But we have always done it this way! This is the way to kill change and innovation, Yet, by listening well, this does not need to be the case!
For a long time, my knee-jerk reaction was, “If you don’t want to change anything, don’t hire me.” That’s still a truism. But usually, that is not the core of the problem.
I have often achieved a lot in my career by listening carefully to the people who were experts in the old solution. That started back in my time at Bell Labs. This was the prestigious research arm of Lucent Technologies, at the time the largest telecom supplier with 140,000 employees worldwide. Telephone exchanges were the size of entire rooms and had been installed at the telco’s to last for 35 years.
It was the late 1990s, and I was working on how to bring telephony to the internet. This was a radical change from everything the telecom industry stood for.
By listening carefully to the old hands, I learned which aspects of the old solution were inherent in telephony and which were due to the old technology choices.
This helped me enormously in making the right design choices because I knew which aspects seemed unimportant but were nevertheless essential in this new way of offering telephone services.
That’s why I always consult with the “old guard” in new projects. First of all, it doesn’t hurt to have a friendly working relationship there, but also to learn what remain important at the company, even if new technology or a new process has been implemented. Or what mistakes were made in the past so we don’t repeat them.
That is what you get when you bring me in to change something!
