Change Slowly, Deliberately, and with feedback
The 6th article in the 10 Steps to a Healthier Culture series.
Change is an ongoing experiment, not a decision.
Let’s say you read some management book, you’re inspired, and you want your people to do what’s in that book. You are filled with enthusiasm and you know this thing is going to work. Everyone just needs to get on board.
So you run in and say whatever crazy insightful thing is in the book. “Hey we’re not going to estimate any more!” “Hey we’re not going to plan any more!” “Hey we’re going to limit our work-in-progress!” “Hey we’re going to always deliver things every two weeks!” And then you run out of the room having spread the good news and everyone is converted.
Or everyone is sitting there shaking their heads.
They live in the real world. You are living in a book.
When you are at the base of K2 in Speedos and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and you read the map to the top, you can’t just start running and expect that by the end of the day you’ll be waving your flag like Edmund Hillary. You might be psyched to get there, but there’s real work to do. There is preparation. There is figuring out your own role. There is figuring out your team. There is finding a Sherpa. There is buying PowerBars and coffee…and pants, pants would be good.
When you come bounding into the office with a cool new way of working, you aren’t just bringing change…you are altering people’s lives. How they act, interact, and react every day will be altered. This is disconcerting. Your new system introduces a lot of unknowns.
Too fast, too soon, too aggressive, too large just sets of people’s defenses.
Rapid or incoherent change is why almost all agile and Lean initiatives fail or are, at best, rocky.
Your new system is supplanting some systems, enhancing other systems, and interacting with still others. Indeed, everyone in that room is their own system. You now need to understand how your new system is going to work with those others. You can’t rip the engine out of your Ford Pinto and drop a Tesla S engine in.
How much change at a time is enough? Well, it’s usually a lot more than most consultants think, and a lot less than you want. It’s not three or five years, but it is certainly more than “this week.” And no, you can’t send everyone out for a two-day training and certification and expect anything other than to pay for hotel rooms and false certainty.
Meet with the group (consultants are actually helpful here as outside voices) and find out how the team is operating, how much they are into this change (or if they have their own), visualize the current system and the future system, and figure out a path to get there. Tell them what problems you think you are trying to solve, find out what problems they’d like to solve.
When you agree on change, phase it in. Figure out the feature set of what you would all like to do together. Again, change is an ongoing experiment, not a decision. Your new cultural change requires not only doing the change, but evaluating the change. Is it working?
Remember, the more things you change, the more you have to measure (if you don’t measure it, you won’t have clarity), so keep in mind that these people have to actually work while all this is going on. Too much change also becomes overload. Real world and all that.
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
