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by
Jason Little
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March 25 - July 5, 2017
its principles can be applied to change by involving those affected by the change in the design of the change. That involvement will validate that it is the change that is most likely to work, and it will likely reduce the symptom of change resistance.
As for the notion that we should “check our emotions at the door” when we come to work? Not going to happen – and that’s a good thing. People are emotional creatures, and that emotional response is a sign that change is happening.
It would be curious to extend the acceptance that we cannot be unemotional to the military. An idea of a soldier or a general driven by emotion should not sound risky or udesireable. Emotion is where we get courage and perseverance; it allows us to inspire others and to be inspired.
away from plan-driven approaches, and towards feedback-driven approaches.
"Lean Change Management moves the slider for managing change from using plan-driven aproaches to feedback-driven aproaches"
The Lean Startup Method teaches organizations how to develop their market and build demand for their new product before they spend all their cash building something no one will buy. Lean Startup organizations do this through a looping Build, Measure, and Learn cycle. 1. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is designed to test your assumptions about how customers will respond to your product. If you think potential customers will use five features of your new product, your MVP could simply be releasing one of those features you think is the most valuable. 2. Measure the response to your
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The consultants at The Commission were applying these ideas by running change initiatives they called Minimum Viable Changes, or MVCs. This relabelling of Lean Startup’s MVP puzzled me because minimal doesn’t always mean small.
There is the inevitable dip in performance that comes with adopting a new tool or process. This dip is a form of risk that has to be mitigated. Finding the "sweet spot" where the disruption caused by the introduction of change does not pose existential risk to the organization may be seen as one of such "minimum viable change" increments. Determining what is viable then becomes the challenge, and without proper anchoring and affordances, any change effort will slide back to the old ways. The prescriptions of the Scrum Guide, for example, are minimal by design, the principles of the Agile Manifesto are interdependent, and any partial implementation is not viable. It would be like trying to road test a car, but starting with one wheel at a time.
To counter-balance this problem, my colleague and friend, Andrew Annett had an idea to start all projects red 3! His thought was that at the beginning of the project you have a pocket full of money and an empty head, with respect to project knowledge, so you need to learn your way to the prestigious green status.
Consider the similarity to starting a school course with 100% of the grade, and then trying to keep it by submitting good work.
“Well, it seems we’re using the Lean Startup lingo, but not really using any Lean Startup principles. Our changes are prescriptive; we decide whether or not they work, and we change them every two weeks. It’s pissing people off and personally, I’m burned out.”
The Commission was nearing its organizational shelf-life, they were using decades old systems, and the people who knew how to run them were closing in on retirement. Trying to change that while simultaneously changing how they managed work and people was a daunting task to say the least. Facilitating transformational change such as this is hard, and today’s plan-driven approaches to change are not equipped to manage this degree of complexity. As complexity increases, so does uncertainty.
Insights: Before you can plan any change, you need to understand the current state of the organization. To do that, there are many tools, assessments, and models you can apply to understand the current state. For example, at The Commission, we collected Insights by using an ADKAR® assessment and informal meetings called Lean Coffee. You’ll learn more about those in Chapters 4 and 5. Options: Once you’ve gained enough Insights to start planning, you need Options. Options have a cost, value and impact. Options usually include one or more hypotheses and expected benefits. These hypotheses are
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Their most famous tool – ADKAR®, describes five conditions that must be satisfied in order for that individual change journey to progress. Organizational change happens when people progress through those five conditions. Awareness of the need for change Desire to participate in and support the change Knowledge on how to change Ability to implement required skills and behaviors Reinforcement to sustain the change These five conditions fall into the natural order of how an individual experiences the change. For example, if you have no Awareness that your organization is adopting Agile practices,
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Regardless of which Options we came up with, the tricky part was understanding all that would be necessary to make the Options viable! For example, helping people acquire knowledge through training is one thing, but changing behavior and having them apply what they learned, is a completely different challenge.
