[busted]

Certainly agree with most of this. It has a couple of underlying ideas that I've also noticed.

1. Use empathy to both overcome resistance and do the right thing. The strategy in Step 2 for reframing an interaction in a way that gets the person to understand that you're trying to help them, and also reminds you to remove your ego and that the goal is to improve things for everyone, is one I've used a lot. Not because people think you're trying to be difficult but because it overcomes defensive barriers and helps ease them into the context switch of thinking about the problem.

2. Get a foothold with iterative progress. The author did this by splitting adoption and (the process for) configuration. Especially with tools and processes, people will often try to jump to the final state and if they can find any holes or issues with the proposal as is they'll be inclined to throw it all out at the start. If you instead make it clear that we're a) trying something new that will b) be improved as we learn more about it and c) can always be reversed if we decide it was a bad idea, people are usually much more open to it.

One thing the article mentions though is "spending" leadership capital. I like instead to think of it as "investing" capital. If the decision you invested it in ends up being bad, you lose it. If it ends up making people's lives better, you've gained more. Thinking about it this way also can get junior people, as mentioned in the article, to be more inclined to help with decision making. They don't have a lot of capital to spend but they can choose to invest the little capital they have in order to grow it.