Hello, Carl! I'm so happy you asked about this, because the decision to add the WealthGrid story was a huge turning point in this book project. We had set out to write a fairly academic
patterns book—this is what patterns are, here are our patterns, here are some effective combinations—but that is a pretty abstract body of information. We wanted to make these patterns feel immediate and applicable to real world problems, especially for those people who are stakeholders in a transformation initiative buuuut who maybe don't have deep technical knowledge/background. We still present all that same content, of course. Engineers wanting to problem solve something specific can still skip right to the library of patterns. But by fitting the patterns inside a narrative we could show how things actually flow in the real world—and not always the right way, or the way you think they will. WealthGrid is absolutely based on experiences we have had with companies we worked with on actual transformation projects, and our hope is that people from any organization contemplating its own potential transformation will recognize their own situation, at least partially, inside this story.
This approach was very different from what we originally proposed to O'Reilly, and it's not one they would normally follow in their other books, so we had to convince them to let us try the experiment. The editors liked it and so here we are!
I hope this answered your question, let me know if there is more you'd like to know about this.
Cheers,
Michelle