LinkedIn·Saturday, 22 August 2026·4d ago

I used to think that if I could prove there was a better way of doing something, people would naturally want to change. I don’t think that…

Sonya Siderova

Founder & CEO at Nave | Helping enterprise agile coaches prove transformation value with metrics executives trust

I used to think that if I could prove there was a better way of doing something, people would naturally want to change. I don’t think that anymore. When my daughter was little, she had a teddy bear she couldn’t be without. She slept with it. Ate with it. Took it everywhere. One night its hand came off and I found myself sewing it back on at 10pm because she was devastated. A few years later, she had completely outgrown it. But the teddy bear was still sitting in the corner of her bed. She didn’t really need it anymore. She just wasn’t ready for someone to take it away. I think about that a lot when I introduce a different way of working. When I started teaching teams to use probabilistic forecasting, I could have told them to stop estimating. Instead, my approach became: Keep estimating. We’ll run the forecast alongside it. Then we’ll compare both with what actually happens. Over time, people can see for themselves which approach gives them more reliable answers. And at some point, the old way simply stops being useful. Nobody has to take it away. That has become one of my operating standards: When I introduce a better way of working, I don’t ask people to give up the old one first. I let the new way earn their trust until they’re ready to let go themselves. Because proving that something works and being ready to rely on it are two different things. The first requires evidence. The second requires time with the evidence. #NavigateYourFlow #SystemsThinking #LeadershipDecisions #ContinuousImprovement