I stumbled across this test in an old issue of Harvard Business Review (November 2001). Robert Kegan postulates that people are immune to change because they have a competing commitment that prevents personal change (http://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change/ar/2). I found this compelling and applicable. Kegan created an exercise in which he asks people to respond to the following four questions:
What is the new commitment that is being asked of me?
What am I doing, or not doing, that is keeping my stated commitment from being realized?
What else have I committed to that may be competing?
What big assumptions have I made about the new commitment?
I found this interesting because sometimes the competing commitment feels like a violation of a value of loyalty or personal dedication to another person. Other times, it can be an intrapersonal conflict—low self-esteem, self-doubt, and so on. For example, a tester on a new Scrum team, Jane, was asked to work more...
