Jason Little's Blog, page 7

LCM Podcast EP6 – Are Centralized Change Teams a Good Idea?

Last December, Ty Crockett and I were back and forth on Twitter about our experiences with centralized change teams:

Well, it took a couple of months longer than expected, but we finally had the chance to connect and record the podcast! As with my previous podcasts, if you want to have your say, contact me and you can be on the rebuttal call in a couple of weeks!

Show Notes:

Ty is an enterprise agile coach at Improving (formerly Improving Enterprises) with a background in IT and he’s based...

Knowing Where to Look

Is certification the only way forward? Nothing gets people more riledup than a good ‘ol certification debate! I posted my frustration with this on twitter and was met with some snarky comments from friends about the “OMG, someone is wrong on the internet!!!” problem.

Well, they ARE wrong, and the 47 comments on the thread that reinforced my own biases was all the proof I needed. Some of them included:

There. Now that I’ve proven how smart I am, let’s continue.

By the way, if you don’t kno...

What Shouldn’t You Change?

In today’s world, the organizational lifespan is shrinking, and established organizations are trying to figure out how to remain relevant. Given today’s instant-gratification society, humans are wired to expect instant, or near-instant outcomes, when taking action.

To be more blunt, when leaders want to go Agile, they want some damn results in a week…even though deep-down they know it’ll take some time.

Often lost in the confusion of methods, tools and frameworks is a simple question: What do...

Using Storytelling in Change Management

We’re 4 days into the New Year which means 92% of the world population has already given up on their New Year’s resolutions, and there are already 249,000,000 results in Google for ‘2016 Management Trends’.

The New Year brings with it a feeling of re-birth, and the opportunity to change something, hopefully for the better. I, and I’m sure many of you, gave up on New Years resolutions many years ago. For me, the New Year is nothing more than a signal that it’s going to get really cold and I’m...

Integrating Cultures with Lean Coffee

I stumbled upon Jason Little’s blog post, Hacking a Conservative Organization with Lean Coffee at a time when the organization that I worked for was acquired by a competitor. Shortly after the acquisition, I was asked to lead a team of agile coaches for the new (combined) organization. One of the goals of this new team was to support the Software Development organization in building high-performing agile teams. As the agile coaches started to observe the teams within Software Development we r...

LCM Podcast EP5 – The Great Organizational Culture Debate

In this episode, Mathias Gorf, Patrick Verdonk and Peter Rubarth debate the points raised by Eric and I during Episode 4:

the concept of getting people to ‘buy in’ to your change intentionally changing, and measuring culture how to preserve your existing culture during growth whether ‘chief culture officers’ are a good idea or not

Interested in being on a future episode? Contact me!

How much does change really hurt?

Have you ever wondered why we respond negatively to change in some instances, yet bring it on at other times? If we wholeheartedly didn’t like change, would we be the most adaptable species on the planet? Why did we bother to venture out of the trees, walk upright and eventually manipulate many aspects of our natural environment? Yet, we resist the introduction of a new system or organisational restructure at work.

The answer, according to neuroscientists, lies in whether we perceive the chan...

3 Tips for Simplifying Change

Last week at DareFest 2015, I sat down with Richard Atherton to talk about how today’s change agents can simplify their approach to change.

Register for Lean Change Agent in London, UK

LCM Podcast EP4: Culture – Can you measure it?

In this episode, Eric Lynn, founder of Culture Q’s, and I discuss culture, including whether or not you can measure it and why the approach some companies take is the wrong way to do it.

This episode was recorded at #DareFest in Belgium so I apologize for the audio as I didn’t have my studio mic with me!

If you’re interested in being part of the followup conversation, contact me!

About Eric

I began developing cultureQs in 2002, picking up on a challenge from a client while facilitating a po...

People Must Be Told What To Do

“We have to tell our teams what to do or they just won’t do it.”

How many times have you thought this? How many times have you had a conversation like this?

People in general are great at externalizing blame. When something goes wrong, we look at the people involved, and push blame outwards.

When something goes wrongand we’re involved, we blame some weird, random circumstance that was un-expected.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been in an organization where someone, usually a manager or hig...