The Troublemaker

When you join a new team, with an outsider perspective, you can often diagnose problems quickly. The mistake is assuming you should immediately fix them.

It’s both arrogant and impatient. It’s arrogant to presume what worked in your last context will work here, and impatient to direct people to change and expect the behaviour to stick.

The antidote is what I call sustainable team-led change. My job as a delivery lead isn’t to fix the team. It’s to facilitate conversations about improvement, build consensus around the team’s best ideas, and then help them hold to what they decided. Changes the team chooses are changes the team maintains.

The trickier part is helping a team see its own blindspots. If they can’t see the problem, they won’t understand why they need to change. So I think of my role as troublemaker. I don’t point at problems directly. I seize on incidents, complaints, and confused new starters to open conversations in retrospectives and post-mortems. In those sessions the team confronts its own weaknesses and works out solutions together. Sometimes that means letting the team fail. A safe failure is worth more than a rescue because the team feels the problem for themselves rather than having to take your word for it.

It’s slow, semi-random progress by design. Humans can only habituate so much change at once; push too many things at the same time and the team backslides. One change, let it set, then move to the next. By getting 1% better every iteration, a team can become high-performing in a year or two, and they own every step of the journey.

Sometimes, though, a team is genuinely broken and I have to be the fixer. Learned helplessness, or simply never having seen better. In that case I have to be the fixer — bring witnesses, case studies, and the confidence to say: this is how it’s done. I can only carry one of these interventions at a time. It’s slow going and it’s draining.

And sometimes a team won’t survive long enough to find its own feet. I have to pick them up, shake them hard, and put them back together in ways they don’t fully understand. This makes me a fixer that is naturally mistrusted. I’ll fight hard for the basics that should be obvious. It isn’t fun. Constant feedback and adjustment is the only way through, and it helps to be temporary. The team will keep what works when I leave.

Between being the troublemaker or the fixer, I know which I’d choose. The troublemaker doesn’t fix anything directly. They help the team want their own improvements. The fixer carries the burden of proving they are right without the support of the team. That is hard work.