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.
