It's always tempting to make big changes in big steps. After all, there's a long way to go and a short time to get there. Momentous change taken all at once is dangerous. It is people who are being asked to change. Change is unsettling. People only change so fast.
I often ask, "What's the least you could do that is recognizably in the right direction?" Baby steps do not justify stasis or glacial change. Under the right conditions, people and teams can take many small steps so rapidly that they appear to be leaping.
Baby steps acknowledge that the overhead of small steps is much less than when a team wastefully recoils from aborted big changes. Baby steps are expressed in practices like test-first programming, which proceeds one test at a time, and continuous integration, which integrates and tests a few hours' worth of changes at a time.