What feels like an unchangeable reality today is just your current starting point. The question isn’t whether better ways of working exist—they do. The question is what small step you could take today to start moving in that direction.
Have you ever heard (or said), “That sounds great, but in the real world…”? This common objection can block meaningful change in teams and organizations. In this episode, we explore where this resistance comes from, how to interpret it, and—most importantly—how to work through it. Whether you’re coaching a team, facing skepticism from colleagues, or even doubting change yourself, we’ll share practical ways to think about the “in the real world” objections, and how to respond with small, meaningful steps toward a better way of working.
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Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
Hey, Peter, So, in this episode, I want to talk about “the real world.”
Peter Green
Oh yeah, like on season seven, Seattle, I don’t know if you remember this, but do you remember when Steven slapped Irene on her last day in the house before she left, that was… Oh, no? Not that?
Richard
I didn’t stick around all the way through season seven, though, I have to admit I did watch The Real World in the early days
Peter
Season seven was lit.
Richard
No, that’s not what I want to talk about.
Back when Agile approaches were first spreading beyond the early adopters, like 2006 or 2007, when I was training or coaching a team to get started, somebody would always have an objection that started with, “That sounds great, but in the real world…”
It was such a pattern that I ended up dedicating the final half-day of my Agile for Teams workshop to collecting, prioritizing, and working through the top tier of reasons why this group was going to struggle to apply an Agile approach in their context. And we actually still do a variation on that today because it’s so effective.
But, that “Hey, but in the real world” objection kind of went away in the mid-teens. And then, in the past quarter, I had two different workshops with two different clients where it reared its head again.
So, I thought it would be interesting for the two of us to have a conversation about the “but in the real world” objection—where it comes from, what it means, how to handle it whether you’re a coach hearing it from a client, whether you’re hearing it from one of your colleagues on your team, or whether you notice yourself thinking or saying it.
Peter
That sounds great. Before we get into that, Richard, though, a reminder to our listeners that this show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
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So, Richard, what kind of things were you talking about when you bumped into “but in the real world” in these most recent workshops?
Richard
You might expect it to be some of the wild stuff our most mature clients experiment with like doing away with user story estimates or pushing towards really high levels of empowerment and self-organization, releasing software every day, or using Agile approaches way outside of software. But no. I was actually getting the “real world” objection to some pretty basic Agile stuff:
- Like actual cross-functional teams that can deliver increments of value
- Like completing a valuable user story in less than a week—not necessarily enough value to go to market, by the way– we were just talking about could you completing a thin vertical slice of value at all
- Or there was one where it came up when we were talking about having a conversation with a customer to hear about customer goals and needs firsthand
Those things, apparently, can’t happen in the real world.
Peter
Now, having trained with you for many years, I’m sure that you were telling stories about real teams doing those things in the, I think, real world.
Richard
Yeah, of course. I’m not really interested in teaching theory that hasn’t been tested, and so I always have this internal reaction I have to kind of dampen, of, “No. I’ve just been lying with all of these stories. They’re not real. I made ‘em up. Unbelievable.” I don’t say that, but, I think, “Do you really think that these real stories aren’t real?”
Peter
Right, it just suggests that the “real world” claim isn’t meant literally. It’s a place holder for something else.
Richard
Yeah. I think that’s true. It’s possible, but unlikely, that the person is claiming that all the stories we tell are made up.
Peter
So, how do you think about it in the moment; and as you’ve reflected on it since then, what do you think is going on?
Richard
I think there are a couple different things it can mean.
One is a claim that whatever we’re talking about wouldn’t be worth the effort. It’s unrealistic and impractical. And I think there’s an implicit claim in the snarkiness of that form of objection that serious people wouldn’t waste their time on this stuff. If you’re realistic and down-to-earth, you don’t bother with these touchy-feely human-centric empowered-teams kind of things. You just get the work done. You follow the plan.
Another possibility, which I think is often the case, is that whatever we’re talking about is so far from this person’s current reality that they can’t imagine getting there. Whatever dysfunctional situation they’re in feels like “just the way things are.” And that it’s normal and it’s probably doomed to stay that way.
Peter
Yeah, right.
I notice these are at really different places in the levels of resistance model that we talked about back in episode 130.
