourself, Howard — what do you do when you aren’t busy writing code?” is a decent, if obvious icebreaker.

This isn’t the tyranny of the minority, and outsiders can help themselves by expressing interest in whatever it is that the insiders find so fascinating. Who knows — even if knitting is your hobby, you might find World of Warcraft has some possibilities, too.

Diversity means we understand that our differences make life more interesting, that we all have common ground if we look for it, and that we turn our understanding into action.

Appreciating differences while finding common ground isn’t political correctness.

It’s simple good manners — no small thing in a team environment.

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