Sticky transformations are those where engineering teams adopt productive practices as a habit and need no external influence to go through with them. But engineering transformation requires a change in organizational mindset and a successful transformation requires continuous change. During a transformation exercise, coaches, teams and leadership focus on driving change and transforming ways of working. This blog looks at what this means for organizations.
Behavioral change is hard. To achieve sticky transformations, we must encourage people to make decisions that are in their broad self-interest. The ‘nudge’ theory recognizes this behavioral trait. Richard Thaler won the Nobel for his work on nudging. This theory emphasizes the idea that positive reinforcement aids people in making the right decisions and in turn makes behavioral change easier.
So how does one help drive behavioral change through great choices? That brings us to another best-selling book - Atomic Habits by James Clear. Clear advocates for one percent daily changes to your habits - small enough that there’s little friction. If you persist though, these changes can make you 37 times better by the end of the year. Yes, that’s the math- 3700 percent improvement if you make one percent change every single day for a year. If that gets your attention, then you’ll also be interested in the way he says we form habits.
To borrow from Clear’s recipe, if we are to make habits stick, here’s what we need to do:
Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying
All this sounds rather straightforward in writing, but how do you put it into practice when designing your transformation initiatives?
Any transformation requires certain things to be done not just mechanically but using the right method to see visible benefits. For instance, when performing an exercise in the gym, improper form and posture can injure you. The same principle applies to any process, including transformations. You need to get rid of some old habits and form few new ones to be effective.
In my experience, developers can see the benefits of transformation early on if they make a few changes to their ways of working.
How cues reinforce behaviors
The cue, whether from an internal thought or external envrionment, trigger creates a craving.
The cue singals a craving, often a feeling or urge, which signals the brain to seek a response.
The response is what motivates you to act to fullfill the craving.
The reward satisfies the craving and further imbeds the association to create a feedback loop. This strengthens the connection between the cue/trigger and the reward.
Based on the above reference, let’s try to understand the process of reinforcing behaviors with the following examples:
Cue |
Craving |
Response | Reward |
| Alarm for five minutes before stand-up meeting | Increase team stand up’s effectiveness | Write your update for concise narration | Stress-free stand-up updates and effective communication for the team. |
| Business analysts (BAs) set up time with senior developers of the team to curate stories for iteration- planning meetings | Work with well written stories | Look into all development aspects of the feature and help BAs curate narration and success criteria | Developers and analysts' pairing brings long-term benefits by better understanding of technical and business aspects and increased effectiveness |
| You are ready to work on a new story | Reduce communication gaps between different disciplines | Do story kick-off with BA, Quality Assurance (QA), and any other role (e.g., DevOps, Security) | Eliminate unknowns by discussing the implementation and success criteria |
| You came across a complex code block, buggy implementation, or anti-pattern | Reduce technical debt by cleaning up code base | Kick-off a social refactoring chat in your team communicator for finding better ways to solve it | Spread awareness of better coding practices and allow everyone to learn without feeling defensive about it |
| You are stuck with a problem for a few minutes | Call upon the expertise of the group | Call a developer huddle (virtual or physical) for a brainstorming session on solutions | Build shared knowledge about different problem situations and solutions |
| You are embarking on story implementation | Frictionless development of story without unknowns | Discuss the story, implementation strategies, testing scenarios, and non-functional requirements with the team | Dive into story implementation with clarity |
| You are about to wrap up the story development | Ensure success/completion criteria of the story is delivered. Smooth handover of functionality | Review development with QA and BA (additionally tech lead or another tech person) to do the handover | Eliminate any surprises during testing, allowing you to ensure you fulfilled all the success/completion criteria during development |
| A build failure notification appears on IM | Maintain green builds for the team | Glance through failure reasons. If nobody picks up, build fixing duty and volunteer if you can fix it | Build pipeline should be green to prevent committing code on failed builds. The pipeline must always be green |
The micro habits mentioned here are easy to develop and will not alter your daily routine. Everyone in the team should promote the dialog of 'why' and perform certain actions repeatedly. It will allow you to eliminate the inefficiencies and promote the adoption of processes that suit your team.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