The first objection is probably Level 1: disagreement about the nature or extent of the problem. That person seemed to be claiming that things are fine as they are, and changing isn’t going to be worth the effort.
Richard
And you can test that, if you want to, by asking about the person’s satisfaction with the status quo. Is the current team structure or work breakdown approach or whatever working for them? You might find that they do experience some pain in the status quo, but they don’t see how whatever we’re talking about would address it. Or you may discover that they think things are fine. And either way, you can go from there.
Peter
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s right. And then, the second form of the “but in the real world” objection sounds more like a Level 4 or 5. They’d love to change but they don’t really see how it’s possible.
That second interpretation feels more charitable to me. And maybe more useful to work with. Because if someone’s current situation– if it feels normal and unchangeable to them, that’s actually something that we can work with.
Richard
Yeah, and I think there’s something important about that word “normal” you just used, because what often happens is people look around their organization and see the same dysfunction everywhere. Like, all our teams are organized as partially cross-functional. So, that must be the normal way things are, right?
Peter
And if it’s everywhere in their experience, it’s probably everywhere else too, in other companies—In the industry. Especially since bad news travels fast and is more memorable, it’s easy to start to assume that everything’s broken everywhere.
Richard
I think this points to the importance of leadership. There really are a lot of things that can’t be solved at the team level. Leaders need to create an environment where great things are possible. Or people just give up, disengage, and do the minimum within a broken system that feels permanent and unchangeable.
Peter
Yeah, we’ve talked about this on the show a lot. So many people feel disengaged from their work, and the biggest determinant of workplace engagement is your direct manager.
Richard
Of course, the manager is often not in the room when I’m hearing the “but in the real world” objection. And the manager’s manager is even less likely to be there.
Peter
Right, and that’s the level where things like team structure are getting shaped, which is often part of the objection.
Richard
And we do encourage those extra layers of management to come to that final half day in the teams course, where we’re going to be talking about the challenges. Because it’s great for them to engage, and when somebody says, “Oh our managers will never let us change our team structure,” and then I love it when a senior manager jumps in and says “Well, actually that’s why we’re here.”
Peter
(laughs) “Here I am.”
Richard
But, assuming they’re not there, our advice we often give people in the middle of broken systems is, “If you can’t fix it, make it more visible. Help the people who can fix it see what you see.”
For a lot of these topics like cross-functional teams and small slices of value, the thing to make visible is cycle time. Dysfunctional org structures, dysfunctional work breakdowns reveal themselves in long cycle times. And cycle time has a direct impact on the financials of a business. So, making that more visible and showing how a change can reduce cycle time—often dramatically—can be a way to build support for that change.
Peter
Yeah, I told a story about that back in episode 131. Where we talked about the team that was doing pricing and promotions and trying to combine four teams into one, and they just had to make the business case. And once they made the business case around cycle time, Boom. Everything clicked.
Richard
Yeah. That was an order of magnitude improvement. That wasn’t an incremental improvement.
Peter
Right
Richard
When I encounter that “but in the real world” objection and I want to engage with it—whether that’s a client, a colleague, (although you and Angie don’t do it much). But back when I was working more directly on teams and a colleague would do it, or even when it comes up in my own mind (like, “Ah, that’s unrealistic”)—I like to get curious about what’s actually behind it. And those levels of resistance from episode 130 are really helpful.
So, I’ll ask follow up questions to discern whether it’s a Level 1 objection—someone is claiming that things are fine as they are, and we don’t need to change—or a Level 4 or 5 objection—I’d love to change but it’s just not realistically possible.
It’s usually the latter, and we can dig into why it doesn’t seem possible and talk about examples of other people making incremental changes in similar circumstances.
And sometimes, we do have to help people hear those other stories differently. Sometimes people are automatically looking for what’s different in the story from their context: why doesn’t it fit us? “That doesn’t apply here because they were doing a web app.” Or “But they were all in the same time zone.” Or whatever. So, if I see that dynamic happening, before I share more stories, I’ll point out that this is a story from a really different context, and so I’m inviting you not to look for what’s different, but look for ideas and inspiration rather than a perfect fit recipe.
Peter
Yeah, that’s a great approach to it.
