Convincing people: Hercules is as strong as a lion

It’s my quarantine life in Brooklyn. A few days ago. I’m chit chatting with a client from a Bank before a call. Some war stories. About people resistant to the DevOps transformation. We immediately agreed that we find resistance mainly in conservative, traditional institutions like banks. Like here in our case. 

In the call before, we had just faced some dismissal from his leadership. We had brought to their attention that we wanted to leverage a new AI system. They didn’t like the idea. They didn't want to change what had worked fine for them up that point. But the current state wasn’t fast enough for our DevOps plans. We needed the speed of an AI decision system. But there had always been someone blocking changes.

My counterpart acknowledged, and I agreed: a large part of our work is convincing people. 

For a minute it was quiet in our call. Then he turned his face directly at the camera. “Hey what about our Traders? They are successfully using AI for decision making. They trust an AI system with millions of Dollars! That's a great metaphor to us! That would convince them to trust us. So we get trust for our suggested change.”

Jump forward two months, now I can say: it worked! We did gain their trust and brought an AI system in place. It helped us in our DevOps journey, by automating the approvals for software changes. 

This had been a real herculean effort on our DevOps journey. Convincing people to do the right thing is an herculean effort. We compared in our communication the two systems with another, that’s changed their mind. Our AI which is making decisions for change management with the existing AI used in trading.

I learned that day: if you want to persuade people, you need a good metaphor. Link your change to a successful experience. To something big. A moment of glory for the team, the company, the industry. A metaphor that makes an attractive promise on the impact of your change. 

When you start your journey, find out what the successful transformations in your company have been. What have been their moments of glory. Link your proposal to that. Ask for the ingredients of the transformation.

Link your DevOps transformation with a promising metaphor to win the minds