Everything Everywhere All At Once movie’s artwork

Everything Everywhere All At Once Corporate Transformation

Trusted recipes collected over 20+ years that will help you successfully fail any corporate transformation. You’ll feel busy and important, though absolutely harmful.

It’s like the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, only updated

1. Launch as many projects as possible at the same time. Investors want everything to move forward, and fast! So go fast. Anywhere, nowhere, but fast.
2. Deploy frameworks whose vocabulary evokes speed (“sprints”, “velocity”, “scale”, etc) even if you don’t have a clue on how to implement them. SAFe is a safe choice. SAFe shows ambition.
3. If possible, make all projects internal competitors. Make them compete on attention, budget, time, resources, and of course position.
4. Create new poles, units, departments, streams, whatever; in a word, create new silos. Don’t forget to name a local HoS (Head of Silo).
5. Or, even better, choose a matrix organization, so that each person is attached to 2 entities at the same time (their hierarchical entity and their business entity) and is constantly under fire from contradictory injunctions.
6. Mix 4 and 5.
7. Don’t spend money on organisation tools, good organisation needs no tool, it’s intuitive, everyone knows that.
8. Don’t grow your budgets. Sure you can transform a whole company with a constant budget. It’s called frugal innovation. Don’t listen to naggers who argue that nothing evolves without extra time, money and energy.
9. Spread documents and knowledge over as many channels and sources as possible, without worrying about duplication, accuracy or freshness of content. More is always better, right? Besides, nobody reads these days, so who cares about inaccurate content? You can always use AI to sort out your own messy content, so why waste time trying to be relevant?
10. Spread your thinnest and scarcest resources across as many teams as possible. If you don’t have enough architects to have an architect per team, create a cross-over team of architects. There’s nothing more efficient than context switching, multi-tasking and coordination meetings.
11. To go faster, change everything at once : change people, management, responsibilities, methods, tools (from zero to Git+Jira is really not a big deal), brand and, of course, governance.
12. F*ck homeostasis.
13. Name highly unqualified and untrained people as managers. Choose the right soldiers for your dirty job: people who like to boss others around and have no technical skills whatsoever. Pay them way better than those who are productive even if they spend their days in meetings thinking they’re the linchpin of the company..
14. Do not provide any kind of training whatsoever: it’s well known that humans are highly adaptive creatures that thrive learning on the go and under a lot of pressure.
15. Never ever talk to your customers. They’re here to pay and shut their mouth. You know better than to listen to a bunch of whiners.
16. Deploy new complicated process, involving a maximum of people with a minimum of autonomy. Gather new committees to make sure the new process are followed. Don’t waste your time checking out if there are any positive outcomes.
17. Deploy fast-food indicators and KPIs: they’re tasty at the time, though as soon as you ingest them you want more because they have no consistency. Anything that revolves around time and ROI is a sure bet.
18. Set high expectations in a culture that tolerates no failure. No more time for failure than for anything else, fair enough.
19. Distribute responsibility among as many people as possible. Combined with the previous point, there’s a good chance that no one will ever make even the simplest decision. In the end, replace this bunch of incompetent decision-makers with AI.
20. Communicate the amazing Master Plan trough a single holy mass, deliver all information at once and hope for everyone to understand everything and not dare asking any questions.

No questions? Good! Now let’s deliver faster, chop chop!