In a recent early-morning workshop on Zoom, we got into a discussion about cold weather. Someone from Austin mentioned it was a chilly 33°F. A few participants from Colorado and Nebraska chuckled—they were dealing with single digits that morning.
“It’s what you’re used to,” someone pointed out. And they were right. What feels bone-chilling in Texas might feel downright balmy to someone from Vermont.
(A friend moved from Brazil to Denver one October—I’m not sure he felt warm again until the next July, no matter how many layers he put on.)
This got me thinking about how we talk about change in our organizations. We often hear things like:
“We could never split our stories that small.”
“TDD wouldn’t work with our codebase.”
“Cross-functional teams aren’t possible in an environment like ours.”
“Two-week sprints? Maybe for simple web apps, but not for our complex system.”
Just like with weather, what feels impossible to one team might be routine for another. Neither perspective is totally wrong. That 33°F really does feel cold in Austin!
The trap is thinking in binary terms: possible vs. impossible, works vs. doesn’t work, can vs. can’t. Reality has a lot more dials than switches.
We once worked with a team working on a very old mainframe software system who was convinced they couldn’t slice their work into small pieces. “Our changes are just too complex,” they said, “and this tech really just doesn’t work with Agile techniques.” But when we explored what benefits they’d see if they could magically make their work smaller, their eyes lit up. Less risk. Earlier feedback. Fewer surprises.
We didn’t try to jump straight to 2-day stories. Instead, we looked at their current cycle time—how long it typically took to go from idea to delivering value. It was about 8 weeks. “What if we could make that just a bit faster? What would that allow?”
That question shifted the conversation from “we can’t do that” to “how might we move in that direction?” They started experimenting with ways to break down their work differently. Within a few months, they’d cut their typical delivery time in half. Was four weeks still longer than the two-week sprints they’d heard about in conference talks? Sure. But it was a massive improvement in their ability to deliver value and reduce risk.
The next time you catch yourself thinking “that would never work here,” try these questions instead:
- If you could magically make it work, what benefits would you see?
- What challenges would you need to handle in that magical future?
- How could you nudge your current system just a bit in that direction?
- What’s the smallest experiment you could run to learn something about this?
You might not get to where that other team is. Their 11°F might never feel comfortable to you. But you might discover you can handle more than you thought—and get real benefits along the way.
Want to explore this more? Email and tell us: what’s something you’ve heard is impossible in your context? Let’s think through how to move those dials. We’ll read and respond to every email!
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