Abraham Lincoln used to ask a riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”

Answer: Four, because calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

As a change consultant you have the difficult task of unmasking and presenting reality as it really is. This may involve the removal of blinders that people have over their eyes. This also means that people have to be taught that simply wishing for things or saying things doesn’t make it so.

Telling people how things really are can land you into hot waters a few times. There’s something to be said about being tactful and pragmatic, but there are times when you have to say it as it is and lay it all on the line. The question to ask yourself is: “Am I here to just collect a pay check or to make a real difference?” If it is the former, there is not much chance that you’ll expose faulty thinking or organizational dysfunctions, stir up the pot, or stick your neck out. You’ll also not make much of a difference. Change agents who want to make a difference may end up getting their head chopped-off once in a while but in the long run the successes will far outweigh the failures.

I’ve had a few instances where I’ve had to say “A is A” — a thing is what it is — to senior management. I’ve had my head handed to me on a platter only once; the other times the clients actually appreciated the forthrightness and the rewards (satisfaction in causing big changes, bigger contracts) far outweighed the risks. My sense is that most people want to do the right thing; sometimes, they just need to be jolted out of their current mode of thinking.

In the software development field, the thing I really like about Agile is that it reveals problems and dysfunctions and forces you to either acknowledge the problem and fix it or to cover your eyes and hope it goes away. People’s responses to these difficult situations (exposing the naked truth) help you quickly distinguish those who talk a great game from those who actually walk the talk. These situations also help you determine if you are really going to make a lasting change in the organization or if you are simply wasting your time and postponing the inevitable. Some might say that, “A dead ScrumMaster is a useless ScrumMaster”. To that all I have to say is that sometimes you just have to realize that even though you may not be technically dead, you are pretty useless anyway.