Phil Gilbert’s “Irresistible Change”

Phil Gilbert has published a new book — Irresistible Change — and this week I want to focus on key messages we can pull from it.

Let me start by saying, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Phil Gilbert in four phases of my career:

1. Briefly, we both worked at Trilogy Software.
2. Then when I went to work at Lombardi Software in 2003, Phil was the CTO and later President. I ran the technical services team within professional services, and Phil ran engineering and product and influenced everything.
3. As I started BP3 with Lance Gibbs in 2007, we were a partner of Lombardi Software, where Phil was President and CTO. This sparked a new era of collaboration as partners.
4. After Lombardi was acquired by IBM, we partnered with our old teammates inside the Big Blue Machine, and Phil headed up the BPM business, and eventually the Design Studio.

My impressions will obviously be informed by that experience. Most of how I know to work with Phil I learned from observing inputs and outputs, rather than having Phil explain his thought process. For example, while working with customers of Lombardi, I learned through observation, not documentation, that Phil’s number one priority was the business impact of a issue (or feature request), and not necessarily the traditional technical metric of “something bad happens.” So when we had a blocking issue, at BP3, we knew to explain to Lombardi’s support team what it was blocking: this production deployment for our customer which will allow them to do X, which has an impact of $Y per week. We got laser-focused help right away when we used this framing.

As a result, this book is fascinating in that it reveals how Phil thought, or at least, how he explains it in retrospect, and it tells a story.

Introduction

In the introduction, Phil makes the case for a few key insights. First, that change is a high-value product that deserves to be valued, resourced, and becomes the key element in the business of change management. If change is a product, then packaging and marketing are important, how to sell it is important, and showing results is important.

When I think on the changes we made to our organization at BP3, we did not give it this treatment — nor did our clients who promulgated change initiatives in their own organizations. To the extent that we did this (or that our clients did), I suspect it was more a happy accident than a well-thought-out framework for making change stick.

One of Phil’s quips in the intro is that you have to treat the status quo with disdain. I come from a different school of thought — respecting the work that has come before, and trying to understand *why* we are where we are. In my worldview, I look to build on the best of what’s there, pay respect to the history and status quo, and build a case for change. But sometimes, disdain for the status quo is the right recipe. You can have too much respect, or too much nuance.

When you’re trying to move an organization the size of IBM in a small number of years, I have to imagine that too much nuance or subtlety gets in the way. I respected that, too. It is one of the reasons I felt that Phil would stay and lead a big change at IBM.

Reflections on Lombardi and Early IBM Years

In the next section Phil retells the stages leading up to “Irresistible Change” — the years at Lombardi and the early years at IBM post acquisition. Lombardi was a leader in Business Process Management (BPM) Software. I worked tirelessly there for four years with our services team to help clients deploy that software into production, to help our clients realize their business processes in running software that was a pleasure to use.

When I left Lombardi to start BP3, an important element was for us to leave on good terms and to work with Lombardi as a valuable partner in the market. As such, I gave 6 months notice, and stayed on even longer under a contract to help with transition activities. Within two years, BP3 was a <10 person consultancy, 100% focused on Lombardi’s ecosystem and making it as successful as we could — because we believed in the approach to business software that Lombardi represented, and we believed in the power of representing a business’ algorithms as processes.

During this era, I started writing a blog at BP3 that published 4–5 times per week. That blog started to get traction around BPM (business process management) circles. In this heyday of blogging, analysts from Gartner and Forrester, and independent analysts, and even competitors and partners, would comment on each others’ blogs and engage in sweeping discussions about the direction of the industry and the meaning of each move that the major players made.

Phil was a vocal advocate for Lombardi’s approach. But when IBM bought Lombardi, he had to dial down his public facing commentary. In some sense, I became the outside voice that was very much aligned with the “Lombardi way of thinking” — which was really Phil’s way of thinking about the space.

In order to get the word out about what he and the team were doing within IBM, I sometimes received “on background” briefings from product management or the design team. Or received Inner Circle access at IBM events to see what the biggest clients were saying and what they were interested in from IBM.

When we wrote an innovative iPhone/iPad app for IBM BPM (successor to Lombardi Teamworks) — the first person I showed it to at the IBM conference was Phil Gilbert. He was ecstatic, and paid about the highest compliment we could have asked for when he said “we have to show this on the main stage on Monday, Scott!”

But, as exemplified by Phil’s recounting of early years at IBM, there was a lot of “no” from IBM brass for outside-in ideas and for the kinds of innovative things that Phil and team were up to. He recounts the story of an iPad app for Blueworks Live getting cancelled, which is a great example. I think our iPad app probably was another great example of how enterprise applications were going to find homes in the Apple ecosystem, and as such didn’t fit the narrative yet.

Many of my colleagues were sure Phil Gilbert would leave IBM in a year after the acquisition, but I had a feeling that IBM could offer Phil something that few companies could: a massive megaphone and stage to prove out his ideas. I didn’t *know* that would happen, but I knew that it was possible, and that such a chance would be hard to turn down for a guy with truly big ideas.

The first step to get such an opportunity is to do the job you’re doing really well. Phil was assigned the overall Automation portfolio and as he retells it, simplified 44 products to 4, took headcount from 1100 to 700, drove higher revenue, and sped up product cycles. It was a massive win for the IBM ecosystem around business process, decision automation, and automation. As a partner at BP3, we had a front row seat to the upheaval and the benefits — and it directly helped our clients navigate IBM and created many opportunities for mutual success, as the product consistently improved and simplified licensing terms. As a partner, our business doubled during this period.

Phil relates taking his case for change to Robert LeBlanc, and how Robert and Ginny tasked him with coming up with a way to introduce the methods that worked so well for IBM’s automation business unit, and spread them company-wide. From the outside, I was aware that Phil’s next step was to run the Design Studio (as I thought of it) — but I did not know how the process came to pass, and how instrumentally and directly Ginny and Robert LeBlanc were involved.