Getting the proverbial horse to drink is the issue at hand, and the crux of the "soft skills" exemplified in social and emotional intelligence competencies.
Often, a shift of perspective and values is necessary to take advantage of the new learnings, and in order for that shift to be genuine it has to connect to one's intrinsic values.
Find the people that are motivated to learn, and help them become change agents. Once other employees see their colleagues are motivated to support the change, it will help reduce resistance to change.
AKA make people awesome (or help them become/show their awesomeness)
Traditional, plan-driven approaches assume change has a logical starting point because the change project has a start date. The plan that gets created is based on a snapshot of organizational insights generated at a certain point in time, and from a certain point of view. By the time the plan is put in practice, the reality has changed, and the plan is no longer up to date.
Plans become obsolete so quickly because there is too much emphasis on trying to create a perfect change plan. When the stakeholders and change team spend too much time planning, they run the risk of convincing themselves that the plan is perfect. Then they hit a wall of change resistance when they put the plan into practice.
Curiously, there are two human nature phenomena at play here: the commitment bias, which is the same fallacy that forces us, by way of cognitive dissonance, to find more value in things that we had already invested considerable amount of energy into. The second phenomenon is brought on by the first, and it's that in such situations people who are good at deflecting blame end up winning.
having an overall plan is important, but breaking it down into smaller chunks, and releasing those changes to the organization slowly is more important. This approach will reduce the chaos caused by introducing too many simultaneous changes. It also gives the people affected by the change the opportunity to help shape future changes. I refer to this as a feedback-driven approach for creating change plans.
There is an interesting parallel to the WIP limit in Kanban. Since it takes time to integrate change, perhaps it may be useful to apply the "minimum viable change" pull model here as well, and talk about the an organization's capacity to integrate change.
sometimes you don’t know how to start facilitating change. You need to do something in order to get the feedback that will guide you to the next step. After all, it is only after you act and receive feedback, that you truly understand the impact of the changes you have in mind.
The Chaotic domain in Cynefin
The simple practice of visualizing progress, to me, is more effective than the emailed status reports that people want, but rarely read.
Trying to understand organizational culture isn’t something you can do through analysis alone. Sometimes to truly understand an organization, you have to disrupt it in such a way that provokes a response.
As this applies to all complex systems, a familiar example would be estimating delivery dates for software projects. The dysfunctions in the processes, and misalignments of meaning become visible when a small change in requirements invalidates other delivery estimates. Anti-patterns in the code (e.g. tight coupling) and in the organization (e.g. lack of communication) exact their price when the system is required to absorb a change such as new feature, or a new usage.
When, if investigated, we realize that there are categories of defects in the project that could significantly increase the delivery time, it becomes clear that unless such defects are mitigated and/or isolated into separate sub-projects, there can be no reasonable expectation of alignment with business realities.
The Crack A Crack is an organizational dysfunction that feels uncomfortable. Going back to the moving example, managers had no idea how to address a Facilities issue because having cross-functional teams sitting together was a new concept for them. Sounds ridiculous to me, and maybe even to you, but they didn’t see the problem as a dysfunction. To them, it was the status quo. Each manager was responsible for their people, not for teams that included people from multiple departments.
Observe similarity with the matrix organizational structure where cross functional teams are formed as a cross section of various departments thus giving each worker two managers – project manager and department manager.
The Crack generates tension, friction, frustration, or bad vibes. It may be something you can express in terms of conflicting goals in the organization, erroneous assumptions, or unexpressed feelings that could be revealed by, or serve as leverage for the hack, which is what comes next.
The Hack The Hack is the action you take to expose, jam, complicate, disrupt, or otherwise point out the crack to the organization. It’s a minimal, artful intervention, which if successful, exploits ...
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The Hack is something you do to expose the reality that you see to the people who simply see the status quo. By exposing that reality in a tactful way, you’ll open their eyes and make them aware of the dysfunction.
Visible, anonymous feedback to help employees raise issues safely.
