Three Cs: Covid, Cloud, and Change – The Wicked Problem of Covid and Sense-making with Agile
In this video, Toby lays out how Covid presented as a Wicked Problem for business and how cloud and agile change that could help to make businesses more nimble.
In this discussion, Toby lays out some principles of Organisational Change and Transformation that can help establish a robust business even when Black Swan events occur.
Full transcript
Hello, everyone. My name is Toby Corballis.
I am delighted to be here at SEACON this year and to present this talk. I am going to speak about what I call the three Cs: Covid, Cloud, and Change. Before I do that, let me briefly introduce myself.
I have been an agile practitioner for more than ten years. I run a podcast called The Wicked Problems Podcast, which you can find at wickedproblems.fm. I am also a Lead Associate at eSynergy Solutions.
This talk focuses on the wicked problem of Covid, and how sense-making combined with agile practices can help us understand the confluence of Covid, cloud adoption, and organisational change.
Covid and the Acceleration of Cloud Adoption
I would like to start by setting the scene with a trend line of cloud computing. A graphic originally published in the early 2000s demonstrated that cloud usage was building exponentially. That was true then, but it is even more evident now. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption far beyond previous expectations.
Let me make an early prediction: Covid-19 has permanently accelerated the migration to cloud technologies. We have already seen this during the first lockdown. Software providers are expediting migrations to the cloud, particularly SaaS offerings. Organisations that do not embrace cloud technology will lose out to those that do, and I believe the same is true of agile ways of working. Those who fail to adopt both will soon be unable to catch up.
Remote working is also accelerating this shift. Workflows are adapting to recurring workplace interruptions. With a second lockdown already behind us, it seems clear that these disruptions will continue in some form.
The Dogs That Did Not Bark
This scene reminds me of the Arthur Conan Doyle story involving Sherlock Holmes. A detective asks Holmes whether there is anything else he should notice. Holmes replies, “The curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When the detective points out that the dog did nothing, Holmes explains, “That is the curious incident.”
This represents expectation versus reality. During the first lockdown, many predictions were made. Most did not come true:
- Systems and networks did not collapse. Regulatory systems, such as MiFID II voice capture in financial services, adapted effectively.
- Productivity did not plummet. Many people adapted well to working from home.
- Trust issues did not emerge to the extent predicted.
- Markets did not crash uncontrollably, thanks largely to software-based circuit breakers.
- Liquidity did not disappear. Redemption gates helped maintain stability within funds.
However, significant challenges emerged:
- A 238% increase in cyberattacks on banks.
- A 900% increase in ransomware incidents.
- A 20–40% increase in network traffic.
- Targeted attacks on global health organisations to obtain information about potential treatments.
We clearly live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
Leadership, Management, and Wicked Problems
Before going further, it is important to distinguish between management and leadership, a distinction often confused. Management focuses on planning, budgeting, staffing, measuring, and solving known problems to produce predictable results. Leadership is about setting direction, enabling alignment, motivating people, removing barriers, and mobilising organisations toward innovation. Leadership is, in many ways, the foundation of agility.
In the early 1970s, Horst Rittel and Melvin Weber identified three types of problems:
- Critical problems – requiring immediate action, such as the sudden shift to working from home.
- Tame problems – complex but solvable with known methods, such as building a data centre.
- Wicked problems – problems never encountered before, with no clear stopping condition and no obvious solution.
Different methodologies suit different problem types. Waterfall can be appropriate for tame problems, whereas wicked problems require agile, because agile allows organisations to sense, adapt, measure, and pivot when no clear end-state is known.
Professor Keith Grint summarises this well:
“To resolve a wicked problem, the leader must reduce anxiety among team members by facilitating the construction of an innovative response to a novel problem.”
Rolling out a known process to solve an unknown problem simply does not work.
Walking the Tightrope of Covid-19
In 2020, we have all walked a tightrope. Traditionally, only one person walks a tightrope at a time, and they never look down. In this pandemic, everyone is on the same tightrope, and everyone has looked down simultaneously.
Traditional leadership attempts to control outputs, but agile leadership controls inputs. We cannot fully control final outcomes, but we can measure, learn, adapt, and pivot intelligently based on evidence. This is the essence of servant leadership.
If we look at enterprises since the 2008 financial crisis, we see that organisations embracing agility—like Apple and Microsoft—have significantly outperformed others like IBM and GE. There are strong lessons we should carry forward: liquidity is vital, automation increases during downturns, and niche expertise becomes more valuable than general consultancy. Cloud-based systems adapt faster because they scale at speed.
As Gartner recently stated:
“Covid-19 is a wake-up call for organisations that place too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience.”
Case Study: Migration to Cloud and Agile Adoption
Last year, before Covid, we delivered a lighthouse programme for a conservative investment bank to demonstrate the art of the possible. The aims included:
- Creating a small, scalable ecosystem to land further cloud migrations.
- Migrating existing systems to public cloud.
- Introducing leadership to new ways of working and illustrating migration paths.
- Demonstrating how agile, culture, and cloud strategies align.
- Supporting microservices through cloud technology.
Challenges
- Naysayers who created distracting, pointless tasks.
- Stakeholders requiring full future detail for comfort.
- Private cloud vendors offering “free” but restrictive solutions.
- Escalation of commitment to existing providers (“we spent millions, so we must spend more”).
- Known provider bias used as protection (“if it fails, we can blame them”).
Success Factors
- A courageous, visionary executive sponsor.
- Clear top-down communication.
- Skilled engineers and agilists working collaboratively.
- Procurement, compliance, and security support from the outset.
- Strong feedback culture (positive feedback publicly, corrective feedback privately).
- Continuous backlog prioritisation and validated decision-making.
Outcomes (6.5 sprints, 3 months)
- Readiness analysis of 181 applications.
- Production-grade, secure AWS ecosystem with two migrated demo applications.
- Cultural readiness report with organisational change recommendations.
- Blueprint for the operational design of remaining migrations.
Key Takeaways
- Secure board-level buy-in, and over-communicate.
- Change is people-oriented, including technical change.
- Engage engineers and technicians early; they are domain experts.
- Confront resistance early before misconceptions become “received wisdom.”
- Start small, and avoid over-commitment.
- Continuously refine sprint cadence, WIP limits, and prioritisation.
- Use tools effectively; there is no one-size-fits-all method.
- Gather data, inspect, analyse, adapt, and pivot based on evidence.
- Leadership is built on relationships; management focuses on control. Both are important, but they are not the same.
Closing Story
In 1951, Albert Einstein set an exam at Princeton University. His assistant noticed that the paper contained exactly the same questions as those from the previous year, and rushed after Einstein to warn him.
He said, “Professor, we must cancel the exam. The questions are the same as last year.”
Einstein replied, “Yes, the questions are the same, but the answers are different.“
This captures the reality of agile work. The problems may look familiar, but the answers will often be new. Each context, year, and organisation demands new responses.
Thank you for watching.
If you would like to get in touch, you can reach me [via the contact form]. I have also written a book on this subject, available on LeanPub, and you can find my podcast at wickedproblems.fm.