Flying vs gliding

by
Irene Sandler

September 26, 2024

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”
— Confucius

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Ask any toddler how to fly, and they’ll probably flap their arms up and down. But while flapping works for birds, it’s not particularly suited to humans.

Still, humans have been trying to fly since the earliest civilizations (see: Icarus). It took at least 2000 years to understand—and crucially, apply—the four aerodynamic forces, after many failed/fatal attempts jumping off cliffs and towers.

Once the Wright Brothers figured it out, it took just ten years to launch commercial aviation.

Talk about removing constraints.

We see a pattern that wraps legacy modernization under the much larger banner of “digital transformation”. It’s a compelling story for the Board: we’ll sweep out the old at the same time we usher in the new, glorious state in which our technology helps us go faster, higher, stronger.

This pattern assumes we can decouple business processes from their underlying systems. Mix, match, add, delete business processes, and then it’s “just” a matter of rearranging the underlying systems to support the new workflows. But the “just” is the rub, because:

  1. The system is typically aligned with current business processes, even if imperfectly. Modernizing well first requires understanding how the current system supports or constrains these processes.
  2. Systems evolve over time to meet specific needs. There are band-aids and duct tape, workarounds for edge cases and dead ends for abandoned ones. These lead to “hidden” requirements—those that aren’t documented but are crucial for smooth operations.
  3. Users and stakeholders are more likely to resist changes when the new system fails to account for the realities of the existing one. That’s why organizational change services typically consume at least 15-25% of any IT initiative’s budget.

The pioneers of human flight broke it down: lift, thrust, drag, weight. They understood how each aerodynamic force affected roll, pitch, yaw, to give control of a body in flight.

An analogous approach to modernization would be to break it down: first, incrementally recreate what’s working now onto a stable, well-understood, modern technology foundation. Little to no disruption for users, little to no change to business operations, and complete control of a complex business in flow.

Then, once the underlying system is no longer a constraint, apply the “reimagined” business processes to loosen bottlenecks and eliminate efficiencies, heralding a period of unimaginably rapid innovation.

Anything else is just gliding.