Hacks fit into one of three hacking zones: Green Zone (Safe): Think of these Hacks as a gentle kickin-the-organizational-butt that will safely help an organization become self-aware. They are the least disruptive. Blue Zone (Risky): These Hacks can get you hauled into the boss’ office for a lecture (or worse!) and result in the opposite effect you were trying to achieve because people will react strongly to them. Red Zone (Dangerous): These Hacks are the most disruptive and can lead to you potentially needing to update your résumé. They can also severely harm the company. Perhaps worse, they
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For more info on retrospective approaches, read Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larson
I used the happy, sad, mad format for these retrospectives. People in the retrospective write the things that made them happy, sad and mad on sticky notes. They then categorize the results, look for patterns, and finally decide what action to take to solve a problem.
I covered the staff’s results with flip-chart paper, ran the retrospective with the managers, and then we talked about the similarities and differences. Some managers had no idea how some of their staff was feeling about aspects of the changes that were happening. This exercise gave the managers Insights into what they needed to change, and it helped me provide harsh feedback in a safe way. My goal was to expose how staff felt so the managers would be aware and able to react. Agile retrospectives are a powerful practice for understanding the current reality. Frequent feedback through this
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We know people will resist change. Force Field analysis is a good practice you can use to help you figure out what’s working against the change, and what is working to support it. This, in turn, will generate valuable Insights that you can turn into Options and Experiments.
Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist working in the 1940s who was, in many ways, the pioneer of organizational psychology and change management. He started the change management field by being the first person to describe change as a three-phase journey4. One of his practices is called Force Field Analysis.
Force Field Analysis can be done on one sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle to represent the change you want to introduce. On one side, write all of the forces pushing against or Restraining the change. On the other side, write all the forces supporting or Driving the change. If you like, assign each force a strength score (e.g. score them 1 to 5, from weak to strong). Add up the results, and you can see the overall force operating on the change, and which direction is strongest: Driving or Restraining.
our change team used a Force Field Analysis to have the teams feed information back to the executives about what they thought was driving the change, and what was restraining it. This is why Lean Change Management is referred to as a feedback-driven approach to change. This feedback was critical to adjusting the plan, after all, no one knows best what to improve than the people doing the work! Once we had this data, we looked for patterns to figure out what Options and Experiments to do next.
Top-down change without honest feedback from those affected by the change simply will not work. By using this practice, we provided a safe feedback mechanism for teams because the data was anonymous, and we provided the executives with useful information they could use to adjust the strategy.
This shows that the anonymous feedback doesn't have to be in the form of a board on a wall.
3 different types of assessments: Prosci ADKAR® OCAI Cultural Assessment Schneider Culture model
once you send out the ADKAR® survey, your reality has changed! It’ll take time to analyze the results and by then, the reality will be different.
There is a strong bias with many Agile practitioners about the need for a culture and mindset change with respect to Agile. I see the same stance from people in the business community when they talk about innovation. I’m sure you’ve seen many posts and forum discussions about how culture will eat your strategy for breakfast. This makes perfect sense for people who have their biases confirmed by these statements. For others though, changing culture and mindsets starts with more well defined processes, because they believe better processes will help them.
This speaks to the utility of the opinionated and feature bloated/loaded apps like Jira and Rally vs the more direct approaches such as using a whiteboard or apps like Trello and Cardboard.
Provided a strong management buy-in, coupled with continuous access to the insight and guidance of a trusted and empowered coach, an organization stands a great chance to succeed in their Agile Transformation with Lean or Agile only tools. However, since this isn't often the case, some of the familiar metrics and terminology, although not necessary, may somewhat reduce the anxiety of the transformation, and serve as a bridge between the old and the new. Also, the opinionated, prescriptive manner in which some apps expect to be used, may highlight incompatibilities with the old way, and suggest areas for modification and improvement.
