Find the MVI to reduce the friction in organisational changes
In my previous post entitled ‘Tips for Change Facilitation’, I mentioned a brief tip entitled, ‘Find the MVI’. Lots of people asked me for more information about this particular concept called MVI, so I will share a few more thoughts and examples about it in this blog post.
MVI stands for Minimum Viable Improvement. As a general concept, an MVI is a set of small actions that require a low effort and can produce congruent and noticeable improvements in the company. It is an interesting concept because, as you well know, organisational change initiatives are hard and can take too much time.
Complexity: The biggest challenge
The systemic complexity inside the organisations is one the reasons for the difficulty in change initiatives. In complex systems, the unpredictability of how change affects the system means we will often be surprised by the outcome. No matter how well-planned or how deeply understood the method is, we can not avoid some unexpected behaviour or undetermined outcome.
Leading a large change initiative with extensive plans and too many areas to work on, can be tough and frustrating. For this reason, sometimes, we need a different strategy. We need an approach based on small and sustainable actions. We need to find the MVI.
Identifying something minimum and viable
Defining an MVI is about how we can create a small lever to start a change in the organisation. OK, but, how identify effective levers? Follow a few set of tips to consider when you need to identify some change leverage:
- Look for unexpected places - Sometimes, the better opportunities for improvements are in the unusual places.
- Take it one day at a time - Changing small daily behaviours can be easier than make big changes in mindset.
- Don’t use labels - Avoiding labels may reduce the resistance to new ideas.
- Roles come last - Changing roles and organisational structures may increase the organisational friction. Avoid starting the change journey by changing the positions and job titles.
- Survive today to fight tomorrow - Sometimes, you need to change your approach as change facilitator when the current strategy is no longer effective.
- Help the organisation to visualise small benefits - Identify ways to measure and celebrate quick wins.
- Validate small hypotheses - Don’t you know where to start the change? Are you lost in a messy environment? Keep calm and validate a hypothesis. Adopting short cycles of probing and sensing is a useful approach to learning in complex systems. An MVI can be expressed in a single idea to be tested.
Putting it into practice
I would like to share a brief example of how we can put those tips into practice. Imagine a company that is trying to create a better relationship with its customers in software development projects. Instead of trying to use an imposing role (like Product Owner), the first single viable improvement in this type of relationship is to ask the client to participate in a phone call of up to 30 minutes twice a week with members of the project team to answer questions, clarify requirements, and help prioritise work. It is a much more feasible action than trying to push people to act in predefined roles.
It is only a starting point. For sure, the company has a huge journey ahead; however, with this single MVI, the company can start to feel the benefits and gain confidence to go further in its journey of change.
Conclusion
MVI is a useful approach to changing facilitators during change initiatives. It is helpful because it provides a good way to focus on small and feasible improvements first. Due to the complexity of organisational changes, it is much better to concentrate on small actions rather than trying to change too many things at the same time. This is the entire idea behind the MVI: think minimally, keep things simple, reduce friction, and produce little wins to make positive reinforcements in the organisational change/transformation.
