Opportunity in Waiting: Timing, Context, and the Businesses Yet to Change

Nearly 20 years in Ops teaches you a lot. Not everything—but plenty. One thing that's been consistent during that time is the contrast between how companies actually are and what the latest book, blog or company says it should be.

When I started my career, the Agile manifesto was still young and the agile movement, to transform more traditional or 'waterfall' style software development processes into more 'agile' methods, was becoming more and more popular. Let’s be clear that running Scrum or Kanban doesn’t make you Agile. These support an agile mindset, but being truly agile goes beyond software development. - although the definition is really loose, being Agile is an endeavour the entire company needs to get right. What's also interesting to know is those methodologies have been around in some cases for decades before their popularity. I think anyone reading this will probably know the story of Kanban and Toyota.

In the 2000s so many companies started to rush towards that transformation, all of a sudden there were certifications and agencies that would help you transform and implement some of these processes. They sold tricks and tools to make you agile. Books, talks, conferences. Entire industries sprang up as tech-driven companies began transforming. Even many non-technology driven companies, suddenly found themselves with huge technology teams as software took over the world and couldn't ignore these potential gains, helping to proliferate new methodologies into areas that they probably had no real business being.

There's a lot of factors at play here, the explosion of technology and software, new hardware like smartphones, improved access to the internet. But the most interesting factor? Timing.

Timing is everything.

Imagine if you were starting a business today. You have a great idea for a SaaS tool in the productivity industry and had some cash to go and build it.

It's 2025, so inevitably you're going to be using some of the tools and techniques that have been popularised over the years. You can start there. You don't have to transform. There's no baggage. You don't have an existing customer base that you need to support, processes that have been implemented or tools that are incumbent to the running of your business. 

Don't like that tool? Move to another one. Don't like that process, change it. It's much easier to do as you start out, don't have incumbent processes or tools and are relatively small. Though once you get established, hire more people, start to grow...

Now imagine that you were a 150 year old business. You come in as a director, excited to bring in new and fresh ideas to create more success in your industry. 

You build your relationships, develop a strategy and a plan. But you hit a stumbling block, the manager of a team already has a process in place that you'd need to change. But they've been doing it for years and it works. You want to use some data to be able to measure your plan, but everything is done manually rather than through a real-time BI tool. 

These are made up examples, but I'm sure you can imagine these being very real from your own experiences. One isn't better than the other necessarily, there's risk with new companies and safety in established companies. 

In the latter example, it's clear there's a lot to change. It's going to be frustrating, maybe hard. But timing is important here, they've hired you to come in and do something - that should give you confidence that it's possible. It's then about figuring out how to make it happen.

If someone else has done it, you can do it too.

But that doesn't mean it comes easy. Or even that you can follow the same path others have.

I recently re-read No Rules Rules. You should read it too. Reed Hastings (Founder and CEO of Netflix) and Erin Meyer (Professor at INSEAD Business School) talk passionately about what many might see as the secret sauce that helped Netflix change an entire industry, famously going from almost being sold to Blockbuster to essentially putting them out of business. 

Many people who read it at the time were inspired to copy some of the key things from the book. Things like:

• Have only top employees, fire people that you wouldn't fight for
• Encourage candour and maximise transparency
• Remove controls, abolish expenses and vacation policies

And you know, many of these ideas are good, great even. There's plenty of evidence both in the book (and Netflix's success) and out there in the world of many other companies being able to draw their success down to the culture, operations and processes that they follow that align with what's talked about in the book.

I pick this book as an example because I've worked in and heard of several companies that have senior leadership or management read this book, get very excited and want to implement some of these techniques. Picking and choosing parts that sounded appealing or maybe tackled something they felt passionately about.

Reed speaks very directly to the reader throughout this book, in fact the sequence is very deliberate. You need to do each of these things in the right order, they set up the success of the next step. If you haven't achieved success with the first step, you cannot jump ahead to the second.

If you don't have the best employees, you can't begin to remove controls. You cannot encourage candour and transparency if you still have lots of controls in place.

The lesson here is about recognising the steps, understanding the context and acknowledging the realities of what you have (or don't have) to be able to keep transforming and creating change that will help your business do more.

There are many businesses today that still need change.

And there always will be.

There are businesses that have been around for decades, even sometimes over 100 years that have a long and successful history that haven't made some of the leaps in the past 20 years that we'd probably expect.

Can you imagine walking into a place that didn't use the latest productivity tools? Or didn't have an onboarding tool for new hires? Or still used Excel instead of BI software? That still used fax machines? 

They exist. Still faxing, still thriving—but for how long? 

What this means is there's opportunity. These companies have untapped potential, successful and surviving doesn't mean risk free and there's a reality that at some point, they will need to invest, transform and change to take advantage of new tools, new ways of doing things to increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk.

Experience says: waving the change flag rarely wins cheers. Fear of change runs deep, not because people don't recognise the need. It's because most people are afraid of change.

As an Ops professional, your job is to help deliver that change with the least amount of friction possible. Leveraging the expertise and experience that exists, while finding those new ways of doing things to achieve what goals and outcomes is needed to help the business continue to thrive.

Timing is about context.

The question isn’t if change will come - it’s when. And for those ready to act, the opportunity is waiting. Here's some things to ask yourself and your team, knowing these will help make the change even easier.

Is the business ready for change?

How do you know? Who's involved? What's their background and motivation? Is it broken, or just need as good as it could be? What are the core functions the business needs to operate and what happens to them?

Revenue, costs and risk - can we afford it? Can we afford not to?

What's the ARR? What do the next few years look like? What happens during the change to those numbers? What happens afterwards? What are the external factors that might impact this? (Trade wars, AI, etc.).

What people and timeframes do we need to work with?

Have you got the people? Do you need new people? How long until they are productive? Does this change mean redundancies? Is there a timeframe we need to deliver this change for X reason?

Is this evolution or revolution?

What about business continuity? How much pain would this change cause if it didn't go well? If you start fresh, will it be faster/better? Do you need to keep something that currently exists for good reason?

Need more help?

Change isn’t easy. Knowing the context, understanding timing and having the skills and expertise when you need them can be tricky.

But the rewards can be so great and there's still lots of opportunities out there. Businesses that have been successful, but could accelerate their growth through doing things differently. 

So, ask yourself: Is it your time? Is your business ready to move, to evolve, to grow?

Because the opportunity is there. It’s waiting. And it won’t wait forever.

Do you need help navigating change? Leading the effort and making things happen? Call the Wolf, we're here to help.