On the other hand, the artifacts from the command-and-control era may just drag people back into the old mindset, and serve to preserve the old culture. Moreover, the uncompromising bulldozerlike rigidity of these apps may interfere with the developers' quest for mastery and autonomy.
there are tools for measuring and managing culture. You have to decide if you want to make a conscious attempt to change the organization’s culture, which determines whether or not to use a culture assessment tool.
The OCAI model describes four culture types: Clan: Internally focused, values flexibility and freedom Hierarchy: Internally focused, values stability and control Adhocracy: Externally focused, values flexibility and freedom Market: Externally focused, values stability and control The main concept underlying the OCAI model is the Competing Values Framework. This framework is referred to as a sense-making device that helps leaders understand how to manage the simultaneous harmony and tension that occurs within organizations. The reference section at the end of this book lists more resources
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Learning about how to recognize different cultures by understanding attributes of each can be helpful in figuring out what approach to take for introducing change.
The benefit of understanding what makes a Hierarchy culture tick helped us become more aware of the norms in the organization. Some of these included learning about the un-spoken processes for traversing the hierarchy, to knowing that control and process were strongly held values. Sometimes we would shape our changes as new process so we could speak the language of The Commission’s unique culture.
Perhaps this is exactly what formalized frameworks and opinionated apps are trying to do — sneak in Agile values under the guise of yet another dogmatic commandment? A meta way to install a process that prioritizes people and interactions over tools and processes? It is conceivable that a set of instructions could produce a result that would restructure the very process of giving and receiving such instructions, but it is a slippery slope: if the degree of novelty is insufficient, below a certain critical mass, it may serve as a tacit permission to engage the bystander apathy, and remaining deep within the comfort zone, simply ignore the change, keeping one foot firmly on the old ground.
William Schneider describes four cultures in his book The Re-Engineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work 9 that are similar to OCAI’s cultures: Collaboration: “We succeed by working together” (people and reality oriented) Control: “We succeed by establishing and maintaining control” (company and reality oriented) Cultivation: “We succeed by growing our people” (people and possibility oriented) Competence: “We succeed by being the best” (company and reality oriented)
Schneider describes how each of these cultures aligns with psychology types described by Carl Jung, and that organizational culture emerges from the personality types of its leaders. For example, if the CEO of your organization reacts aggressively to every problem and wants to create new processes to deal with the problem, a control culture is likely to emerge and spread throughout.
It is conceivable that in a pyramid shaped hierarchy subordinates would copy their superiours all the way to the "fearless leader", but what personality type would the flat and distributed autonomous organizations develop?
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Agile methods are informed by revolutionary thinkers and ideas such as Satir's models, Jung, MBTI, Clare Graves and other theories that are not traditionally considered in the context of project management. They touch on psychology, sociology and other "soft sciences" because of the shift of focus onto people and interactions.
Dr. John Kotter describes an 8-step process for leading change in his book, Leading Change: Create Urgency Form a Powerful Coalition Create a Vision for the Change Communicate the Vision Remove Obstacles Create Short Term Wins Build on the Change Anchor the Change in Corporate Culture
In order to sustain the change, we knew that we had to discover the true sense of urgency for them. Otherwise, the staff would feel like they’re too busy to focus on important work because everything is an emergency. Busyness and busy-work are common symptoms of false urgency.
In Lean Change Management, urgency emerges by involving the people affected by the change in the design of the change. It starts with open and honest dialogue.
there is urgency to change because people are volunteering to help. More importantly, it shows the organization is owning the change and not relying on me to push it through.
the process of using big visible information radiators, as well as meeting frequently created high transparency and improved communication between people in different departments.
People need to feel they are supported while working through change. By making all our problems visible, and tracking new, in progress, and done issues, everyone gets to see that progress is being made.
Once people have incorporated the changes into their new self, the new processes become the way we work. People are no longer consciously applying new practices; they just do it. Kotter says the culture shift comes last, not first. That means the changes need to prove to people in the organization that they work before the utopian culture shift occurs.
The last stage in the Shu-Ha-Ri progression where instead of following rules, everything the master does sets the rules.