I’m curious about something. You mentioned this “but in the real world” objection was common in the early days of Agile, which I experienced as well. Then it sort of went away, and now it’s come back very recently. Any theories about why?
Richard
I’ve been thinking about that. I suspect that in those early days, the objection came from a place of skepticism about new ideas. But now, I think a lot of times, it may be coming from a place of resignation or even despair about the state of work.
Peter
Say more about that.
Richard
Well, in 2007, Agile was still new and different. The “real world” objection was about whether these new practices could work. Many people hadn’t seen them even attempted before. Now, we know they can work. There are real success stories. But people are stuck in systems that feel impossible to change. And in many cases, they’ve heard people using Agile terms without experiencing the reality.
Essentially, I hear people saying, without directly saying it: “We came to Agile for the collaboration, continuous improvement, a smooth flow of value. And we got 2000-word Jira tickets, big planning meetings, and retros that don’t actually change anything.”
The resignation isn’t about whether better ways of working exist—it’s about whether they’re achievable from here.
Peter
Yeah, I think that’s a key distinction. Because if something is new and different and you’re just skeptical about the new thing, then you’re still convincible by evidence. But if you believe something is impossible to achieve from where you are, evidence that it works somewhere else might actually be discouraging. It might do the opposite job.
Richard
You’re like inoculated to the real thing.
“But in the real world” can be a way to also avoid having to reckon with the hard truth that things could be better, but I don’t have the power or energy or whatever to make it happen here.
It was a breakthrough for me years ago when I encountered research showing that ability and motivation are often tangled up in our brains. When something doesn’t feel possible, we’ll convince ourselves it wasn’t worth trying anyway.
We have the biggest impact in our work when we can revive people’s imagination for what’s possible—for how good work can be—and then we can give them the skills and tools to move towards that vision incrementally.
Peter
“Dream big, act small.”
Richard
Yes! And you need both. In a complex setting like a human work system, lasting change happens by nudging the system towards a better state. Not changing it all at once. So, you need to know where you want to go, and then you need to run small experiments to get there. It doesn’t work to just have a big vision if you can’t see how to get there. And it doesn’t work to just make changes if they’re not oriented towards better outcomes.
Peter
That gap between the current reality and a better way of working can feel overwhelming. But then we need to help people understand that no one wins when we settle for less.
Companies aren’t better off with inefficient processes and poorly shaped org structures just because they’re hard to figure out how to do. Teams aren’t better off doing busy work. The most human-friendly approaches to work often turn out to also be the most effective ones.
Richard
Right. I encourage people to let themselves imagine a genuinely better way of working and not dismiss it just because it feels far away. But then step back from that big vision and think about what’s a small step we could take in that direction.
Peter
Richard, do you have a real world example of what that might look like? Or even just a pattern that you’ve seen work there?
Richard
Yeah. Let’s take that first “real world” objection I mentioned– about cross-functional teams. Maybe you can’t reorganize the whole company tomorrow. As we’ve often seen when we help our clients think through org structure, there’s usually way too many things in flight at once. And teams are all over-committed, and it can be really hard to come up with a new structure that is cross functional and keeps everything moving. But could we get three people with different skills to collaborate on one high priority small piece of work? Even for two weeks or a month? You probably could peel off a few people to do that.
Peter
Yeah, that’s kind of what our Team Launch Sequence does. Let’s take two weeks and we’ll run 10 small, back-to-back experiments with cross-functional collaboration and see what happens.
Richard
Exactly. And by day 4, that person who said “this’ll never work here. Not in the real world” is saying things like, “Oh, this is what real collaboration feels like. What if we could do this all the time?”
Peter
Right. And once people see that working, even at a small scale, it starts to change their sense of what’s possible. That shift from skeptical to really excited about it reminds me of when our team first adopted Scrum. We got some training and then we talked about whether we wanted to adopt it. The general sense was that people were pretty excited about it. But like with any team, not everyone had the same level of enthusiasm. I remember one back-end developer, a fantastic developer, someone I really respected and enjoyed working with, named Eric Sanders. And Eric was kind of vocally grumpy about it, for, like, most of the time he was on our team about adopting Scrum. When we adopted it, he had that response we’ve been talking about. “In the real world of backend dev, it takes months to get the architecture and components mapped out, coded, and working well. It’s not like a UI widget that you can knock out in a week, test it, and go live with it.” He didn’t try to sabotage it or anything, but it seemed like at every retrospective, he was the voice of skepticism.
