The team you have been a part of for the last 6 months has been amazing. No, they haven't pulled a month of 60+ hour work weeks to get a new release out the door.

It has just been a stream of steady progress towards a shared goal, true collaboration instead of procedural coordination, willingness to change ways of working in small steps, and a sense of getting really good at what they are doing.

The team is getting noticed, not for heroics, but for simply getting sh#t done.

And with that recognition comes the request to somehow capture the process that your team is using, and then replicate or scale that to other teams. What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything - starting with the assumption that the high-functioning team is somehow adhering to a checklist of process steps to efficiently deliver value, and by extension good outcomes for the business. Similarly, high-functioning teams in an organization that doesn't support collaboaration are doomed to an existence of frustration.

It's almost impossible to "process" your way out of trouble when doing complex work, but you can definitely make your culture more friendly to complex work.

Let's dive a little deeper, and hopefully come away with an appreciation of how a high-functioning team gets that way, and why scaling that team's ways of working rarely has the intended impact across the organization.

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From time to time, a developer asks me "How can I convince my team/manager/organization to ..." - and after a brief discussion with followup questions, I often answer "you can't convince them".

Let's let that sink in.

There are many reasons why convincing someone that your awesome idea is worth pusuing is harder that you might think. It often has less to do with your idea, or your presentation, and more to do with how the folks around you are motivated and measured.

Let's let that sink in too.

There are a few basic truths about why it's hard to implement change that have almost nothing to do with the quality or substance of the idea - so let's dive in.

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Even if you haven't seen "2001: A Space Odyssey", you have probably heard someone say "Open the pod bay door, HAL".

"I can't do that, Dave" is a familiar feeling for embedded systems developers when your hardware isn't doing what you think it should.

By now you might have guessed that this article is about how having a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) for your embedded system makes your life easy, changing to a new CPU is fast and painless, and the kids all get ballons and ice cream when your port takes only hours because of your awesome platform approach.

The reality is always different - what started as a simple port is now a bit more complicated because a new RTOS is mandated, and there are new security requirements, and the interface to expander boards is different, and so on.

All of a sudden, the HAL is the least of your problems because on top of the architectural changes, you don't have any kind of unit test framework or continuous integration system to help you move forward with confidence.

Take heart - this is the perfect time to get all of that stuff in place with a small and focused team. And you can take advantage of the fact that you don't have any hardware yet to get these critical building blocks in place.

Let's find out how to approach this starting with the HAL ...

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Misson statements. Hands up for anyone who loves their company mission statement.

Hands up for anyone who knows their company mission statement.

In many organizations, the mission statement is laid out by top level leadership, sometimes with input from departments or individuals. It tends to be a general and somewhat fluffy set of words that could apply to just about any organization. And that makes most mission statements forgettable.

That doesn't mean your maintenance team should not have a mission statement! Your job together with your team is to come up with a statement that reflects how you want to be seen and heard within the organization moving forward.

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Your department has undergone another re-organization because ... actually it doesn't matter. The goal was to step-change the innovation culture so that your company can quickly deliver world-class experiences that delight your customers and exceed their expectations.

Sound familiar? Depressingly familiar? Wasn't this supposed to be one of the outcomes of the last reorganization? What happened?

First, take heart. Leadership doesn't wake up one morning and decide on how to make things worse. There is a genuine desire to make things better - what's missing sometimes is asking the hard questions that drive change in the right direction.

Let's have a look at why innovation is so hard to achieve in some business environments, and what we can do to turn things around. This is definitely not a list of "5 Easy Ways To Innovate" - it's more about taking stock of where your organization is today, and deciding on the first steps towards where you want it to be.

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