> the impasse that I often see is between people who think a change must happen “now“ and those who think it should happen “never“
The problem is that the organisational equivalent of ‘later’ is ‘never’. Therefore, if something needs to actually be done, the only time is now.
> There is a lot of space between those positions, an optimal usually exists in there.
Yeah but finding, or rather estimating, this optimal is a lot of work, and requires you to have one foot in both camps, and some kind of process/authority to make a decision, and some incentive to make a short term sacrifice for long term gain. That's just not going to happen in a weekly sprint planning, in a company that's aiming for the next quarterly report.
By all means say the change will happen in 3 months time instead of never.
Then in 3 months time the choice is the change will happen now, or it will happen never.
You can schedule it for the future, but the choice will always be "do it now" or "don't do it now".
It’s just like re-factoring heavily interdependent code, except without the advantage of the dependencies being written down