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Imagine you said this to somebody: “All you’ve done over the last decade was completely wrong”.
…whoa, hold up.
How dare you say that to an accomplished professional?
That’s a pretty harsh thing to say, isn’t it? And it’s so harsh, it’s actually rude.
You know what: I’ve had people think I said that to them. I’ll be honest: I’m far too bad at confrontation to say such a thing, even if I meant it. Of course I didn’t say it.
And I didn’t mean it.
Yet this is what multiple people have heard me say, when they hear me talk about DevOps, and introducing it to their organisation.
I think it’s very helpful as a reminder just how shocking such changes can be to people.
It’s jarring. It’s disconcerting. It attacks them in their self-image as professionals.
Of course the claim that they’ve done “everything” wrong is also completely false – they’ve done great things, they know a great deal.
Yet they feel so attacked, so devalued by the idea of changin the organisation, and their place within it.
I think it would be both foolish and rude to dismiss such people. They bring up the very valid point that a creator always becomes part of their creation, and after all we all take part in creating the organisation, the culture that surrounds us.
If the creation called into question, it points back to the creator.
But… I only want to help those people. Not invalidate what they did, or overturn it.
Just make it better. And no reasonable person will claim that there is nothing to improve, that they have achieved perfection.
So I’ve learned that it’s often far better to not tell, not to give a set menu. Instead I try to offer opportunities, point out potentials, show how they can benefit.
Unsurprisingly, people respond far better if they feel respected and validated, and will often come up with their own ideas for how to move forward.
But I frequently think back to the people who felt I had told them they had done everything wrong. They hold such a powerful lesson for me, because DevOps is about people. And as far as those particular people were concerned, I had done everything wrong.