The change that is Irresistible

What’s interesting is that Phil isn’t telling you that Change is a mandate or a forced experience. It isn’t irresistible in that you can’t refuse it. The goal is to make Change an irresistible offering — that your “customers” will find it too hard to resist!

You create the irresistible option and people will choose it — or not. There’s an element of Zen here — that you have to just assume if they choose not to go with the program, that they have good reasons, or that you are fortunate to not have to work with their program. (I take this same approach to recruiting: you create a desirable place to work, and a desirable job — but if someone chooses not to take the job, don’t try to force it. It all works out for the right reasons)

Phil’s approach was to ask for one year of budget to prove out the approach. I find that incredibly aggressive on IBM timescales. His goal was to use Design Thinking approaches that were successful at Lombardi and in his unit at IBM, and to make it a fundamental way of working within IBM at large.

The elements of the irresistible change?

1. A startup-style pitch deck for the program — and later for the customers ( IBM business units ), that succinctly expresses the need and the solution. 4 slides.
2. A funding pitch for one year. Create good pressure on the team to perform and show results quickly.
3. Make it so valuable that your customers (business units) will help fund it going forward. You can imagine how you can extend the reach of that budget to more programs if a likely entrant can come up with some of the funding — “I’d love to help you but I only have half the budget you need to support your team, can you come up with the other half?” — and also a great way to qualify who is truly motivated to succeed with this plan.
4. The team — not the individual — is the unit of change. An individual can’t make all the people around them work in the new way. You need to push a whole team to adopt new methods and approaches — so that the individuals are supported in that new way of working.
5. Brand the program — Phil needed a brand that separated what they were doing from “Design” in general, so that people couldn’t “draft” on what they were doing or unintentionally undermine their brand or efforts. This is really smart, and something that we could really have applied at BP3 with all of our clients looking to implement massive business process or automation programs.
6. You have to have the discipline to say no, when some program comes along that isn’t following the whole approach. Or when there are too many programs and you can’t spread so thin to support them.

What if your program was to bring AI to every aspect of your business?

Taking a step back. Imagine you’re building the case for adopting AI to change every facet of your company. You put a team together to innovate with AI in a room or in a floor in your campus. But for some reason the innovation never seems to spread to the rest of your company… The problem is that solving for one use of AI, is not generalized to how every part of your business might leverage AI. You’re also not distributing the skills and new ways of working very widely. This doesn’t change the way an organization works.

You need a new process. If you want to change your business, change your process.

Read this book. Brand your AI program efforts, bring in teams to work closely with your program team. Your program team should work with each AI-enabled team closely, ensuring that they are both following the new ways to work with AI, and that the learnings are coming back to the program team. Someone just “doing AI” isn’t part of your program. They have to get enabled on new ways to think and act. Figure out what works, and what makes successful teams work well. This is good stuff, and companies that do it successfully will dramatically outperform their peers.

The Leaders you Need

Phil goes on to describe the kinds of leaders you have to have in your program, and the kind of people you need in your teams that you coach in the new way of working. This will vary depending upon the kind of instrument you’ve chosen to effect change in your organization, but the principles will be the same.

• Domain expert
• Practices leader
• Program leader
• Talent acquisition
• Systems & procurement
• Communications

In Phil’s book, he goes on to describe how each of these functions plays out, and also dives into the types of people that make the client program successful. There’s also critical information about how to select projects and teams, how to scale, and how to report value to executives and reinforce the whole virtuous cycle.

Design influences IBM — and beyond

I like that Phil emphasizes key levers for change like branding, the environment in which the work is done, and communications. Some of these points are subtle or uncommon.

In many ways, IBM’s journey into “Design” influenced our own at BP3, leading to the formation of a Design practice to produce truly world class experiences for our clients. I recall when Phil went public with his Design mission at IBM, a friend from Silicon Valley lampooned the effort on Twitter, believing that it was not possible for a company like IBM to have great Design, and he pitied any designer who tried.

My response to him at the time was simple: isn’t IBM exactly the kind of company that should embrace Design and Design Thinking? I understand you don’t believe that they can succeed, but should we make fun of them for trying? When we would all admit it is a major point of failure for IBM leading into this massive cultural change?

I think we all know the answer. Just like SUV’s can also benefit from being electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines, big “boring” companies can very much benefit from new ways of thinking and Design.

Final thoughts

If you’re reading this and you’re in Austin, you might be interested in the book signing and Q&A event at the State Theater coming up on November 13th :

From Phil himself:

Dear fellow Austinites,

It’s been quite a journey — from some very tough early days at IBM (spoiler: I quit), to being asked to help lead a transformation that would change not just IBM, but the way enterprises think about design. Then came writing the book. And now, its publication.

On November 13, I’d love for you to join me at the State Theater as we take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come — together.

Back in 2012, neither IBM nor Austin was known as a design powerhouse. But with that first class of 60 designers who came to town to take a leap into the unknown, a movement was born. Today, IBM has more than 3,000 designers worldwide — and Austin is home to nearly every design-forward tech company on the planet.

I’ll be joined by Doug Powell as we look back on that story — and forward to what comes next. And honestly… it’s just been too long since we’ve all been in the same room.

Get your ticket now and let’s celebrate a shared legacy of design leadership at IBM, Austin and beyond.

– Phil

PS — your ticket includes a copy of the book and your first drink!

It would be truly great to see some of my BP3, Lombardi, and Trilogy friends there, I plan to attend!

Originally published at https://sfrancisatx.substack.com.

Phil Gilbert’s “Irresistible Change” was originally published in Austin Startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.