Eric left our team after that first cycle, and I always assumed he left thinking Scrum was only effective in a narrow part of software development, or, like he was glad he was finally off that Scrum team and could go back to longer development cycles.
But then, a few years later, I was asked to train a newly formed team that was going to take all of the media playback capabilities across Adobe’s applications and package them together into a shared component. We scheduled the training; and the night before, I was kind of scanning the invite list, to say “Hey, who do I know on this team if anybody,” and lo and behold, there was Eric’s name. He was a developer on that team, which made sense given his expertise. But when I saw his name, I thought “Oh no. Now I’m going to have to do this training with a skeptic that’s going to challenge all of the success stories I share in my training!” Right? Because I would share what worked and why I think it might work for other teams.
So, the next day, I got through my intro, where I shared what the Audition team had accomplished and why I was excited to help their team get the same benefits, when Eric raised his hand. He was sitting right there at the front table. I thought, “Oh boy, here we go!” And he stood up and gave this three-minute impassioned speech about how useful Scrum had been for the Audition team, how excited he was that the media core team was going to adopt it, and people could rely on him as an experienced Scrum supporter if they had questions. My jaw was just, like, on the floor. I was like “Who are you and what have you done with Eric?” I tried to play it off, like “Yeah, I planted Eric on this team just to be my cheerleader,” but I was pretty shocked that someone who was that vocally skeptical at the beginning, had seen it work and then become an advocate on this new team.
Richard
It sounds like at some point when you weren’t looking, Eric actually experienced how Scrum could fit with his real work.
Peter
Yeah, just as we’re talking about this, I’m remembering this experience I had, because you were talking about what shifted it for Eric. I think I was coming back from lunch, or something, because I remember walking into our team’s space for Audition, walking down the hall, and Eric’s office was off on the left, and as I walked by, I noticed that Charles, who was one of our testers, was in Eric’s office, he had a laptop, and he was like back to back with Eric, and that was unusual, because Eric liked to be solo. Like, he wanted to get into a sense of flow and do his work. So, I thought, “What is Charles doing in there and why is he sitting back to back?” So, I paused and started eavesdropping a little bit. I was kind of a snoopy Scrum Master. I was curious what my team was up to.
I heard Eric say something like “Ok, I’ve checked that into the build, check it out for me.” I thought, “Oh. Cool.” Then Charles said, “Stand by…” and a few minutes passed. And I’m looking around, making sure that nobody sees me, and then Charles said “Oh, you’ve made it so I have to pick the sample rate first, but our users are going to want to pick the source first, then the sample rate.” Eric said “Ah, gotcha. Hang on a second…” A few minutes pass, then Eric says, “Ok I’ve changed the order, go check it out.” At this point I got too worried, or maybe I had a meeting I had to get to, so I headed to my office. But then at the daily Scrum the next day, Charles reported that he and Eric had paired up on a new input source type and then it was tested and we’re ready to go on that. And at that point, I thought, “I think this Scrum stuff is going to work on our team.” That was really a moment when I thought, “Uh huh, it’s actually working.”
Richard
That’s probably not at all what Eric had in mind when he started with Scrum, but as he experienced those faster cycles improving his code, “the real world” started to look different.
I think sometimes, you can’t discuss or reason your way into it. You just have to do small, safe experiments to discover what’s possible.
Peter
Yeah. Well, this feels like a good place to wrap up. Any thoughts for people who might be feeling stuck in their version of the “real world” that’s so frustrating?
Richard
Yeah. I just would say, what feels like an unchangeable reality today is just your current starting point. Don’t mistake what’s familiar with what’s necessary or what’s inevitable. There are organizations right now doing the things you think are impossible. The question isn’t whether better ways of working exist—they do. The question is what small step you could take today to start moving in that direction.
Peter
Yeah, I love that.
And if you’d like help figuring out those steps or building momentum for change in your organization, we’d love to help. Visit humanizingwork.com to learn more about our workshops and our consulting services. And thanks for tuning into the Humanizing Work Show.
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