Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change

by Jason Little

KOTTER’S 8-STEP CHANGE MODEL

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

"Urgency for change emerges through honest dialogue between people with different points of view"

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.

Form a Powerful Coalition Kotter refers to this step as “creating a team of change agents and evangelists that facilitate the change”.

Kotter says this Powerful Coalition must have capability to lead change, and the clout in the organization to get things done.

Create a Vision for the Change Think of the vision as your 30-second elevator pitch for the change. This vision must be specific, measurable, actionable, inspiring and realistic.

Communicate the Vision

Remove Obstacles During the transition, people need to know they are being supported through the change process.

Create Short Term Wins

Build on the Change

Anchor the Change in Corporate Culture

MCKINSEY 7S FRAMEWORK

if you wanted to diagnose and solve organizational problems, you needed to think about more than just the structure. They identified six other related factors, which they considered to be just as important: Strategy, Systems, Skills, Style, Staff, and Shared values (called “Superordinate goals” in early versions of the model).

"Trying to apply a structured change process is one of the causes of change failures"

According to SFBP, this question gets people thinking about goals instead of focusing on obstacles, or reasons why the change won’t work.

That’s the difference between transformation and change. In order to change a process, you need to play in the problem space for a while to truly understand it. In order to transform to a new organizational state, use solutionfocused thinking to get to that desired future state.

Weinberg: If you only have one option, you have no options. If you have two options, you have a dilemma. When you have three options, only then do you truly have Options.

There are three major factors to consider when assessing your Options: Cost:What’s the effort or investment needed to make this Option viable? Value: What’s the benefit? Does it outweigh the cost? Level of Disruption: How disruptive would this Option be in the organization? Often this is a gut-feel notion, and hard to quantify.

Using the word cost helps stakeholders realize that all actions in the change plan cost the organization something.

When it came time to dig deeper into Options that we thought would be high-cost, we used two specific types of visualization to help us think through the change: 1. Blast Radius: Brainstorm and list the intended and possible un-intended consequences of introducing this change.

2. Sphere of Influence Diagram: How hard would this change be, given who would be affected by it? For example, are the people affected by the change outside our direct sphere of influence? How would they react to someone outside their department suggesting they change how they work? Conversely, how could we leverage people within our sphere of influence to help us implement the change?

The blast radius is the ripple effect the change will have in the organization. Visualizing the blast radius of the change is extremely important. It helps you think through the overall change plan, and it provides transparency to people affected by the changes. It’s a good idea to get your change team in a room and in front of a whiteboard to create this diagram effectively. Draw the name of the change in the middle of the whiteboard, and ask the team these questions: Which departments, people, and management roles are directly and indirectly affected by the change?

What processes would be directly and indirectly affected by the change?

Once you know the blast radius of the change, you can use a Sphere of Influence diagram to map out how you can reach influencers for this change

Creating the Diagram Draw a circle in the bottom corner of the whiteboard or flip chart paper to represent the change you’re wanting to introduce. Write the names of influential people on the outer edges of your paper or whiteboard. These are people with the clout to support or kill the change. Using your network of people, draw lines to connect your change to the influencers.

The idea behind the sphere of influence diagram is to understand how hard this change will be. It will also help you gain a better understanding of where the support is (and isn’t) for the change. This is a critical insight to help you decide whether to commit to or abandon the change.

Now consider how these Options fit into your overall change plan by classifying them based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Going through this exercise will help you see if you’ve added all the elements that are needed in any change initiative.

Do Now: Place in this column all of the Options you will start working on right away.

Do Later: These are Options you consider doing in the near future, but might need to be adapted, given how the actions in the Do Now column pan out.

Yikes, Not Sure: These are the risky Options. They could have high-cost and questionable value.

Abandon: These are Options that, after understanding the blast radius and sphere of influence, definitely won’t work now, but might work later. The reason you keep them here is that you’ll gain some Insights when other people see them and ask you about them.

All Experiments start with a hypothesis.

regardless if we actually created the hypotheses, we would always follow the same thought process: Think about what the Experiment would be Think about who would be affected Think about what the benefit would be Think about how to validate the Experiment as successful

Here is a template you can use to create your hypotheses: We hypothesize by <implementing this change> we will <solve this problem> which will have <these benefits> as measured by <this measurement>

“Validation” in Lean Change Management means confirming that the change you’re planning is the right one to focus on for that particular time, before you spend all your time and effort designing a change that is likely to hit a wall of resistance.

Validating Experiments comes down to completing two important steps during the creation of your Experiment. The first step is done with your change team, and involves asking two questions before running the Experiment: 1. How will we know this Experiment has been successful? 2. How will know we are moving towards our intended outcome? The second step is to review your Experiment with the people affected by the change to see how they react to it.

There are more important things to measure than people’s behavior: Did the people affected by the change get the outcome they thought they would? Has this Experiment improved something for them or made them happier?

The act of planning is the important part, not the thing you develop (aka the plan).

"The format of your canvas matters less than the conversation that creates it!"

THE IMPROVEMENT CANVAS

developed the Improvement Canvas, which was based on Lean, and inspired by the Improvement Kata

The four steps to the Improvement Kata are: Understand the Direction Grasp the Current Condition Establish the Target Condition PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) towards the Target Condition

Vision: What is the vision for the challenge we’re trying to solve? Actual Condition: What is the current state? Target Condition: What is the future state? Obstacles: What would prevent us from achieving the Target Conditions? Hypothesis: What’s our specific hypothesis for the change? Results: What were the actual results? Insights: What Insights emerged while working on this improvement?

This One-Page Change Plan is more helpful when uncertainty is high because you may not know exactly what you want your future state to be. 1. Problem Statement: What problem are we trying to solve? 2. Options: What Options do we have to solve this problem? 3. Risks/Obstacles: What are the risks and obstacles for each Option? 4. Actions: A simple Kanban board of actions we need to take in order to solve the problem. 5. Measurements: How will we show progress? How will we measure success? 6. Insights: What worked? What didn’t?

And these are only two examples of canvases I’ve used. Find more at http://leanchange.org/canvases

Be careful about how you measure progress because it’ll influence behavior.

"Separate measurements from diagnostics"

We used a measurement called the Happiness Index,