What are your strategies for facilitating change? Wait for an existential crisis, as in the book, might be one option. are there others?

It is very difficult to drive change if the system does not feel the urgency of it.

Epecially the type of change we are talking about. Unless you work with the CEO/COO, you will need a leader that accepts to do things differently below them, yet take the brunt of looking aligned in the rest of the enterprise

Getting some "lighthouses" helps but you can quickly end up having pockets of change that never add up at system level. People then explain why they are exceptions rather than the possible norm.

There is really no way around it, you have to need a leader that is courageous, and you need to connect Business and Tech sides (if you press on with Agile only on the tech side the results will rarely be meaningful) ..

On other points that I made, you can also create a disruption in the system to generate the chaos / crisis to enable novel thinking to emerge. We did this at some place I was at by stopping the delivery of 300 people overnight because they were not going to make the release anyhow. We reoriented the teams to self organise and work on the DevOps impediments instead. This was sufficiently disruptive to get people to think more about end to end agility, press on with the DevOps effort, up the skillsets and quality, and work more from objectives rather than feature backlog.

in retrospect I was very successful last year with piggybacking a planned change (in this case moving to a new office): I really like the "don't fight stupid, make more awesome!" Rule by Jesse Robbins(see more here: https://de.slideshare.net/jesserobbins/cloud-expo-jesserobbinsopscode20130129b/44-Jesses_Rule_Dont_Fight_StupidMake). When I started in my current job two years ago, I set out to do 3 things, because i saw big impact in my previous position: • Continuous Integration and Delivery: We were able to cut the full build/test/integration test on hardware (we produce our own hw) time from 26 hours to 12 hours in the first few months, now building every commit in a docker container • Add Static Code Analysis and Pull Request annotation: We moved to github and now use Infer, cppcheck, and clang-tidy to check pull requests (took approx 1 year) I was able to facilitate and implement this in my role as technical project manager, but the third thing took me way longer than expected: • Create a dashboard which makes work visible and shows key metrics and put it into the hallway for everyone to see. I already had a rasperry pi at hand but quickly learned that getting my private device on the company network is more or less impossible (get it on a whiteliste to get an ip etc.). What was even more startling was that it was not possible to get an additional monitor to show a dashboard. I asked every other month, but, given that we were growing, there was always a scarcity of time (also my own) and resources. In July last year part of our company moved to a new office, down the street of the existing office. The new office was renovated and there was also a wishlist / things to do list created and I asked IT for the stuff I needed for my dashboard (raspberry Pi and a monitor). I think that given that they were in a "change mode" of solving problem, buying Hardware and setting up the network, it got the stuff approved and I got these devices. There were also some logistical problems (I guess that's normal) with setting up the new office space and I had some time to play around with https://smashing.github.io/. I then put a lot of (private) time into implementing a first version of the dashboard and set it up in the hallway, ready for the official opening of the office. The dashboard sparked a lot of interesting discussion during the opening party and we also got some great feedback about our innovative ways of working. Ever since the dashboard has been part of the new office and evolving into an important indicator of the current status. And a source of new change initiatives ;)