Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change

by Jason Little

the Virginia Satir Change Model

The stages of the Satir Change Model: Virginia Satir Change Model by Steven M. Smith. Stage 1 – Late Status Quo: Everything is familiar and comfortable, and performance is stable. Stage 2 – Foreign Element: This stage is about resistance. In my view, Agile is a powerful Foreign Element that generates a strong response from people. Some love it, others resist it. Stage 3 – Chaos: People feel that they’re losing their identity and experience a general sense of loss, which leads to a drop in productivity and an increase in confusion or anger. Stage 4 – The Transforming Idea, Practice and Integration: Once people have tumbled through Chaos, they reach the point where they get it. They hit The Transforming Idea. The Transforming Idea leads into Practice and Integration. Here, people integrate the benefits of the Foreign Element into their new identity. Stage 5 – New Status Quo: Performance starts to stabilize at a higher level than it was during the Late Status Quo.

Try as you may, change cannot be controlled.

"People have a way of fighting through the pain of change when they want the outcome badly enough"

I wrote this book for people who are passionate about bringing meaningful change into their organizations. I want to help them broaden their toolkit by filling it with ideas from Agile, Lean Startup, neuroscience, psychology, organizational development and change management.

two reasons why change initiatives fail. The first is the unpredictable nature of those pesky humans, and the second is the lack of a structured change process.

As a Change Agent, it’s never about you, or me – it’s about understanding the perspective of the people affected by change.

"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 MVP through, what Lean Startup cal...

3. Learn about how people use the product from your measurements, and feed that data into your next MVP.

call change initiatives Experiments instead.

"Process helps make sense of change, but blindly following a process is a recipe for disaster"

Pursue meant that the change worked, and we should keep doing similar changes.

Pivot meant that the change sorta worked, but something about it required tweaking.

Abandon meant…well, forget about it, it’s probably not the right time for the change. Yet.

Jurgen Appelo’s Mojito Method.

"Lean Change Management is about fundamentally changing how we think about change"

Insights: Before you can plan any change, you need to understand the current state of the organization.

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.

Experiments: At this point you’ve learned enough about your current state and considered multiple Options. Now it’s time to introduce a change and see if it works out the way you thought it would.

Experiments also have a sub-cycle:

Prepare: This is the planning stage of your Experiment.

Introduce: This is the step where you start working with the people affected by the change.

Review: Here you review the outcomes of the Experiment.

"Understand the dynamics of your organization by collecting insights with a variety of tools from different communities"

All change management processes start with some type of assessment before the change project starts. Some call that approach understanding change readiness.

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

"Decide on options based on what you learned from collecting insights"

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.

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.

Practices are specific actions or processes your use to generate Insights.

Practice 1: Creating and Using Information Radiators

"Information radiators help build trust by making work transparent"

Added Bonus: The Insights Door

Practice 2: Lean Coffee

Practice 3: Culture Hacking

"Disruptive innovation is good. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not."

Culture hacking is a practice that has three components: the Crack, the Hack, and the Hacking Zones.

The Crack A Crack is an organizational dysfunction that f...

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 the crack to influence the culture of an organization.

Hacking Zones When designing your Hack, be mindful of the impact. 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 can res...

Practice 4: Agile Retrospectives

Practice 5: Kurt Lewin Force Field Analysis 4

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.

Top-down change without honest feedback from those affected by the change simply will not work.